MARVELS AND CATASTROPHES
R-Lab 2019
R-Lab 2019
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MARVELS
AND
CATASTROPHES
2018
R-LAB
2019
INDEX
COLLECTIVE PROJECTS
006
INTRODUCTION BY PETER LANG
ALL STRUNG UP: THE CAT’S CRADLE UNIVERSE
018
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL
ART OF DISASTERS INTERRUPTED, THE WORKSHOP
032
040
044
050
058
COEXIST
DANS LE PAVÉ, LA PLAGE
BASTON
TIPPING POINTS
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO (PART ONE)
LEXICON OF MARVELS & CATASTROPHES
078
102
UMEÅ: NORDIC HAZARDLANDS
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO (PART TWO)
RENEWAL AND METAMORPHOSIS
108
110
118
126
266
268
270
272
WHAT IS THE OPEN STUDIO?
HAJK
SPIRITUAL CLEANSING
A CARTOGRAPHY OF THE ANTHROPOCENE
PERSONALIA
FILMOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
COLOPHON
002
R-LAB MARVELS & CATASTROPHES
INDIVIDUAL PROJECTS
132
138
146
154
162
170
176
184
CARLOTA MIR ARPENTAGE
VICTORIA VAN KAN 12:56
ANNA RISELL FOR THE FIRST TIME OUR WORLD
JÉRÔME MALPEL 21ST CENTURY ICON
GUSTAV KARLSSON THE WAVE OF REAL FANTASY
GERDA PERSSON SPREDFABRIKEN
BO PILO NAVIGARE NECESSE EST,VIVERE NON EST NECESSE
ANNA ASPLIND IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS THROUGH
CATASTROPHE
194
202
212
220
226
232
VERONICA SKEPPE FAUX RED
SOFIA LARSSON IF WE DON’T DO IT SOMEONE ELSE WILL
ANDRES VILLARREAL URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND ITS DISCONTENTS
ÅSA AGERSTAM HEALING TREES
BERT STOFFELS PRESERVING A PUBLIC SPACE
ANA BARATA MARTINS THE SUN RISES EVERY MORNING AT THE
SAME PLACE AND SETS EVERY EVENING AT THE OPPOSITE SIDE
238
242
246
JUSTINAS DŪDĖNAS HERE I AM. SO GLAD YOU ARE
ELENA MAZZI BUILDING A NEW LANDSCAPE
FLORENCE TACHÉ THE WORD FOR WORLD IS ENTANGLEMENT
INDEX 003
1. Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (New York: Dell, 1963) pp 6.
“Anyway, Father looked
at that loop of string
for a while, and then his
fingers started playing
with it. His fingers made
the string figure called
a ‘cat’s cradle.’ I don’t
know where Father
learnt to do that. From
his father maybe. His
father was a tailor, you
know, so there must
have been string and
thread around all the
time when Father
was a boy.” 1
006
ALL STRUNG UP:
A GAME OF CAT’S CRADLE
In Kurt Vonnegut’s odd story about the day Hiroshima was
bombed, we meet the absent-minded Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the
fictional Nobel prize winning scientist who is one of the early
fathers of the A-Bomb, and who lives and works in Ilium, the
imaginary town located somewhere in the very real region of
Ithaca, New York. On the day Hiroshima is bombed Hoenikker
stays home with his family, fingering much of the time a loop of
string. A man with no apparent concern for his fellow human
beings, not even his own children, Hoenikker keeps fiddling
around with his string playing at cat’s cradle. One can only
wonder if there is something about the game of cat’s cradle,
a form of recreation going back thousands of years, that has
the power to reveal the mysteries of the universe?
TEXT AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY PETER LANG
When two players string cat’s cradle between their fingers
they mimic in a way the making of a rhizomatic structure.
The trick is to snatch with one’s hands the string where it
crisscrosses over, and then by pinching either side with the
utmost dexterity - swing the nodes from one player’s hands to
the other’s achieving in the process the next configuration in
the cat’s cradle. If done properly, the string shape-shifts from
a taught web to a loose tangle and then back again.
The game of cat’s cradle is an apt metaphor for today’s
rapidly changing world: we move from one uncertain state to
another, from one immanent condition to the next, passing
through disquieting episodes that move from tenuous balance
to sudden collapse. Our current environment, like the cat’s
cradle, can be strung together in multiple ways: no matter
from which end you pull the string, the whole system reacts
together going fully taut or simultaneously collapsing. The
thing you seize on pulls a slew of other things along with it.
INTRODUCTION
007
The web of reactions and counterreactions move in some
kind of unison, one thing towed along with the other. So, it’s
not about singular causality, but about interlocking events.
In other words, if you look at large scale migration that has
become such a politically charged issue, it would be impossible
to address its root cause without bringing together the
sweeping effects of climate change, which in turn cannot be
treated without understanding the impact of rising consumption
on the global scale. So it goes - as Vonnegut would say. These
factors are all strung together and impossible to separate.
The cat’s cradle is the big world picture.
There have always been, since the earliest recorded histories,
bleak premonitions of gloom and doom. The foundation myths
of the ancient world often begin in large scale calamities:
the Aztecs, for example, believed the world will have been
destroyed four times, and that the present world will be
devastated by earthquakes. If in Hellenic myth Atlantis ended
submerged under the seas, the destruction of the Roman
city of Pompeii was instead eminently factual, captured by
history’s first recorded eye-witness accounts. Emanuel Kant,
through his early studies of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake
rejected supernatural or eschatological visions on nature
arguing instead for explanations based on scientific causality.
Walter Benjamin understood the vulnerability of the city and
the macabre human fascination with urban destruction.
Catastrophes have led to the forecasting of risk, the invention
of earth sciences, and at times the suspension of the rule of
law. But we are no more capable of mitigating future disasters
or no closer to understanding the effects of cataclysms on our
lives then when the Vesuvius blanketed Pompeii. And we are
no less awed by the sublimity of these terrific spectacles then
was Pliny the Elder when he succumbed to the eruptions of
the Vesuvius while attempting a heroic naval rescue mission.
008
PETER LANG
Disasters expose human helplessness in confronting the full
force of nature, but these tragic events can also bring out the
best in human compassion and collective action.
This year’s R-Lab - and the last edition to be run from the
prestigious Royal Institute of Art - takes aim at the broader
subject of disaster, not just how life plays out in this late era
of the Anthropocene, but that which has always occupied
humankind’s deepest unconscious fears, including the
possibility of complete extinction, the frightening forces of
nature, the very science fiction possibility of an alien invasion,
and least we not forget an ageless preoccupation with divine
intervention, condemnation and salvation.
For this reason R-lab considers this subject not only from
a rational standpoint but also from what constitutes the
deeply irrational side of our human nature. Marvels and
Catastrophes, as the title of this year’s course implies, is
about an entire matrix of feelings, sentiments, responses,
that concern what could happen to us in the coming years.
Clearly there will always be those who embrace the ways of
science, but often modern rationalist thought is not sufficient
on its own to overcome the greatest anxieties facing humanity
today. We must be ready to implore the “gods,” to seek the
insight of truth-Sayers and shamans, to mix ancient rituals with
contemporary ceremonies. Genres like science fiction, and
the supernatural provide extremely rich alternative narratives,
that play with our fantasies and our fears. But it’s not enough
to probe the future through a present set of cultural tropes.
One also needs to look much further back at how the ancients
- their communities and civilizations - survived or fell to the
major threats of their times. On what was constituted their
complex belief systems? Just how did their shrines, totems,
statuaries, amulets, bracelets, customs and superstitions
act to hold their societies together in the face of great threats
and dangers?
INTRODUCTION 009
If the “science” behind climate change remains largely out
of reach to most people,-- it’s not because society at large
is incapable of processing the message, or because it is
lags behind the facts, but more likely because society has
not been able to interpret these dizzying events and complex
environmental prognostics in a manner that can be tied
together into a truly unified responsive action.
Alternatively, the success of myth- or what today is packaged
as fiction, is precisely in the strength and clarity of their
symbolic messages. What we lack today is precisely the kind of
narrative fabrication that could bring an entire world together
to combat our greatest existential threats. Something like the
fantastical world of Game of Thrones with something like the
immensely popular spectacle Eurovision tossed in, would go
a long way in propelling audiences together in unprecedented
numbers on a truly worldwide stage. If only we could unite
behind the message, we could achieve a sort of Spockian
mind meld with the earth and get things moving forward. Like
the game of cat’s cradle, the world we inhabit today is a string
of interconnected variants, some predictable, some not. But
it’s not hopeless, we just need to get into the game.
***
PETER LANG // JULY 2019
Marvels and Catastrophes moves through historic and contemporary landscapes, reflects on
societies past and present and engages with the peoples who are or will be most affected by
the forces of nature and extreme climatic reversals. R-Lab considers the preponderant forces of
nature and natural disasters on the transformation of architecture and cities, objects and rituals,
and focuses in on these conditions, including mapping, documenting as well as envisioning new
critical interventions while bringing together experts in the sciences, from a range of related
fields in the sciences, humanities and the visual arts.
What we have achieved as a class, as a collective of advanced professional practitioners coming
from diverse fields and with diverse nationalities is to investigate an array of possible outcomes,
given what we know from the past and what we can glean from the present. Our goal has
been from the start to weave together learned knowledge with experimental practices, to
critically make from what we observe, and then to critically observe what we make. Marvels and
Catastrophes set out to build on a set of international workshops, and what follows are a series
of narrative movements, each one an account of a critical phase in our work.
INTRODUCTION 011
Take a Walk on the Wild Side:
Learning from the City and Beyond (2015)
In Commemoration of the passing of Lou Reed, the punk
singer and urban poet, this is the first publication dedicated to
individual student research projects during the course at the
RIA, Stockholm. Including transcripts from “Display on Display,”
the talk show recorded at the Tensta Konsthall on Frederick
Kiesler, featuring Celine Condorelli, Thordis Arrheniucs,
Donatella Bernardi, Maria Lind, Sven Olov Wallenstein and Axel
Wieder. With notes from the Workshop at the Lido in Venice.
R-lab, Architecture, Design, Media (2016)
Compendium of individual student projects. This edition also
documents Stalker Walk Stalker, the 48 hours walk from Tallinn
to Jägala Falls, tracing Tarkovsky’s evocative locations from his
1979 film Stalker. Participants included the urban arts group
from Italy, Stalker, along with some 60 people from the Estonian
Art Academy, the Royal Institute of Art, Aalto University and
Oxford Brookes School of Architecture and independent
explorers. Also in this edition is the Magic Circle, a series of
workshops and seminars conducted at INDEX in Stockholm.
R-lab, Architecture, Cities, Utopias (2017)
Compendium of individual student projects. This edition includes
the newspaper insert - also reproduced in book format, of “The
Baltikan,” that documents two successive R-lab workshops, the
first in Mostar, the second in Riga - two cities that are peripheral
to the central Europe but part of the long ex-Soviet territory
that stretches from the Baltic to the Balkans. The newspaper
includes collective works made on site, and a number of fictional
articles by student authors using protective pseudonyms.
Some of the highlights include an interview with the urban
anthropologist Nick Dines, and an early glimpse of Mostar’s
Partisans’ Memorial, by Bogdan Bogdanovic.
R-lab, Architecture, Artefacts and Signs (2018)
The first expanded R-lab edition featuring individual student
projects and collective workshops from Sarajevo and from the
Nida Art Colony, in Neringa. Sarajevo became the focus of
body agonistics, with groups concentrating on the dichotomies
between bodies in war and bodies in sport. The Workshop
was co-organized by Emina Camdzic Sarajevo University, with
contributions by Senada Drmirovic Habibija ADA, Lorenzo
Romito NoWorking, Nicholas Boyarsky Oxford Brookes, Haris
Piplas and Alfredo Brillembourg ETH. At the Nida Art Colony,
R-lab’s artistic guide was Paulina Pukyte, Chief Curator of the
11th Kuanas Biennial, “There and Not There, (Im)possibility of
a Monument. Pukyte contributed the poetic essay “Fish Eyes.”
012
R-LAB ARCHIVE
IT”S ALL ABOUT BO”S NEGS YO
[2018-10-17, 11:02:07]
Peter:
What about last night?
[2018-10-17, 11:08:52]
Peter:
It's midday. She missed her
appointment with Bo and Gerda
this morning. I need to know
when was the last time we
saw Ana.
[2018-10-17,11:09:21]
Peter:
She is not picking up her
phone.
[2018-10-17, 11:09:25]
Bo:
we found her!
