Lasse Emil Larsen Mouritzen

°1988
research interests: Collaborative Art
en

Lasse Mouritzen is a visual artist, filmmaker, urbanist and curator working with informal and

nomadic aspect, movements and communities in the light of urbanisation, globalisation and

migration. He is connected to the independent research- and art duo called JAMBOY based in

Copenhagen. Lasse has an academic background in urbanism and performance studies, and

his interests is focused on cities of social struggles and potentials through participatory art

projects. In his collaborative works and writing he deals with how to use art and creative

workshops to mobilise new social and urban patterns and more sustainable socio-aesthetic

languages. He has been working with slum-development in Mumbai and have done participatory

art projects all around the world, working with a wide range of mediums such as film, poster

design, performances and urban installations, and topics; social inequality, jugaad spirit and

utopian impulses, vitalism, nomadism and myth-making.

research

research expositions

  • मृगतृष्णा, Mirage: Reengaging socio-spatial peripheries through site-specific film (last edited: 2018) author(s): Lasse Mouritzen This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    In this essay I will discuss how social engaged and site-specific filmmaking has a potential to reengage socio-spatial peripheries. Based on my recent residency at Flame University, February 2019 in Pune, I will describe how socio-spatial distinctions and peripheries are formed during processes of urbanisation. Following Ananya Roy and her description on the antagonism of utopia (Roy, 2011) I will look at the ambiguity between the blue print and the process of the build environment, and describe how the build environment and its function responds to its own process; the construction workers, the labor camps surrounding it. I will explain how my research evolved into a site-specific social-artistic film installation. Furthermore I will describe the potentials and advantages of using art-based research while working with social minorities through methods of non-conventional dialogues, soft interventions and visual communication. I will argue how the social-artistic film, both during the process of the research, filmmaking and screening, can be seen to open up new reflections of socio-spatial peripheries. My argument is that site-specific social-engage art and research should not try to exchange understandings, facts or categories between different socio-spatial peripheries, like for example news, media or documentaries would do. Rather, site-specific social-engage art and research should form awareness of the complexities and questions relating to social inequality and complexity, not by exposing or translating knowledge from socio-spatial peripheries but by blurring or disguising it, as a mirage; encouraging interest and questions instead of answers. In this regard, I would argue in elaboration of Gayatri Spivak’s essential essay ‘Can the subaltern speak’ (Spivak 1988), that giving voices to the subaltern or the socio-political excluded has an inherent danger of remarking socio-spatial peripheries. My argument is therefore, instead of forming facts on socio-spatial peripheries or facilitating voices of the other, site-specific social engaged art can form questions, imaginations and curiosity even auto-fictions to open the peripheries instead of closing or confirming them.
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