[2018-10-17, 11:09:31]
Bo:
thank you!
[2018-10-17, 11:09:56]
Peter:
Ohhhhh!
[2018-10-17, 11:10:16]
Peter:
I was about to contact the
police.
[2018-10-17, 11:10:55]
Peter:
Let's not anyone go without
some contact
[2018-10-17, 11:16:34]
Orestis:
[2018-10-17, 11:18:32]
Vesna:
Ana Barata and whoevere
else.. lets meet at 15h
infront of Hagia Sofia
[2018-10-17, 11:33:16]
Ana:
Oh my god, sorry for worry
everyone
[2018-10-17, 11:33:29]
Ana:
I passed out and woke up late
[2018-10-17, 11:33:40]
Ana:
I will go now to hagia sofia
[2018-10-17, 11:33:58]
Ana:
And then at 14h to the
turning wood workshop
[2018-10-17, 11:34:20]
Orestis:
We are going to work through
the evening I think
[2018-10-17, 11:34:54]
Peter:
Ok Ana ! Glad it was nothing
[2018-10-17, 12:43:10]
Anna A:
Come play with us!
[2018-10-17, 12:43:19]
Anna A:
image omitted
[2018-10-17, 12:45:42]
Peter:
Super
[2018-10-17, 12:50:11]
Orestis:
Niceeee
[2018-10-17, 13:18:30]
Orestis:
Some random from ours
[2018-10-17, 13:19:55]
Orestis:
video omitted
[2018-10-17, 13:20:19]
Orestis:
HAHAHAHAHAHA
[2018-10-17, 13:20:32]
Vesna:
I m kidding.. i did the
drawing
[2018-10-17, 13:42:08]
Vesna:
Very successful insta profile
[2018-10-17, 13:50:20]
K:
Great to see the process!
[2018-10-17, 13:50:34]
K:
Take it easy to everybody
[2018-10-17, 15:19:59]
Orestis:
If anyone is still at artsins
can you please get my coat?
[2018-10-17, 15:20:18]
Orestis:
It's hanged on the right side
wall as you go in
[2018-10-17, 15:20:22]
Anna A:
No we're at Arter
[2018-10-17, 15:20:28]
B:
Okay I will
[2018-10-17, 15:20:29]
Anna A:
Sorry :(
[2018-10-17, 15:20:49]
Orestis:
Thanks!!
[2018-10-17, 15:21:01]
B:
Youre welcome
[2018-10-17, 18:00:00]
Andres:
I told you shes sleeping :)
[2018-10-17, 18:01:55]
Andres:
So we all wanna go to asian
side for dinner? Shall we
all meet at the lobby at a
certain time?
[2018-10-17, 18:02:04]
Jerome:
Yes
[2018-10-17, 18:02:54]
Sofia:
Yes! 19.15?
014
BO’S ESSENTIALS
[2018-10-17, 18:02:54]
Gustav:
19:19 in the lobby!
[2018-10-17, 18:03:12]
Flo:
19.19 sounds great
[2018-10-17, 18:03:14]
Andres:
19.20 sounds good
[2018-10-17, 18:03:58]
Bo:
ok!
[2018-10-17, 18:04:13]
Sofia:
awzm
[2018-10-17, 18:09:24]
Vesna:
image omitted
[2018-10-17, 18:09:52]
Anna A:
Ok but Asey is waiting
already
[2018-10-17, 18:22:00]
Gerda:
Wait for us!
[2018-10-17, 18:22:06]
Jerome:
We are are
[2018-10-17, 18:22:10]
Jerome:
Ready to go!
[2018-10-17, 18:22:32]
Gerda:
We are coming now
[2018-10-17, 22:27:23]
T:
We will meet at the hotel to
go to the party
[2018-10-17, 22:51:44]
T:
We're in the lobby
[2018-10-17, 22:56:04]
Andres:
We just arrived at hotel
[2018-10-18, 08:46:29]
Andres:
Already at 8
[2018-10-18, 09:58:44]
Carlota:
Oh fuck off
[2018-10-18, 09:58:48]
Carlota:
[2018-10-18, 11:02:46]
Justinas:
When is anyone going to the
neon workshop?
[2018-10-18, 11:03:00]
Justinas:
Id like to jump in
[2018-10-18, 11:05:38]
Orestis:
Are you still around justas?
[2018-10-18, 11:09:25]
Justinas:
Not far away
WHATSAPP GROUP CHAT TRANSCRIPT. OCTOBER 2018
[2018-10-17, 18:09:53]
Gustav:
image omitted
[2018-10-17, 23:01:32]
Bo:
image omitted
[2018-10-18, 11:09:27]
Justinas:
Need a hand?
[2018-10-17, 18:09:57]
Anna A:
I go down
[2018-10-17, 18:15:18]
+90 538 914 10 02:
Where are you going?
[2018-10-17, 18:16:50]
T:
We will go to Kadikoy.
Probably Koço restaurant
[2018-10-17, 18:18:02]
T:
If you want to come we're in
the lobby of marmara hotel
[2018-10-17, 18:21:49]
Andres:
Is everyone here in lobby?
Are we ready to go?
[2018-10-17, 23:28:49]
Ana Barata Martins:
Party mood
[2018-10-17, 23:29:33]
Ana:
Join us
[2018-10-17, 23:29:54]
+49 1577 5952053:
[2018-10-18, 01:24:03]
Vesna:
Oh my diamond ring
[2018-10-18, 01:32:24]
Vesna:
Such a hottie..
[2018-10-18, 01:36:11]
Anna A:
[2018-10-18, 11:10:10]
Orestis:
No it's ok. We just thought
you were lost
[2018-10-18, 11:10:17]
Orestis:
[2018-10-18, 12:11:06]
Orestis:
I don't now how you all are
doing. We still need some
extra time.
[2018-10-18, 12:21:56]
Anna A:
We're here starting slowly
[2018-10-18, 12:22:26]
Anna A:
I think you might miss the
first but it's ok :)
ISTANBUL
015
IT”S ALL ABOUT BO”S NEGS YO
016 BO’S ESSENTIALS
WHATSAPP GROUP CHAT IMAGES. OCTOBER 2018
ISTANBUL
017
THE ART OF DISASTERS
INTERRUPTED: THE WORKSHOP
UPSIDE DOWN IN ISTANBUL
“To be sure, those painful September days had their
dark beauty and as the month wore on I discovered an
important new way of making them bearable; if I swam on
my back, the pain would ease. To make this happen, I had
to throw my head very far back to the point where I could
see all the way to the bottom of the Bosphorus, but upside
down, and I had to carry on swimming in this attitude for
some time without coming up for air. As I backstroked
through the current and the waves, I would open my eyes
to see the inverted Bosphorus changing colors, fading into
a blackness that awakened me to a vastness altogether
different from the boundless pain of love—offering me a
glimpse of a world without end.” 1
TEXT BY PETER LANG. IMAGES BY JÉRÔME MALPEL
Orhan Pamuk
1. On the Museum of Innocence, Recollections and Collections.
It was a particularly insightful experience to begin our
workshop with a visit to Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence,
especially in preparation of our upcoming workshop for the
4th Istanbul Design Biennial. Pamuk’s museum was conceived
during the writing of the book, and showcased, through a
series of well-assembled dioramas and cabinet displays, the
step by step unravelling of the principle character’s privileged
life. The book, a mind meld between Nabokov and Proust
set in an upper middleclass district of Istanbul during the
mid-seventies, moves in rapid succession through a series
of recollections that become collections, including delicate
earrings, period movie posters, glasses of milk white raki,
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL 019
common salt shakers, and discarded newspapers. Each of
these objects refers back to particular incidents in the book,
and the book makes plenty of references to how these objects
will be perceived by a public visiting the museum.
1 + 2. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, the novel. Maureen Freely
translation (London: Faber and Faber, 2009) pp 270
The small museum was conceived in parallel with the novel.
Kemal, the melancholic character who lives out his fictional
life in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul saviors his chance to
roam the museum when it’s complete. The novel’s fulcrum
is Kemal’s obsessive love for Füsun, a distant cousin, who
becomes the literal object of his desire. Mementos of his love,
that include trivialities like a map marking all the mistaken
sightings of Füsun around the city, are presented in displays
labeled, numbered and mounted on the museum’s walls.
The book is not so much a forensic reconstruction of a life,
as it is an ode to the process of writing. Greeting the visitor
at the entrance is a large tableau with thousands of cigarette
butts pinned like butterflies and meticulously noted by hand
in pencil. They could only have come from the lips of Füsun.
The museum, like the book, is an excruciating visual jewel.
The experience inside the museum is not unlike the 1999 film
Being John Malkovich where the main characters, played by
John Cusak and Catherine Keener, find a mysterious portal
that leads inside the mind of John Malkovich, who plays
himself in the film. It’s a surreal roller coaster ride in which
you become a voyeuristic passenger in someone else’s life.
Admittedly, the narrative is locked into a specific class and
gendered reading that gives only a narrow perspective on
life in a city like Istanbul’s, but there are a sufficient number
of self-critical digressions that make the character’s flaws
appear nearly self-reflective.
Yet there is no escaping this kind of profound interiority, as
Pamuk’s passage of Kemal swimming on his back in the
Bosphorus sea most hauntingly portrays:
020
THE ART OF DISASTERS INTERRUPTED
“Because the Bosphorus is so deep so close to the
shore, there were times when I could see the bottom and
sometimes I couldn’t, but to glimpse this brilliantly colored
realm, albeit upside down, was to see a great, mysterious
whole, at who’s sight one could not but rejoice to be alive,
humbled at the thought of being part of something greater.
Gazing down at the rusty cans, the bottle caps, gaping
mussels, and even the ghosts of ancient ships, I would
contemplate the vastness of history and time, and my own
insignificance.” 2
In some strange way, we too, the participants of the workshop
would become upside down observers of a city that would
reveal itself in fragments, scents, detritus, across steep
streets, cluttered tea rooms, and all kinds of displacing
things. For us the portal would be the amazing crafts studios
and workshops of the Şişhane district, with Asli Kiyak our
guide and mentor leading through this Escher like craft maze.
2. A School of Schools, and the importance of talking about
design education
The Istanbul Design Biennial, directed by Jan Boelen together
with Nadine Botha and Vera Sacchetti, is conceived as a
School of Schools, where
“everything and everywhere is a school, and every single
interaction we have with design is pedagogical.” 3
In exploiting the potential of Istanbul, the curators “sought
to explode the schoolhouse’s scenography of exception
from building to city. The streets become the corridors of
happenstance learning…” 4 And this reading of the city is the
critical departure point for running a workshop like the Art of
Disaster Interrupted: Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence can be
understood as a backstop to a process that unravels into the
3.Curatorial Essay, Boelen, Botha, Sacchetti, in Vera Sacchetti ed., A School of Schools Reader, 4th Istanbul Design Biennial
(Istanbul, Valiz and Foundation for Culture and Arts, 2018) pp. 46.
4. Ibid. pp. 50
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL 021
Istanbul of today. The School of School’s mission, set within
six venues around the same Beyoglu district as is Pamuk’s
museum, resembles in no small way the eclectic array of
collections found gathered together in Pamuk’s dense display
of personal memorabilia.
Some of the criticism leveled at the current Design Biennial is
precisely about a nostalgia fueled vision of sixties and seventies
design, oddly coincident with the era in which Pamuk’s book is
set. 5 Yet I would see this problem more as a part of a greater
nostalgic turn, where we continuously revisit the late sixtiesseventies
culture in the futile search for the magic ingredients of
a lost revolution. We nonetheless should be resigned to the fact
that this period was neither that heroic nor that revolutionary,
if we consider that the world we have inherited remains strewn
with the debris from their misguided judgments.
But I would not avow the significance of looking back to the
seventies just yet: as I have noted in the A School of Schools
Reader, the constant rejection of the status quo by this earlier
anti-establishment generation is the real takeaway for us
today. Results in the end don’t count as much as the ceaseless
interrogation of motives and rules in the urgent drive for real
educational reform. As they had done some 50 years ago,
we must do once again, by taking our struggles back into
the streets. The university has changed significantly since
the occupations of 1968, but not necessarily for the better.
Management driven, built on the backs of a growing teaching
precariat, the universities of today farm out their talent and
outsource fundamental research. But no educational system
can do without its students: and they will remain the most
powerful and irrepressible force for change. If a School of
Schools has succeeded at all, it is because it brings us back
to the core issues on how design education could, through
the informal work of students, rethink the most urgent issues
of the day.
5. Though clearly the first is predominantly western, the latter more about the
western modernizing effects on traditional Turkish culture.
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL 023
3. The Craftsmen of Şişhane, and Aslı Kıyak’s metal jungle
There were some unanticipated difficulties concerning the
premise and organization for the R-Lab workshop in Istanbul
when the program had to be tinkered with, once we had news
the course would be going to the Design Biennial. The R-Lab
course takes a very long view on disaster, anchored to the
historic accounts on the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the
destruction of Pompeii - all the way to 100,000 years in the
future, the projected lifespan for the Onkalo nuclear waste
site in Finland. R-Lab’s program for the coming academic
year 2018-2019, Marvels and Catastrophes, was one of
200 projects accepted among 700 applications vying for the
biennial’s 4th edition, A School of Schools.
But unlike most of the Design Biennial’s more successful
submissions that arrived as fully developed projects, R-Lab’s
Art of Disaster workshop offered from the start intentionally
ambiguous goals - a workshop should by definition be open for
diverse forms of experiment. Most everyone has memories
of an elementary school science class where one learns to
make volcanoes explode, and this exercise became the kernel
idea behind a makerspace in Istanbul. Once we recognized the
power of this formula, the rest turned out to be quite simple
after we received the critical guidance of Aslı Kıyak Ingin.
Asli is a designer and activist who early on recognized the
profound significance of the Şişhane neighborhood, a singular
and efficient network of crafts-based businesses working in
extreme proximity. This is a tightly knit decentralized system
of urban factories whose future is threatened by displacement
and gentrification, but that collectively introduce an alternative
model for small sustainable industries. Shoehorned between
the Funicular, Galata Tower and the Golden Horn, this
dynamic neighborhood is stacked with metal workers, metal
suppliers, metal distributors, lampshade makers, small
024
THE ART OF DISASTERS INTERRUPTED
lamp retail stores, related craft industries, and feed by a
fleet of transporters pushing handcarts, not to mention the
strategically located tea shops serving every one of these
buildings. Asli characterizes this area as a metal jungle: and
she continues to spearhead tactics focused on keeping the
area’s unique manufacturing network in this one place.
Asli is well known among the craftsmen, suppliers and
storekeepers in the neighborhood of Şişhane, and she has run
numerous classes with her students and students from abroad
focusing on developing locally generated design prototypes.
Asli walked our group through the district introducing us to a
fresh way of thinking about creative making, giving us access
to this distributed and decentralized factory that would be like
an expanded form of makerspace. The scope of the Art of
Disaster Interrupted workshop was not specifically the making
of design prototypes, but rather the assembly of multivalent
objects, as meaningful processes, that could express complex
sets of values, dealing with post-Anthropocene, cataclysmic,
and other future scenarios.
4. The Luggage of Immigrants, & Other Stories by Ayse Erek
Şişhane would become in the short span of 4 days a very
fertile and productive working platform for the workshop
participants. But there were also the intangible experiences,
that were more about inhabiting Istanbul, like frequenting the
city’s many coffee houses and tea rooms, strolling the streets
between simit carts and street hawkers. It’s not easy to grasp
a city that has a population of over 16 million, whose horizons
stretch well beyond the furthest hills, where skyscrapers
march one after the other across the horizon. The metro
system, ferry lines, and mini buses are straining to connect
the newest of the city’s gated cities, commercial centers and
office parks.
026
THE ART OF DISASTERS INTERRUPTED
A native Istanbuler and an expert in the local contemporary
arts and design scene, Ayse Erek has a close relationship
with many of the Turkish artists residing in Istanbul and is
very familiar with cultural events going on around the city, its
international forums and exhibitions. We asked Ayse to give us
an overall view on a couple artists whose work pivots around
the major issues effecting Istanbul and she obliged us with an
in-depth discussion on the work of Gülsün Karamustafa: an
artist who has been navigating the thin line between artistic
resistance and social activism from the early seventies, and
whose career is still in full swing, with recent shows in Berlin,
Warsaw and New York.
Ayse in her survey of Gülsün’s work, focused on one
performance piece in particular, “Objects of Desire, Suitcase
Trading (Limit 100 Dollars),” for the Money-Nation Exhibition
at the Shedhalle in Zurich in 1998 that strongly resonated
with the kind of concerns that were also primary concerns of
workshop. Through the device of a simple suitcase, Gülsün
took up the role of migrant, engaging in the trade of inexpensive
goods to experience first-hand the plight of women migrants
and their efforts to ensure their own survival.
Writing in the online magazine SALT.TXT, Solmaz Bunulday
Hasgüler and Tuna Sare gave this description of Gülsün’s
artwork: In Objects of Desire, Suitcase Trading (Limit 100
Dollars) Karamustafa referred to both women and goods as
similar objects of desire. Women can be bought and sold;
they can be exchanged in order to buy another object. The
artist set out to experience suitcase trading personally and
started her project with 100 dollars, as this was the least
amount paid for prostitutes in that period. She used the
money to purchase various objects such as music boxes,
artificial flowers, men’s and women’s underwear, makeup kits,
and plastic kitchen equipment to take across the border. She
opened a stall at each city she visited and documented the
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL 027
6. Bunulday Hasgüler and Tuna Sare, “Gülsün Karamustafa: A Vagabond, From Personal To Social, From Local To Global”
Originally published in Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 35, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2014)
objects she sold with Polaroid photographs and placed them
next to the stall. 6
What became increasingly evident, was a common thread
linking several different practices that were coming together
from the time we arrived in Istanbul: the collection at the
Museum of Innocence, the manufactured objects and
utensils found in the Şişhane district, the cheap goods in
the travel suitcase. These were narrative assemblies based
on collections of objects, processes, experiences, linked
intrinsically to the Istanbul context. For in every case, whether
chasing down a lost memory, seeking ways to reinforce an
alternative artisanal economy, or describing the exasperated
condition of migration, the things themselves were the key
transmitters of the experience, without which there could be
no visceral understanding of what really was at stake, and
what such radical forms of transformation could mean.
5.Bodies and Bodies of Water around Istanbul.
Ayse introduced us to Emre Hüner, whose work echoes
Istanbul’s landscapes, its ships on the Bosphorus, and the
mysterious and abandoned industrial areas lying on the city’s
furthest edges. The Istanbul one rarely gets to see when visiting
the city for a short period of time, but essential to reading
the city’s evolution, especially when considering the fragility of
nature, the role of industry, and the unmitigated expansion
driving today’s unrelenting economic expansion. We were also
fortunate to bring in Serkan Taycan, a veteran explorer, and
whose project, Between Two Seas, addressed one of the little
known but unusually opaque grand infrastructure projects to
emerge in this area in the modern era: a new major shipping
canal to link the Black Sea to the Marmara Sea. Serkan,
in 2013, set out to trace the path of this colossal channel
meant for a new generation of large scale cargo ships, which
traversed territories and aquifers critical to the survival of
030
THE ART OF DISASTERS INTERRUPTED
Istanbul’s citizenry. From his initial efforts Serkan constructed
a complete walking trail, about 60 kilometers long, which
became officially designated for hikers from across the world.
There is still no word on the fate of this megaproject, but
Istanbul just inaugurated its newest and biggest airport within
this same region.
6. The Earth School, Arter.
Our daily workshops were held in the classroom space
in the venue dedicated to the Earth School, located at the
Arter Building. We shared our floor with a collection of
‘neo-survivial’ kits, a sort of object survey and archive called
“staying alive,” brought together by the group SulSolSal. Their
eclectic collection of instruction pamphlets, model houses,
water filters, drone delivery systems, food robots, handmade
survival tools, were arranged neatly on the same steel
shelves and open framed cabinets that our classroom table
and chairs were made from. The effect was quite devastating
in its simplicity. On the day of our final review, we had been
given permission by the curators to place the work we made
ourselves—with the help of the Şişhane craftsmen—on the
same floor.
There will be more time and space devoted to reviewing the
works produced for the Art of Disaster Interrupted workshop
and this report will include these notes here in due time.
But clearly, given the premise for the workshop, its broad
geopolitical vision and anachronistic periodization, there were
no real predetermined expectations on the part of the invited
jurors, participants and public, on what would be presented
would not fall into any simple category of things. From an
earlier text written in anticipation of the Istanbul workshop:
The narration of memory and objects, whether fictional or real,
can provide opportunities to find different forms of creative
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL 031
expression. Take for example the ‘evil eye’ charm or amulet,
that first emerged in the ancient Hellenic era, and that has
survived through numerous religious beliefs and reforms until
this day. The evil eye is considered effective in warding off
disasters, serving as a protective amulet. Today it can also
be purchased as a refrigerator magnet. The history of this
one object transcends history and uses and represents the
way certain objects or artefacts can impact on daily life over
extended periods of time.
Not surprisingly then, the students in conceiving and developing
their projects, consulted fortune tellers, considered different
beliefs about the afterlife and pondered reincarnation. But they
also immersed themselves in the street life of the city, reflected
on the abundant population of well-fed and well sheltered
stray cats, the political impact of pavement and re-pavement,
game theory, Arcadian life, and neighborhood solidarity, in its
many forms of consensus, trust and interdependence. One
question that solicited the most uncertainty, however, was
what would life be like in a city the size of Istanbul in 2050?
According to the fortune teller, not very hopeful, but then,
isn’t this precisely the kind of question that should drive our
current dreams and future memories? Will we still be making
museums of innocence?
***
PETER LANG // NOVEMBER 2018
032
THE ART OF DISASTERS INTERRUPTED
COEXIST (!)
One of the first things a visitor notices upon arriving in Istanbul
is the presence of cats. These disrupt the stereotypical
relationship of domestic companionship that is the norm
between humans and cats in Western societies.
Beyond the vast, well documented informal infrastructures,
from food to shelter, that the city (or citizens) provide for
them, cats’ livelihoods in Istanbul are a powerful lesson. In a
global landscape characterized by imbalance, loss, and the
catastrophic consequences of human domination upon all
sentient beings, they offer an alternative model for reshaping
coexistence between species.
Cats in Istanbul exist between worlds, reshaping the relationship
between domestication, care, citizenship and wilderness. It is
not a coincidence that one of Brussels’s requirements for
Turkey to join the EU was to get rid of Istanbul’s cats. Indeed,
these cat urban ecosystems resist European models based
on domestication.
Free from human ownership but navigating between human
affection, bonding and love, Istanbul’s feline ecosystem also
defies the traditional relationship between love and property
that originated in Western capitalist societies. In a ritual of
animal polyamory, cats roam freely around the city, seeking
and giving warmth and cuddles from strangers that become
kin, and creating new networks of love between them, humans,
and the environment.
PROJECT GROUP: CARLOTA MIR, EMRE AYDILEK, FLORENCE TACHÉ, GUSTAV KARLSSON, SOFIA LARSSON, VESNA SALAMON.
NEON BY UGURLU NEON.
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL
035
Through our project, we wanted to reflect on these feline ecosystems
by engaging with the productive ecosystems and of
the city. With the help of the Ugurlu Neon Shop in Shishane,
we used one word - coexist! - to create a neon urban sign
which materially interacts with the streets of Istanbul whilst
addressing the viewer. We also produced a project dossier,
an assembly of references and process documentation giving
context to the final produced piece.
We must learn from Istanbul and devise new ways of coexistence,
ways which resonate with Donna Haraway’s notions of
making kin:
1 Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”
in Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, 2015, pp. 159-165
”No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to
be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts,
acts alone; assemblages of organic species and of abiotic
actors make history, the evolutionary kind and the other
kinds too.
[…]Making kin is perhaps the hardest and most urgent
part. […] I think that the stretch and recomposition of kin
are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the
deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care
of kinds-as- assemblages (not species one at a time). Kin is
an assembling sort of word. All critters share a common
“flesh,” laterally, semiotically, and genealogically. Ancestors
turn out to be very interesting strangers; kin are unfamiliar
(outside what we thought was family or gens), uncanny,
haunting, active. […]” 1
So, make kin, not babies! It matters how kin generate kin.
036
COEXIST (!)
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL 037
Gadenne, D., Potts, A. (2018) Felines on the fault line: Cats and the Christchurch earthquakes, Animal Places: Lively Cartographies
of Human-Animal Relations (2018) Bull, J., Holmberg, T., Åsberg, C. (eds.), Routledge, United Kingdom
§ 5199
“... the proposed changes to Turkey's very comprehensive
Animal Rights Law 5199 and the draft document which was
prepared in secret and presented to Parliament, if passed, would
mean a slow and lingering death for all of Turkey's stray animals!”
ARTICLE III. The fourth paragraph of Article VI has been
amended thus and the following paragraph has been added to
Article VI.
(...) The spay and neutering of stray animals are carried out
and regulated by Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Livestock.
Spay and neutering carried out by municipalities and other
organizations and institutions are supervised by Ministry of Food,
Agriculture, and Livestock. Spay and neutering principles and
procedures will be determined in a regulation issued by the
Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Livestock.
Local administrations are responsible for the rounding up of the
animals to the animal shelters. These animals will first be held
in the observation areas established in these centres. Animals
that have been sterilised, vaccinated and rehabilitated will be
registered and cared for in the shelters until they are adopted.
When the shelter cannot sustain the population, the rehabilitated
stray animals are accommodated in the natural life parks until
they are adopted. Land specified by Law no. 6831 of 31/8/1956,
may be allocated for this purpose for no charge, by permission
of the Ministry. The enforcement of this paragraph will be
determined in a regulation issued by the Ministry.
15.029.231
34
Ist
41o00’49’’ N
28o57’18’’ E
Istanbul
038
COEXIST (!)
10
Ne
[He] 2s22p2
Neon
20.180.
.
Gadenne, D., Potts, A. (2018) Felines on the fault line: Cats
and the Christchurch earthquakes, Animal Places: Lively
Cartographies of Human-Animal Relations (2018) Bull, J.,
Holmberg, T., Åsberg, C. (eds.), Routledge, United Kingdom
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL 039
DANS LE PAVÉ, LA PLAGE
Under, over, behind, though, past, inside.
Walls, claddings, doors, roads, fences, pavements.
Istanbul is a very unpredictable city and the histories of her
people, cats and dogs are sewed together in a constantly
changing symbiosis. The mixture of cultures and history form
a vibrant mosaic of different pieces learning how to come
together every day.
Today, this reality is visible in the way politics of space have
been working since the Taksim square and Gezi park protests.
Hope has changed place and no longer lives in these places.
New places of hope are coming together as it is peoples
natural instinct to resist.
Inspired by the famous “sous le pavés, la plage!” of May 1968
we created a piece that tries to establish some relations to it.
A constantly present, constantly invisible idea of revolution and
political freedom. We considered the pavement of Istanbul to
be the symbolic element through which the political powers try
to change the way space is used for uprises (as for example
the Taksin square pavement).
Pavement is an agent used both to prevent certain uses of
space but also as protection against police and army vehicles
during protests. We see pavement as the agent that operates
for both sides. Pavement is an oppression element until it
becomes a tool against it. It is this idea that led us to work
with the pieces of pavement that have been removed or that
have a special relation to their surroundings.
PROJECT GROUP: BERIL TASOGLU, BERT STOFFELS, GÜLER AKDUMAN, GÜLBÜKE SUSARUGUR, ORESTIS NIKOLADIS, VICTORIA VAN KAN,
YUMNA MOHAMMED ALI, EMRE AYDILEK.
METALWORK BY MASTER ARTIN.
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL 041
Pavé is a piece that we created with the help of a Şişhane
craftsman. It is an exact replica of an existing piece we found
in the Şişhane neighbourhood made out of a different material
aiming to represent the craftsmen role in keeping the urban
and socio-economic tissue working. The metallic piece of
pavement now lies among others in one of Şişhane’s streets
with a message of resistance inside it.
While 100% of the paper used by newspapers is imported,
paper prices increased since the 1980s when the public paper
industry was privatised. Small newspapers and brochures,
generally critical towards the political powers, have stopped
their printed versions and are now available only online. We
found old printed versions and placed them inside this secret,
always present urban element. Pavé, stands among other
pavement pieces in Şişhane.
042
DANS LE PAVÉ, LA PLAGE
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL 043
The Shepherd’s Crook
Rio de Onor is a small village on the border between Portugal
and Spain. The village is centred around the river of the
same name and most of the houses are placed along two
streets on each side of the river. One person in the village,
a shepherd, had a special administrative power by means of
carrying a shepherd’s crook where information was carved
into the wood. Each house is represented by a mark and the
river is a circle around the stick. This functioned as a map of
the village where carved signs and notations were made next
to the house marks regarding economic and administrative
issues.
The Han
BASTON
A Han is a typology common in Istanbul with a history
stretching back around a thousand years. Originally it was a
place where travelling tradesmen could find a place to eat,
find water and stay overnight. Typically it was a courtyard
with only one opening, shelter for people and animals around
the four sides and a water fountain for drinking and washing
in the middle. Later these structures were extended with
more floors, a secondary courtyard and more functions such
as a mosque, social institutions and workshops. In the city,
the craftsmen working in a certain profession were usually
gathered in one han and it became a place where trade and
manufacturing took place with workshops, warehouses and
shops. As both a place providing water, shelter and essential
provisions and a place that represents a social community,
the Han is important as a meeting point.
PROJECT GROUP: ANA BARATA MARTINS, GERDA PERSSON, BO PILO.
THE WALKING STICK WAS MADE BY THE WOOD TURNER ISMAEL AND CARVED BY MASTER MUSTAFA
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL
045
Istanbul Autumn 2018
We try to imagine a city that has disappeared or been heavily
altered by catastrophe. The exponential acceleration of
surveillance technology reinforces the city and its infrastructure
as instruments of discipline, a posthumous architecture that
fails to meet our primary needs and instead works against its
inhabitants.
Navigation out of sight from tracking, recording and recognition
or navigation without the help from that technology needs to
be disconnected from today’s established networks or perhaps
even analogue. We have to imagine an invisible infrastructure
- an architecture without buildings. What are the tools to
help us understand this architecture? What information can
they hold and how do they function, what can they be and
describe?
In a post-apocalyptic world we might need means of
communication and navigation that are durable, simple and
possibly coded.
046
BASTON
The Baston
This walking stick inspired by the shepherd’s crook from
Rio de Honor. The shape of the stick presented here is a
topological representation of a walk through Istanbul from one
Han to another. The movement is recorded not in plan, only
vertically. Also, the “x-axis” is not distance but time, making
the landscape very difficult to read in the shape, it is more
a representation of the experience of the walker. The golden
horn is represented as a carved ring and the Fatih side with a
simplified medusa head as a reference to the Basilica Cistern.
These symbols refer to physical existing conditions and could
possibly be understood by a second person, making the stick a
tool for communication. It could also be a personal navigation
tool, understood only by the person who made it as a way to
help the memory
To rethink the shepherd stick is to become aware and
reinterpret the scale at which we communicate as a
society. Rethinking scale, communication, spatial and
time orientations, and how we disseminate knowledge.
To reconnect with the ritual objects that used to be so
imbedded in every society can be a way to reconnect the
individual with its community. To have a sense of belonging
and comfort, a deeper understanding of oneself through
connecting with one’s and others personal stories, its
community histories, the folklore and vernacular knowledge
that have built a sense of identity that ultimately expresses
itself in the present members of its community.
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL
047
TIPPING POINTS
The project Tipping Points is a participatory and performative
exercise using waste resources from Istanbul’s artisanal
workshops.
We find ourselves in a global system of actions and responses.
Human activities of extracting resources and emitting pollution
challenge the Earth’s system of feedback loops. Predictions
of the trajectory of the Anthropocene put us in a position of
choosing between keeping the balance or reaching tipping
points. These events can have predictable and unpredictable
effects on ecosystems, climate and might bring human
civilisation into uncertain conditions.
As a group of six creatives from different fields (architecture,
choreography, design and fine arts) we decided to investigate
the moment before collapse in a local context. The
neighborhood of Şişhane is located in the center of the old
city, and defined by a local network of craftsmen, all working
within a few blocks. The generation working here is ageing and
they lack successors, at the same time the district is subject
to extensive and rapid transformation and modernisation.
A recent report from the United Nations indicates that human
activities and emissions of all kinds have to drastically change
in the next decades. If we fail to take action it would already be
too late by 2045 and an array of different scenarios of major
disasters would take place. In times of instability, people seek
guidance and answers in magic, oracles and mystic signs.
We handed over the threatening scripts of the report to a
fortune teller, and recorded her visions of 2050.
PROJECT GROUP: AYSE ERDIN, JÉRÔME MALPEL, ANNA RISELL, ANDRES VILLARREAL, ÅSA AGERSTAM, ANNA ASPLIND.
WITH HELP FROM THE CRAFTSMEN OF ŞIŞHANE.
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL
051
In Şişhane, we collected leftover materials from the different
workshops and construction sites. Inspired by the game of
Jenga, we turned our findings into components for a social
event to take place where people stacked the refined objects
into a sculptural tower and then taking turns removing
the pieces one by one and placing them on the top of the
structure, approaching the inevitable tipping point. By setting
up the game on the streets in different parts of the area, we
interacted with locals passing by. These interactions formed
a rupture in the everyday life of the city, an invitation to reflect
by doing. The game transformed the site into a momentary
collective, gathered around a game defying balance, which
ended when we together reached the inevitable collapse. In the
aftermath of the game, what we find is a pile of possibilities,
experiences and new beginnings.
052
TIPPING POINTS
ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL 053
IT”S ALL ABOUT BO”S NEGS YO
[2018-10-19, 23:59:00]
Justinas:
So I'm sitting in some nice
italian bar, finally serene,
able to gaze back a little.
The last few hours of walking
for myself, having just minor
goals and interests, no
dependance, no obligations
and some limited, but
blessing self sufficiency,
what makes me feel like a
cat, measuring the landscape
of Istambul in some Kairos
units, with occasional
reading of Sontag during tea
breaks makes me write in
endless sentences. Apart of
great satisfaction with all
the time we had, I cought
a recurring theme in my
thoughts, so Im documenting
it immediately.
Community of gps satellites,
constantly murmuring for us
about threir names, locations
and times, is so close to
Vonneguts two-dimensional,
ever satisfied creatures
from Titans sirens, whose
only need is to be in touch.
Technology is a child of this
civilisation which already,
secretly has some life of its
own, but still needs to be
nurtured, needs to be needed.
I loved Wenders Untill the
end of the world, where a
vague crash of a satellite
serves as apocalyptic setting
for a romantic and distracted
road movie, where lives are
no less apocalyptic, either
because of their certainty,
or the opposite. Probably I
should write about it more
sometime.
One of the possible
catastrophes may happen
to us because of magnetic
storms of the sun, which are
totally unpredictable, and
are capable of disturbing
electronic communications.
Coils, which can be damaged
by auroras, are the vocal
chords of our society,
just like satellites, our
vestibular labyrinth. Society
of cats is immune to that,
they always fall on their
feet.
Two young women just came
into the cafe (I said its
a bar, but actually they
make pizzas here too), only
asking to take a photo with
the local cat on the couch.
Istambul is a theater of
cats, and cats are the engine
of internet. Istambul might
have a prosperous future.
There was a seemingly simple
artwork in the "earth
school", a combucha machine
begging for money because
it makes it work, so money
sustain its life. A metaphor
for all technology. Also
example of Kairos time.
(Swedish guys say also a
lot, I do now too)
The pizzeria is closing, and
I have to move already. Ill
ask the sattelites where and
when they are to map this
spot. Reduce their chatter
down to my own interest.
Enough to burden you guys.
Thats instead of the usual
goodby, for I prefer to
continue the chatter. And Im
still in this orbit.
I hope I didnt wake you up.
[2018-10-20, 00:51:45]
Vesna:
image omitted
[2018-10-20, 01:01:11]
Andres:
This is an accurate depiction
of life in germany fyi
[2018-10-20, 01:01:19]
Vesna:
image omitted
[2018-10-20, 01:01:43]
Vesna:
back to Berlin
[2018-10-20, 01:02:06]
Carlota:
Hahaha
[2018-10-20, 01:04:03]
Andres:
Thank you Peter and everyone
for the lovely trip!!
[2018-10-20, 02:30:02]
Andres:
image omitted
[2018-10-20, 02:36:11]
+385 95 808 1526:
About tonight..
[2018-10-20, 02:36:59]
Vesna:
Justinas... we love your real
time naration
[2018-10-20, 02:43:54]
Ana:
Such a cool haircut
[2018-10-20, 02:44:30]
Ana:
On vesna's control passport
pic
[2018-10-20, 11:18:59]
Jerome:
image omitted
[2018-10-20, 11:19:03]
Jerome:
For the collection
[2018-10-20, 11:45:25]
Bo:
image omitted
[2018-10-20, 15:47:31]
Peter:
[2018-10-20, 17:10:36]
054
BO’S ESSENTIALS
Vesna:
image omitted
[2018-10-20, 17:10:50]
Vesna:
Nom Nom yellow jacket
[2018-10-20, 17:11:00]
Vesna:
image omitted
[2018-10-20, 17:11:08]
Vesna:
Grossss
[2018-10-20, 17:43:46]
Vesna:
We actually did Sexist neon
sign..Justinas was right
[2018-10-20, 17:45:08]
Vesna:
(*photos made by geniously
brilliant Jêrm Mlpl)
[2018-10-20, 19:56:42]
Bo:
fantastic: https://youtu.
be/0YofAzLcIU8
[2018-10-20, 20:15:01]
Flo:
Hahaha looks like we did
indeed ! Though the great
women presenting it still
make it kind of donna
haraway-ish anyways ;)
[2018-10-20, 20:24:07]
Orestis:
♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
[2018-10-20, 22:28:04]
Carlota:
Why is it a sexist neon
[2018-10-20, 22:28:10]
Carlota:
I'm lost ♀
[2018-10-20, 22:28:39]
Vesna:
Look at the photo.. latest
one
[2018-10-20, 22:29:12]
Carlota:
Ohhhhhhh
[2018-10-20, 22:29:15]
Carlota:
It says sexist
[2018-10-20, 22:29:19]
Carlota:
Pahaha
[2018-10-20, 22:29:21]
Carlota:
[2018-10-20, 22:30:27]
Carlota:
Slow mode
[2018-10-21, 12:25:07]
Justinas:
Some documented process:
https://youtu.be/pKlKjPrn7LY
[2018-10-21, 12:40:10]
Orestis:
[2018-10-21, 12:40:19]
Orestis:
[2018-10-21, 15:11:58]
Ana:
What was inside the box?
[2018-10-21, 15:31:24]
Carlota:
We have post Istanbul
depression and have watched
the netflix documentary on
ciya kebab
[2018-10-21, 15:31:28]
Carlota:
Totally recommend
[2018-10-21, 15:31:31]
Carlota:
We're crying
[2018-10-21, 15:31:33]
Carlota:
Lol
[2018-10-21, 15:32:24]
Carlota:
Stockholm feels extremely
cold and grey!
[2018-10-21, 15:41:10]
Flo:
time to cook something with
the spices you bought in
Istanbul ;)
[2018-10-21, 17:13:10]
Gustav:
It sure is grey and cold in
sthlm
[2018-10-21, 17:14:25]
Gustav:
I just had installed my evil
eye when I noticed that my
cucumber had turned yellow!
Must be the grey cold wester.
So weird so delicious
[2018-10-21, 17:14:42]
Gustav:
*weather
[2018-10-21, 17:22:32]
Justinas:
Winter banana
[2018-10-21, 17:23:39]
Orestis:
Hahahahaha
[2018-10-21, 17:23:54]
Orestis:
Pure beauty
[2018-10-21, 17:56:15]
Bo:
thanks! we feel the same way.
[2018-10-21, 18:00:13]
Vesna:
Well.. just move to Berlin
[2018-10-21, 20:21:36]
Justinas:
Some more sentiments:
https://youtu.be/HmyW2O8SGHQ
[2018-10-21, 21:11:15]
Vesna:
Oooh wow thank you
WHATSAPP GROUP CHAT TRANSCRIPT. OCTOBER 2018
AFTER ISTANBUL
055
IT”S ALL ABOUT BO”S NEGS YO
056 BO’S ESSENTIALS
WHATSAPP GROUP CHAT IMAGES. OCTOBER 2018
AFTER ISTANBUL
057
LEXICON OF MARVELS
AND CATASTROPHES
This was the first “Open Studio” experiment to be hosted
at Färgfabriken and conducted by the team from R-Lab
Marvels and Catastrophes.
Staged on a frozen but sunny Saturday afternoon on the 26 of
January, the Lexicon workshop’s main objective was relatively
straightforward, to invite the public to bring with them:
“objects, things or ideas that you
want to take with you into the
ever changing present! The R-Lab
group will sort out your stuff and
categorise, document and then
will arrange it with all the other
creations.”
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER LANG. DRAWINGS BY WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS
Of course there would be questions about the nature of the
ever changing present - clearly there was this premonition
hanging over everyone’s heads about an unpredictable
transformation already in the making, not just the mounting
number of climatic threats adding to one’s list of uncertainties,
but also the standard unpredictables, the earthquakes, fires
and meteorite showers that follow no rational or universal
script, but that edge one towards accepting the practice of
superstitions, rituals and any of the plethora of Gods that
might provide some other kind of salvation.
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO
059
The Lexicon then, is just this sort of start-up list of things and
ideas that could offer comfort or sustenance when we find
ourselves under these impending forms of stress.
“we hope to create a real-time live
Lexicon on Marvels and Disasters
that will grow bigger and bigger
with each successive event, and the
R-Lab team hopes to understand
how your things fit together with
other peoples’ things, whether
they can coexist with each other,
cooperate with each or otherwise
cancel each other out.”
And in fact, over the afternoon, the Lexicon team began to
observe a unexpected pattern among the public’s contributions
and conversations, an amalgam of considerations on
predictable predictables, unpredictable predictables, and
unpredictable unpredictables, to play loosely with the well
known Donald Rumsfeld principle. We were not only beginning
to assemble a Lexicon of objects and ideas, but we were
witnessing a Lexicon of an entirely new kind in the making…
***
PETER LANG // JANUARY 2019
060 LEXICON OF MARVELS & CATASTROPHES
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO
061
#001
TYPE: object
COLOUR: dark grey / black /
anthracite
MATERIAL: lava stone
DIMENSIONS: 145g / 28 x70 x 48 mm
NOTES: I found this piece of lava on a beach in
the Western tip of Iceland while
traveling with my mum. This beach was very
special as a volcano erupted long
time ago and covered the whole area with lava.
Sometimes in the 1800s, a
British ship got into a storm and sank.
Eventually, some pieces ended up on the
shore and after some time the rust coloured
the metal pieces into a flamboyant orange,
giving a very special touch to the dark
landscape of the beach.
#002
TYPE: object
COLOUR: grey
MATERIAL: lava
DIMENSIONS: 15g / 35 x 40 mm
NOTES: Rock from Pompeii that I took on my
trip there over Christmas. I don’t think it’s
allowed which makes me treasure it even
more.
#003
TYPE: object
COLOUR: grey / green
MATERIAL: metal / plastic
DIMENSIONS: -
It is an object I found in 2007 in my first trip
to Stockholm. The little metal guy immediately
became a symbol of me living in Stockholm.
I moved here 3 years later and brought it
with me. We’re living together happily since
then. Since it’s made of metal, it’ll survive a
catastrophe!
062 LEXICON OF MARVELS & CATASTROPHES
#004
TYPE: object
COLOUR: red
MATERIAL: plastic and metal
DIMENSIONS: 64g
NOTES: It’s a knife. Vectorinox.
I brought it because I had it for a really long
time (since 1986) and since that it’s probably
made of good quality and will last long. It’s my
first knife I ever got so it has an emotional
value.
TEXT AND OBJECTS BY WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS
#005
TYPE: idea
COLOUR: bright / white
MATERIAL: abstract
DIMENSIONS: -
NOTES: Does many thingy for a candelabra.
#006
TYPE: experience
COLOUR: green
MATERIAL: drawing
DIMENSIONS: -
NOTES: Notes: This drawing was made by my
9 year old daughter in 2016. It illustrates a
volcano eruption in El Salvador that the whole
family did experience when travelling in the
eastern parts of the country. What seems to
be falling from the sky illustrates ashes.
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO
063
#007
TYPE: object
COLOUR: silver grey
MATERIAL: silver
DIMENSIONS: -
NOTES: The item I’ve brought is a Kuna coin.
It has the Tuna fish engraved on the back.
Croatian Kuna and Tuna fish are endemic
species, the future doesn’t seem bright.
But… Sea Shepherd organisation protected
marine life and Greenpeace stopped
deforestation. The future coin-coin-emblem is
the spectrum shell mermaid.
#008
TYPE: object
COLOUR: grey
MATERIAL: plastic
DIMENSIONS: -
NOTES: Duct tape makes everything better.
#009
TYPE: object
COLOUR: yellow / white
MATERIAL: natural / bean
DIMENSIONS: -
NOTES: Lucky bean is with me for the first
five years. I just kept on wearing it or keeping
it in my bag. It has a smiley face on one of
the sides. It might bring luck sometime in the
future, plant more beans, eat more bean soup.
064 LEXICON OF MARVELS & CATASTROPHES
#010
TYPE: object / dream
COLOUR: blue / grey / red / white / yellow
MATERIAL: rock
DIMENSIONS: 241g
NOTES: I had a dream that the Moon came
closer and closer and I said “this is it?” and
when it came so close that light whited
everything out.
PS: I haven’t seen Melancholia.
#011
TYPE: object
COLOUR: earth
MATERIAL: earth
DIMENSIONS: -
NOTES: This thing has become a kind of amulet
for me, even if I have never had any interest
in them. Somehow it just became treated as
such, immediately after I formed it out of clay
and stone. As if I managed to externalise a
part of me quite accurately, maybe something
that I would dream of, meet, or just become in
the future.
#012
TYPE: object
COLOUR: yellow / grey
MATERIAL: concrete
DIMENSIONS: ca 180 x 350mm
NOTES: I brought drawings of the closest bomb
shelter in case nuclear war starts during the
workshop.
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO
065
#013
TYPE: object
COLOUR: orange
MATERIAL: plastic
DIMENSIONS: 221g
NOTES: För att man kan panga Aliens med
den. (So one could shot Aliens with it)
#014
TYPE: object
COLOUR: blue
MATERIAL: feather
DIMENSIONS: 22g
NOTES: As a child I found a kingfisher feather
while having a walk with my grandfather.
This bird is declining in France and I never
had myself the opportunity to see one with
my own eyes, but finding the feather got
my grandfather to share is own childhood
memories of nature and his stories of
kingfishers. Then, I made a pendant of the
feather and wearing it makes me feel like I
could get a bit of the knowledge my grandfather
had of this bird. Now the pendant is lost and I
still haven’t seen a kingfisher for real.
#015
TYPE: object
COLOUR: white (200, 182, 163) / red (142,
29, 28) / black (33, 27, 17) / yellow (203,
150, 19) / blue (7, 52, 93)
MATERIAL: plastic
DIMENSIONS: 123g
NOTES: En Peugeot (A Peugeot)
066 LEXICON OF MARVELS & CATASTROPHES
#016
TYPE: story
COLOUR: -
MATERIAL: sound wave
DIMENSIONS: -
NOTES: I brought an anecdote / sound
wave that I heard from the author Henry
Martinsson. He asked people what they would
do if they could wish, after all their basic needs
were fulfilled. Almost everyone answered:
“I want to see the world.” This was maybe
in 1950. Today, many live a confortable life
with more then they need and possibilities to
see the world has never been bigger. But we
shouldn’t. Because flying is not working. What
is the human animal supposed to think about
this - the chance of fulfilling but the moral
responsibility to say no.
#017
TYPE: object
COLOUR: brown, gold, white
MATERIAL: paper, cardboard and leather
DIMENSIONS: 175 x 120 x 42mm / 592gr
NOTES:I brought this book (Marcel Proust - In
search of lost time) because I think it will be the
only book I would like to save if things come to
an end. This book has the ability to bring back
so many memories, visions, spaces from the
past, through the narrative, that anyone could
reflect to one own past. Everyone should have
a copy and read it, now or later.
It is wonderful.
#018
TYPE: object
COLOUR: neon pink, light gold
MATERIAL: cheap metal and plastic, I think
DIMENSIONS:
NOTES:
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO
067
#019
TYPE: object
COLOUR: silver grey / brown
MATERIAL: metal / wood
DIMENSIONS:
NOTES:This is an object saved for a long time
due to unknown reason, but of an important
sake.
#020
TYPE: story
COLOUR: blue / transparent
MATERIAL: water
DIMENSIONS:
NOTES: The story of the fresh water bubble
under the city of Venice: it was drunk…
The wells are now sealed and the city is
sinking. A learning story brought to prep
survival
#021
TYPE: object
COLOUR: grey / white (124, 114, 99) / black
/ yellow (186, 153, 80) / red (151, 28, 64)
/ brown (108, 60, 30)
MATERIAL: fabric / leather / metal
DIMENSIONS: 371gr
NOTES: Billhjälmen / The car helmet
A symbol of how we build a society we need to
protect ourselves from.
Self-destruction - disaster - marvel.
The car being a symbol of climate change of
course! The helmet indicates danger.
068 LEXICON OF MARVELS & CATASTROPHES
#022
TYPE: idea
COLOUR: green
MATERIAL: -
DIMENSIONS: -
NOTES: Hartmunt Stockler / Das schillernde
lexikon (The glittering lexicon)
It is both a beautiful solution and a scary vision
of the future. A backpack that is a green
house, that gives oxygen to the person wearing
it. A beautiful view - a backpack at the same
time.
#023
TYPE: object, story, idea, fantasy, dream
COLOUR: RGB 56, 57, 56 / 18, 24, 25
MATERIAL: several / clay
DIMENSIONS: 140 x 70 x 2 mm / 70g
NOTES: I always bring it with me.
#024
TYPE: object
COLOUR: white
MATERIAL: plastic
DIMENSIONS: -
NOTES: This is the object I use the most and
I accidentally stole it from a friend Andreas
Farkas. I have not return it.
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO
069
#025
TYPE: object, fantasy
COLOUR: clay
MATERIAL: clay
DIMENSIONS: 227g
NOTES: Clay mermaid, cos I made it!
#026
TYPE: object
COLOUR: terracotta
MATERIAL:clay
DIMENSIONS: -
NOTES: The day after tomorrow:
A Rambo knife to survive the day after
tomorrow.
#027
TYPE: object
COLOUR:
MATERIAL:
DIMENSIONS: 160 x 75 x 5 mm / 126g
NOTES:
070 LEXICON OF MARVELS & CATASTROPHES
#028
TYPE: object
COLOUR: brownish
MATERIAL: trolldeg
DIMENSIONS: 65 x 40 x 50 mm / 45g
NOTES: It is someone’s unknown story. You
could barter with it Garfield is eternal
It’s very melancholic . You could eat it when in
a pinch.
#029
TYPE: object
COLOUR: blue, black
MATERIAL: wood, paint
DIMENSIONS: 220 x 70cm / 62g
NOTES: Maracas. Object for euphoria,
celebration, escape from drudgery of everyday
life; for ritual, communication, warning. Music
has a place in any human future, so does
decoration. This decorated musical object
symbolises how close at hand these intuitions
are in our social repertoire.
#030
TYPE: object
COLOUR: deep purple
MATERIAL: beautiful crushed velvet
DIMENSIONS: 46g
NOTES: It is useful and beautiful. It is an objet
in which I can put other objects and carry them
with me. The inside is made of waterproof
fabric, so I could carry liquids in it. If I would fill
it with something soft and fluffy, I could use it
as a small pillow. My object is a tote bag.
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO
071
#31
TYPE: dream
COLOUR: colourful
MATERIAL: immaterial
DIMENSIONS: -
NOTES: It will stick around (forever probably)
It is not defined or cornered by borders nor by
present or past states. It doesn’t die when I
die, it transfers to another being as a gift if it
wants it It is constantly changing and evolving
making the future with it exciting and unknown,
as it grows: it becomes a bag of very unknown
fantasy dreams.
#032
TYPE: idea
COLOUR: light beige to dark brown
MATERIAL:
DIMENSIONS:
NOTES: Päls / Fur. In the future it can be good
to wear fur, but also to have fur. If we kill an
animal we need to make use of it as much
as possible. We also need to be more like
animals, ie have more hair / be hairier.
#033
TYPE: object
COLOUR: brown
MATERIAL: rotting flesh
DIMENSIONS: 160gr
NOTES:This specimen of Murry cod
(Maccullochella peelii) is one of over one million
fish that we recently killed in the Menindee
(?) lakes in Western NSW, Australia. The
catastrophic event was caused by the rapid
growth of blue green algae in the river system,
which starved of oxygen, which was caused by
extreme warm temperatures, lack of water,
slow and total mismanagement of the river
system by farms, mines and government
agencies.
072 LEXICON OF MARVELS & CATASTROPHES
#034
TYPE: object
COLOUR: red / brown
MATERIAL: clay
DIMENSIONS: -
NOTES: The mushroom will take over the world!
-Zombie ants
-Mykeshitza (?)
-And so on…
#035
TYPE: story
COLOUR: grey / brown
MATERIAL: phosphate
DIMENSIONS: -
NOTES: Naurus öde, ett varnande exempel.
Kungariket Nauru i Stilla Havet som sålde alla
sina naturtillgångar i utbyte mot mycket och
snabba pengar. Nu är rushen över och Nauru
har lämnats åt sitt öde, med vare sig kapital
eller natur kvar. Gonatt!
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO
073
IT’S ALL ABOUT BO’S NEGS YO
[2019-01-24, 13:49:04]
Ana:
Sorry guys im late
[2019-01-24, 13:49:09]
Ana:
Start without me
[2019-01-24, 14:06:14]
Andres:
A question, who else will
be joining the discussion
today at 5 or earlier? Jerome
right?
[2019-01-24, 14:07:01]
Jerome:
Im free from 5, if you guys
are still around I'll pop by
(around 5:30 the time to get
there) keep me updated!
[2019-01-24, 14:07:15]
Åsa:
Same here!
[2019-01-24, 14:08:55]
Anna A:
image omitted
[2019-01-24, 14:09:46]
Jerome:
Cosy but no tea?
[2019-01-24, 15:18:57]
Gustav:
+1
[2019-01-24, 15:20:32]
Ana:
Jerome the 17h-19h30 schedule
is still on
[2019-01-24, 15:20:35]
Peter:
5 pm is Researching the
Commons Rutiga Golvet
[2019-01-24, 15:27:58]
Ana:
Is that your presentation?
[2019-01-24, 15:34:23]
Peter:
No it's the usual curated
cool talk Stephanie Hessler
[2019-01-24, 16:41:16]
Johanna:
Hi and thank you for letting
me into this group! I didnt
know it excisted until today
so I have missed quit a lot I
guess. I'm not able to make
it today nor tomorrow but
hopefully in the weekend. /
Johanna W
Veronika Wallinder's email?
[2019-01-24, 16:58:13]
Ana:
Are we meeting now at 17h?
[2019-01-24, 17:05:10]
Anna A:
Lets say 17.30!
[2019-01-24, 17:05:17]
Ana:
Ok
[2019-01-24, 17:05:35]
Anna A:
If you're here come to rutiga
golvet!
[2019-01-24, 17:06:13]
Jerome:
But are we discussing the
workshop or going to rutiga
golvet?
[2019-01-24, 17:06:53]
Gustav:
Rutiga golvet!
[2019-01-24, 17:07:45]
Andres:
We will discuss when
everyone has arrived
[2019-01-24, 14:37:26]
H:
I'm afraid I took my morning
off work To go to crematorium
with a friend this morning
to see her mother's body, so
have to work late
[2019-01-24, 14:54:59]
Bo:
i will try to be there at 5
if you are still there
[2019-01-24, 15:00:21]
Andres:
Yes we have some ideas we
wanna run by you
[2019-01-24, 15:17:33]
Bo:
good!
[2019-01-24, 16:44:24]
Peter:
I apologise for thi Johanna
I also sent out emails
separately and in the google
group. Are you not getting
these either?
[2019-01-24, 16:45:14]
Johanna:
I haven't gotten anything
this year
[2019-01-24, 16:46:19]
Johanna:
I will take a better look in
the google group, a bit bad
with google
[2019-01-24, 16:48:36]
Peter:
That's a problem did you get
[2019-01-24, 17:07:50]
Ana:
Apparently first rutiga
golvet and then workshop
[2019-01-24, 17:09:29]
Anna A:
We can start now but only Bo
arrived, that's why we pushed
it forward.
[2019-01-24, 17:15:34]
Jerome:
I'm just leaving work now in
Söder will take me 30 mins to
get to school please start!
[2019-01-24, 17:27:07]
Anna A:
Ok, we start 17.30
[2019-01-24, 17:35:16]
074
BO’S ESSENTIALS
Andres:
Which room did you go to?
[2019-01-24, 17:35:41]
Anna A:
Outside Peters office
[2019-01-24, 17:45:04]
Andres:
Gustav where did you go?
[2019-01-24, 17:47:58]
Gustav:
Wooops, at Kouohs
presentation
[2019-01-24, 17:49:09]
Gustav:
Thought everyone was here,
but realize now everyone is
not. Ill try to leave
[2019-01-24, 17:49:38]
Ana:
We are at the third floor now
[2019-01-24, 17:49:42]
Ana:
Come here
[2019-01-24, 17:51:23]
Ana:
@46707535195 we are at the
third floor
[2019-01-24, 17:51:26]
Ana:
Join us
[2019-01-24, 18:30:52]
Peter:
Are you still upstairs?
[2019-01-24, 18:31:09]
Andres:
Yes
[2019-01-24, 18:31:47]
Peter:
Ok we're almost over down
here
[2019-01-24, 19:37:58]
Lea:
Hey we lost you? Did you go
somwhere for drink?
[2019-01-24, 19:42:07]
Bo:
did you go for a beer?
[2019-01-24, 19:42:08]
Vesna:
Hey guys. We were thinking of
going to Carmen bar..
[2019-01-24, 19:42:36]
Vesna:
Yes where are u?
[2019-01-24, 19:47:41]
Vesna:
I have a dinner but will join
you after!
[2019-01-24, 19:48:28]
Vesna:
A friend of mine is playing
on Riche 20-22 think it can
be nice!!
[2019-01-24, 19:57:06]
Gustav:
Lost Andres around Slussen.
But I think we're both
heading for Carmen
[2019-01-24, 20:01:39]
Jerome:
All roads lead to Carmen
[2019-01-24, 20:16:08]
Peter:
I am leaving school now you
will still be at Carmen?
[2019-01-24, 20:19:18]
Gustav:
Just arrived at Carmen,
no R-Lab here yet though,
except for Gustav. Maybe I
head back home and make hot
chocolate instead
[2019-01-24, 20:19:46]
Jerome:
Yay chocolate!
[2019-01-24, 20:20:51]
Vesna:
We te in Carmen yes
[2019-01-24, 20:21:13]
Vesna:
Carmen! On the right
[2019-01-24, 20:21:23]
Andres:
We are her undee the tv
screen!
[2019-01-24, 20:21:41]
Vesna:
Location: https://
maps.google.
com/?q=59.315132,18.076229
[2019-01-24, 20:21:45]
Peter:
Ppl
[2019-01-24, 20:21:50]
Peter:
Ok
[2019-01-24, 20:22:54]
Gustav:
Lol. I went to Kvarnen. Samma
lika
[2019-01-24, 20:23:14]
Vesna:
Its close by.. come
[2019-01-24, 20:24:07]
Gustav:
I live in sthlm acting like a
tourist. All new, All nice
[2019-01-24, 21:07:36]
Anna R:
Great seeing you all today,
good luck on the rest of the
workshop!
[2019-01-24, 21:08:01]
Vesna:
[2019-01-24, 22:44:43]
Gustav:
R-Lab, such a nice group of
people!
[2019-01-24, 22:44:56]
Gustav:
Ps: årets Majblomma
[2019-01-24, 22:45:11]
WHATSAPP GROUP CHAT TRANSCRIPT. JANUARY 2019
STOCKHOLM 075
IT’S ALL ABOUT BO’S NEGS YO
076
BO’S ESSENTIALS
WHATSAPP GROUP CHAT IMAGES. JANUARY 2019
STOCKHOLM
077
NORDIC HAZARDLANDS
We arrived by night train in Umeå, Västerbotten, on an early
and crisp March morning. A morning that would be the
beginning of our third workshop and four days of explorations
in this – for most of us – unacquainted city.
This trip was our second delving into the topic of Nordic
Hazardlands. A topic initiated by the Stockholm based research
and design think tank LABLAB “dedicated to understand the
social, ecological and spatial transformations in the Nordic
and Baltic Sea Region”. 1
TEXT BY ANNA ASPLIND, ANNA RISELL & FLORENCE TACHÉ
IMAGES BY R-LAB GROUP
The intention of the Nordic Hazardland workshop was to invite
“participants to look beyond the well-known factors of causality
in order to broaden the field of inquiry to include archaic myth
of origin, the tradition of native peoples and local customs,
forms of internal colonization and government programs for
immigrant resettlement, as well as historic logging, mining
and industrial practices. The Nordic regions have over the
centuries cultivated strong independent survival practices,
and these customs and updated practices may offer clues
for improved and critical strategies for more sensitive
development.” 2
1. www.lablab.se 2. ibid.
UMEÅ 079
The question still remains - is the whole of Sweden considered
as part of the Nordic Region in this context, or does the
concept refer to the northern part of the country (-ies: including
Finland and Norway), beyond some vague frontier (from the
southern perspective)? Since the concept of hazardlands
didn’t fully come with an explanation before or during our stay,
it left some space for us to build a concept of our own. To
pursue a proposed lead from the first seminar that was held
at KKH in December: the French word hasard meaning “a
chance occurrence”, probably describes well how we received
both the stay, as well as its collecting title. So, the workshop
could thus be said to deal with the North (including Umeå) as
on the one hand, a land of fortuity, and on the other, prone to
damage and disaster – Marvels and Catastrophes.
3. Anna Asplind “In Search of the Miraculous” 2019.
The week unfolded as a web of several trails, here and
there meeting in nodes. On our first day some of us visited
Västerbottens Museum to engage in “the tradition of native
peoples and local customs”, others made it to Norrlandsoperan
where E|A|S - Evolving Asteroid Starships was exhibited in
their Vita Kuben. Some were intrigued by inaccurate google
earth images and discovered a brand new IKEA store where
the satellite had only captured an open field. Other means
of discovery were offered through the overlayering of two
different maps 3 , none of which described Umeå; this merge
paired with fantasy and an appetite for adventure enabled
another fraction of our group to find themselves walking
persistently towards the unknown, ending up on Teg and being
mesmerized by lichen growing on a facade facing north. At
Kvinnohistoriskt museum yet another party explored the history
of women, activism and reorganizing societies 1789-1914.
The group reassembled at Bildmuséet for a guided tour by
curator Anders Jansson. On this day we were also welcomed
by Marie Kraft, lecturer at UMA School of Architecture who
gave us a tour of the facilities.
082
NORDIC HAZARDLANDS
On the second day, happenstance guided our nomadic
excursion to the island Ön (“the Island”), located on sight
distance from the city center, in the middle of Ume älv. Our
walk was interrupted when encountering pieces of abandoned
structures, vestiges of past and expired functions. During
these momentary lapses, new narratives unfolded, imaginary
continuations of the elements were created, as well as
speculations about the structures’ former purpose.
The third day contained the symposium On the Frontier of
Mental and Spatial Change in Swedish – German Countryside(s)
with the ambition to understand and to connect historic
and contemporary transformations affecting the Swedish
and German countryside(s). The symposium, supported by
the Goethe Institut, was conceived by Daniel Urey, head of
LABLAB and earlier engaged in developing the international
urbanisation programs at the contemporary art centre
Färgfabriken. Invited guest speaker was Dr. Martina Doehler-
Behzadi, Director at IBA Thüringen, Germany.
Whether or not Umeå should be seen as a part of the
Swedish countryside – Umeå is the largest conurbation
in Norrland, and ranked 11th in the country 4 – the vague
transition between the urban and the rural landscape is as
present here as in any other city. While walking around in
these areas, as well as in the central parts of Umeå, again
and again we stumbled across a company that caught our
attention, Balticgruppen (“the Balticgroup”). Balticgruppen
is a private property company that manages many of the
ongoing building projects around the city of Umeå. Väven
(culture center) and the arts campus are examples of their
bigger projects. At their web page Balticgruppen highlights
their aim “Tillsammans mot det bästa Umeå” (“Together
towards the best Umeå”). In 2015 Balticgruppen created
an enterprise in corporation with Wallenberg; owning equal
shares, this enables for Balticgruppen to release capital and
4.www.scb.se
5.www.umea.se/arkiv/pressmeddelanden
UMEÅ 085
6. One telling story might be the urban development of “Ön” being delayed by the presence of an endangered species onsite:
www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vasterbotten/hotad-fagel-riskerar-att-stoppa
continue their investments in Umeå. 5 In order to return to
the LABLAB description of hazardlands: “The Nordic regions
have over the centuries cultivated strong independent survival
practices, and these customs and updated practices may
offer clues for improved and critical strategies for more
sensitive development.” With Wallenberg investing 50% in the
local company, how well does this match with the anticipated
“critical strategies for more sensitive development”?
The stay concluded in a one-day workshop at UMA where we
collected our findings on the topic “the Almanac of Marvels
and Catastrophes 2019-2020”. Discussions circulated
around questions of how we orient ourselves in the world
of today, of how we meet the unpredictable, of methods to
make predictions of the future. As a starting point, the word
“hazard” was interpreted as uncertainty, from which the
group set up a work around the idea of a contemporary
almanac for anticipating future events based on current
circumstances. A diversity of almanacs were collected at
Umeå’s library and archives: old and new, rural and urban.
Under their lead we created our way through ideas such
as forecasts, contingencies, tying time and space through
climate, and observing and handling our relationships with
our environment through formal rituals, celebrations and
sayings. In that way, the almanac became a tool or a ritual,
which could help us handle both the dependable in the world
and the uncertain, both wonders and disasters. We created
sketches and diagrams that could be part of an almanac for
2019-2020, a guide through which one could go through
the changes in our increasingly marvelous and catastrophic
world.
Although the theme of this workshop and trip was Nordic
Hazardlands, many of the conversations revolved around
existential issues, such as “How to be a person in this
world?”. In fact, that could be considered a result of the
086
NORDIC HAZARDLANDS
ongoing conversation of “How to be a city in this world?”.
This question circles the expectations that are building up
through urban development projects such as the speculations
on the future development of the rural insula, “Ön”, and the
ongoing construction sites of Balticgruppen. Who will decide
the future history of Umeå? Who will dictate the future history
of the individuals? In our regard we saw Umeå struggling with
the identity as a city close to nature, at the same time fighting
for their presence on the global city scene. 6 With the recent
appropriation of the history of the Same culture and desperate
attempt to now let their voices be heard in order to rewrite
that taken history, the question arises: Who are we to talk
about Nordic hazardlands in this context? A small group of
students from the “south” in a – for us – unknown landscape.
Was there a way for us to listen to the local stories, hidden in
the landscape and culture without colonizing?
***
UMEÅ 087
Almanack 1967: Till Stockholms Horisont. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksell, 1966)
The Almanac of Marvels and Catastrophes 2019-2020
The Almanac of Marvels and Catastrophes 2019-2020
096
NORDIC HAZARDLANDS
UMEÅ 097
Excerpt from Bondepraktikan (Old Farmers Almanac)
IT’S ALL ABOUT BO’S NEGS YO
[2019-02-08, 14:17:20]
Peter:
People I should mention that
I heard back from Istanbul
about the shipping. DHL
considers most as garbage and
are not legally allowed to
ship it. The biennial offered
to keep the neon sign in
their permanent collection...
Comments?
[2019-02-08, 14:29:13]
Carlota:
not allowed to ship a parcel?
[2019-02-08, 14:29:29]
Carlota:
omg
[2019-02-08, 14:36:36]
Flo:
That's a shame... there would
be a lot to discuss about a
proper definition of garbage
[2019-02-08, 14:38:57]
+33 6 89 35 21 24:
Anyway leaving the néon to
the biennale is fine by me,
if others agree
[2019-02-08, 14:48:43]
+46 70 753 51 95: Good to
know laws on shipping and
definitions of Garbage
[2019-02-08, 15:20:34]
+46 70 349 09 13:
It's fine by me as well!
[2019-02-08, 15:56:37]
bopilo:
our walking stick and it's
brass holders?
[2019-02-08, 16:08:31]
Ana:
Well they should be able to
ship just the stick without
the brass
[2019-02-08, 16:08:48]
Ana:
Can you tell them to ship the
stick?
[2019-02-08, 16:18:21]
Bo:
but the brass should also
be fine
[2019-02-08, 16:20:02]
Andres:
Maybe they mixed it up with
out street trash
[2019-02-08, 16:20:08]
Andres:
Our
[2019-02-08, 16:21:01]
Ana:
Maybe
[2019-02-08, 16:21:25]
Ana:
But i want the stick and the
brass holders to arrive to
stockholm
[2019-02-08, 16:21:48]
Ana:
Peter tell them that, or give
contact to negotiate arrival
[2019-02-08, 16:39:23]
Anna A:
We can ask Ayse to collect
our trash if we still want
it? (tipping point group)
[2019-02-08, 20:23:48]
Bo:
this is crazy
[2019-02-08, 20:31:19]
Carlota:
can't we find somebody coming
to Turkey?
[2019-02-08, 20:42:10]
Peter:
For the moment let's try to
get the stick
[2019-02-08, 20:43:06]
Carlota:
I would really like to have
the neon back too
[2019-02-08, 20:43:28]
Carlota:
Peter, if we find friends
who can ship it privately is
that OK?
[2019-02-08, 20:44:25]
Peter:
Ok I will try to find out
what can be done
[2019-02-08, 20:47:50]
Peter:
Here is additional info on
trsi costs
[2019-02-08, 20:47:57]
Peter:
Peter,
According to our Travel
Agency SJ offers the
following for 2 adults and 21
students with valid student
card:
Travel with SJ night train in
3-bed sleeper and recliner
6-bed coupes in 2 class
Travel from Stockholm to
Kiruna on March 24 at. 18.11,
arrival at. 9.12
The price per adult in a
sleeping car is SEK 1059 (x 3
for own coupe)
The price per student in a
recliner is SEK 834
OR
Travel from Stockholm to
Kiruna on March 25 at. 18.11,
arrival at. 9.12
The price per adult in a
sleeping car is SEK 916 (x 3
for own coupe)
The price per student in a
recliner is SEK 712
[2019-02-08, 21:07:55]
Peter:
Only problem is actually
processing payments
098
BO’S ESSENTIALS
[2019-02-09, 01:39:12]
Carlota:
Maybe we should book
individually
[2019-02-09, 14:14:30]
Bo:
is anybody going to school
today?
[2019-02-09, 14:15:22]
Bo:
my key card didn't work last
time so i need someone to let
me in later
[2019-02-10, 12:09:53]
Gustav:
I will tell you like it is.
In Sweden we dislike making
individual decisions very
much, especially when the
decisions are connected with
a higher collective purpose -
Like a group trip to Kiruna,
or if you supposed to eat
taco with the family on
fridays.
We learn this already in
"Lågstadiet".
Society is aleady full of
decisions that has to been
made and they all makes us
very tired and bored.
What most of us really want
though is a nice package to
simply say yes to. Without
knowing any details like
timestables or what type
of rosting the bean in the
coffee will have at the
collective fika. We allways
trust the organisatör and
that hen chooses whats best
for the collective.
Its the big picture that
counts and its so super nice
that 21 students and two
adults are heading north this
spring. Its amazing.
Like Rene and his warm air
ballon - an adventerous
expedition into the northern
hazard landz, roaming around
without know what to except.
So let's keep most of the
details hidden - for the
participants to discover as
a group on the train to the
mystical north. Its gonna be
a real fantasy
[2019-02-10, 14:33:30]
Orestis:
Wise Gustav
[2019-02-10, 14:39:13]
Justinas:
Lazy Gustav :) I feel we
need to give a hand for the
organizers, because we need
the proposal that is really
acceptable to everyone. If
it isnt, we all will get a
reduced version, because we
cannot leave people behind
just because of money.
Solidarity is important.
[2019-02-10, 14:39:40]
Peter:
Right! Well observed! I was
thinking of moving in that
direction anyway so if you
don't mind I will suggest
going Monday direct to Umeå.
we discovered that Monday
travel is cheaper and those
of you want to go to Kiruna
can plan on going the end of
the week., unless there are
major objections this is what
I will instruct veronika on
Monday.
[2019-02-10, 15:47:25]
Bo:
good! this leaves us kiruna
people an option to stay
there longer.
[2019-02-10, 16:06:25]
Peter:
Yes ok
[2019-02-10, 16:13:29]
Ana:
LOL! When you don't have
money problems, it is easy to
say yes to whatever plan...
#privilege
[2019-02-10, 16:15:20]
Ana:
Thanks :) SOLIDARITY should
be 2019's word
[2019-02-10, 16:16:37]
Ana:
Inclusion is recognizing each
others differences, not smack
up everyone in one bag
[2019-02-10, 16:40:51]
Gustav:
Åh, sorry. My super long text
was off course ironic, tryin
to be a funny guy. It was
maybe unclear, and I was not
a funny guy. Off course we
all have to contribute to the
trip and make it a nice one,
and also listen to everyone's
individual wishes regarding
different possibilities to
come along and so on
Monday 25th to Umeå sounds
good for me, if that now is
the plan. I do not know yet
if a can afford to go further
north to Kiruna to stay there
some extra days, but I hope
so! I really want to go there
Peter, is it still so that
the school-budget not covers
the trip back home to
Stockholm?
[2019-02-10, 16:44:09]
Gustav:
Ps: Six years ago I did a
proposal for moving Kiruna,
before White rolled out
their masterplan. Based on
increased mining activity :)
[2019-02-10, 17:53:35]
Orestis:
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
NEW KIRUNA IN THE PACIFIC♥
WHATSAPP GROUP CHAT TRANSCRIPT. FEBRUARY 2019
UMEÅ
099
IT’S ALL ABOUT BO’S NEGS YO
100 BO’S ESSENTIALS
WHATSAPP GROUP CHAT IMAGES. MARCH 2019
UMEÅ
101
RENEWAL & METAMORPHOSES
ENTER THE OPEN STUDIO: FÄRGFABRIKEN.
Daniel Urey and Karin Englund made it possible for us to develop
an independent Open Studio at Färgfabriken during a two week
period end of May. The Open Studio is a dedicated space that
occupies one of two side rooms on the main exhibition floor of
the Kunsthall, and is conceived by the Fargfabriken curators
as an alternative platform for public oriented activities, with
few conceptual limitations or thematic boundaries.
TEXT BY PETER LANG. IMAGES BY R-LAB GROUP
While there were some logistical challenges-we have R-lab
participants coming from five different countries and four
different Swedish cities--we could count on a year’s worth
of collective experience running workshops together, from
Istanbul to Umeå. Renewal and Metamorphosis was meant to
bring the program back around to the beginning of the Marvels
and Catastrophes cycle, to provide the kind of platform to
address a year’s worth of serious debate, hard analysis and
daring speculation.
The participant’s individual projects played significant roles
in building up the Open Studio program, providing a critical
subtext for the overall workshop. Anna Asplind’s purposeful
misalignment of city maps with anachronistic evacuation
routes, Jérôme Malpel’s ironic turn to the medieval icon in
proposing an inquisitional confessional, or Gustav Karlsson’s
exegesis on end of world tropes in his vision on Real Fantasy
fed into the gestation of daily events leading circuitously to
the great outdoors: consequently one tour around the paint
factory (Färg-fabriken translates into paint factory) divulged
culinary delights in the neighborhood of Liljholmen, while
another sought out the hidden miraculous in the mundanity
of the local.
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO
103
Andres Villarreal’s critical inquiry using the medium of photomontage
to lay forth the crisis of capital in the throes of the
Anthropocene, Anna Risell’s meditation on the everyday,
in her attempt to stroke routine memories, or Bo Pilo’s
“transactive memory exercises,” diagrammatic algorithms to
be played across a game board were strategic in providing
diverse languages for broader public engagement.
In counter-distinction, Ana Barata went down to the industrial
banks of the paint factory to die fabrics using the crushed
pigments of local plants, Veronica Skeppe created the
characteristic paint color red seen on many Swedish houses
from the mined ore of Falun - questioning color and nationalism
- while Åsa Agerstam engaged the Swedish fixation with the
fabled Scandinavian forest through the manipulation of logs
and tree stumps. In effect, their manual based activities,
grinding colors, mixing veneers, adding liquids and tints during
the length of the Open Studio provided a buzz of constant
activity while filling the space with drapes, textiles, colors,
dyes, and other tools of the trade.
An adjacent building in this soon to be demolished industrial
park around Färgfabriken was reevaluated: Gerda Persson’s
exquisite cast models of the neighboring abandoned factory
Lövholmen, a fifties modernist gem, that houses a major
bomb shelter in its basement, or the introspective and
forensic search for water sources and their conceptual
activation within the Färfabriken Konsthall itself, conducted
by Elena Mazzi, in order to raise one’s conscious sense
of the internal intricacies of the built environment, or the
perfunctory questionnaires, designed by Sofia Larsson with
Jérôme Malpel, presented as opinion polls, posing existential
questions on the ethics of professional architectural practice,
brought our attention back to the principle question on the
moral and survival implications of building and shelter.
104
RENEWAL & METAMORPHOSES
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO
105
The space of the Open Studio also served as a shape-shifting
volume for open conversation, whether it was a slide show, an
update on coming activities, or a playspace. We were privy,
thanks to Vesna Salamon’s help, to an audio vinyl recording
from the Lithuanian performance Sun and Sea featured at the
Venice Art Biennial. Carlota Mir ran an intensive discussion
group on feminism experimenting with arpentage, a form of
collective analysis where the book in focus is cut into sections
and passed along to a group of readers who then return with
their own personal interpretations. Its a method of critically
that creates feedback through cumulatively cutting up and
patching back different interpretations to get to the most
fundamental questions.
These acts of dexterity and craftsmanship, slicing, dicing,
grinding, drawing, pasting, photographing, weaving, carving,
cooking, walking, debating and remaining silent, should be
understood as core practical skills necessary for a world we
cannot yet fathom but for which we must be prepared to
imagine. Coming together to critically think and to critically
make opens the possibility for a utopian community of helping
hands and helping heads. Going public as we did at Färgfabriken
is one of a sequence of steps necessary towards bringing
about creative change, but as we could testify working in the
Open Studio, it also is the way to work towards a greater
common cause.
***
R-lab in the coming year, 2019-2020, will no longer be associated with
the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Henceforth, R-Lab is R-lab N-A,
non-aligned. Information on future programming can be accessed from
this website:
www.r-lab.international
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO
107
Färgfabriken´s Open
Studio is about exposing
the critical and creative
thinking while it is still
in flux. As a centre for
the arts, we have an
interminable interest in
the “väsen” (essence)
regarding the creative
process - what does it
OFFER us as humans
and societies? How does
it come about? How do
we capture it? What
elements do we reject
and how do we shape it?
108
RENEWAL & METAMORPHOSES
The Open Studio is also about raising important, difficult and
sensitive questions on the functionality and quantification
of creative thinking and making. How much of its outcomes
needs to be functional and quantifiable? How much of its
outcomes can be as open as possible, with no clear direction
and thus becoming valuable non-outcomes in a system where
everything and everybody is evaluated? Nevertheless, Open
Studio has indeed the ambition of becoming a destination
for a beginning where the beginning’s main destination is,
as Peter Lang once remarked, a mental and physical space
for critical viewing, thinking and making. In other words,
an open horizon with the ambition of stretching beyond
institutionalised curatorial and educational patterns.
TEXT BY DANIEL UREY
Open Studio 2019 started with the artistic duo Osynliga
Teatern (the Invisible Theatre), which seeks to push the
boundaries between show, performance, and exhibition.
Then the topics of ruralism, landscapes, ceremonies,
industrial agriculture, hazardlands, planetary urbanisation
and how to become human were explored by:
• Frances Hsu + students from Texas University
Architecture Department,
• Malin Heyman and James Hamilton + students from the
KTH ABE Urbanism Studies,
• Peter Lang + students from R-LAB on Marvels and
Catastrophes,
• Performance artist Gülbuden Kulbay,
• LABLAB
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO
109
A Lovely Suburban Fantasy Hajk
HAJK
As we left the Paint Factory the sky was full
of water but a ray of light gave us hope in our
quest. There was nothing to be eaten there so
we needed to go. A map was our only guidance
out of the premises into the wild in search of food
and shelter.
As soon as we passed the giant abandoned
cement factory, we walked along the water on
some old rusty train tracks. High grasses and
trees had slowly been taking their territories
back, and we found ourselves in a nice and lush
patch of tasty greeneries. Some of us started to
collect plants. Quickly we could check which ones
were edible or not by consulting some books and
apps we carried with us.
Urtica Dioica
[Common Nettle]
PROJECT BY GUSTAV KARLSSON, JÉRÔME MALPEL, ANNA ASPLIND
We passed the drawbridge, following a path and
found Löktrav and Spansk Körvel under an old
tree. We crossed a construction road work, and
climbed some metallic stairs to the fortress that
was hardly accessible from the ground level.
Up there on top of the rocky mountain it felt like
another world. With a fast foot we entered a
luxuriant yard with exotic species and blossoming
trees - hidden from the real world that was left
behind us. As we crossed the recreated piece
of nature, some of us found tulip sprouts and
decided that we could eat them.
A few moments later, as we reached what used to
be called the “triangle lake”, we heard screeching
noises from under a weeping willow. Two birds
were fighting for their lives.
Alliaria Petiolata
[Garlic Mustard]
Taxaxacum Officinale
[Dandelions]
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO 111
Suddenly we witnessed the fatal blow, as the
more savage was winning the fight.
Ulmus Glabra
[Scotch Elm]
We quickly ran away from that threatening scene,
and found some more peace in a tranquille
meadow. The whole grass was punctuated by little
golden dots.
“Dandelions! They are so good with butter!“
Oxalis Acetosella
[Wood Sorrel]
Enchanted by the color and the abundance of the
flowers, the group scattered out to collect the
food. Some started to walk toward the forest and
as the first hikers vanished into the woods, the
last ones stayed to scoop the flowers.
At the edge of the forest, the stillness of the
meadow was taken over by a feeling of being
surveilled. The long stretch of the trees became
darker and darker, a totally new environment
settled around us. The last part of the dispersed
group that entered the forest came across a
carpet of low bushes. Among them very small
deep-purple flowers.
“Blueberries! Precious blueberry flowers
beneath the green!”
Myrrhis Odorata
[Cicely]
Alone in the scary forest, the three of us found
some recomfort by carefully picking the precious
buds. But we needed to act fast, and left the
bushes to roam towards the other side. As
the forest became steeper and steeper, the
undergrowth was more visible and we identified a
large patch of nettles. Notwithstanding the plastic
gloves we wore, the stinging hairs on the leaves
could reach our skin. Even when the acid hit us,
we couldn’t stop collecting the plants, only thinking
about the marvellous soup we could savour when
we will reach the campsite.
Syringa Vulgaris
[Lilac]
112
RENEWAL & METAMORPHOSES
Once the bags were full of pricking greens, we
ran down the hill and found the rest of the team
safe and we could continue with confidence and
determination.
We decided to go across the shopping mall.
What used to be a commercial establishment
was just left out, with its primary structure and
the reminiscence of an active social space . We
climbed up the stairs to the top, and found and
exit into the sun. No traces of nature around
here, just concrete and asphalt.
Vicia Sepium
[Common Vetch]
As we walked up the hill and passed the highrises,
a deer ran away into the brambles, we
followed him. When reaching the ridgeline, the
sun started to shine again and we could see the
whole city from above - It was a marvelous view.
We decided to settle the camp. Quickly, we lit a
fire and pulled out our lovely finds. Chopped, then
cooked or grilled the beautiful plants brought us
satisfaction and warmth.
Tilia Cordata
[Small Leaved Lime]
What a richness and variety of species were to be
collected in these territories.
Soon sated and happy, we could continue our
wander with hope - as the sun was setting in the
horizon.
Rosa
[Common Rose]
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO 113
114
RENEWAL & METAMORPHOSES
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO 115
116
117
SPIRITUAL CLEANSING
Spiritual Cleansing is a research project lead during the
Open House at Färgfabriken on May 26th 2019 (European
election’s day).
As we felt a bit scared about how the day will end with so much
uncertainty in Europe, we decided to elaborate a method to
clear out our dark thoughts.
We needed a spiritual cleansing and then decided to take this
opportunity to collect our thoughts and feelings the ones from
the people coming to the art space.
PROJECT BY JÉRÔME MALPEL & SOFIE LARSSON
The project is divided in three different stations - or steps - in
the cleansing process, as followed:
“Check your Dreams here”
A premonition bureau, where people can tell their dreams and
premonitions about potential future events and catastrophes.
“Wash your sins!”
A confession parlor where visitors can, anonymously,
confess a story or action they did or witness that turned into
catastrophes or had various consequences.
“Just do it!”
A voting booth based on decision making, conscious choices
and consequences related to it. The station proposes different
questions to put oneself in the role of architect and reflect on
the ethical struggle of the profession.
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO 119
CHECK YOUR DREAMS HERE:
THE PREMONITION BUREAU
On October 21, 1966, the Welsh village of Aberfan was struck
by 110,000 cubic meters of coal mining waste after heavy
rainfall caused a tip positioned above the village to become
unstable, descending down the mountain slope in a landslide
that engulfed a primary school, a secondary school, and a
number of houses. 144 people died, 116 of them children.
In the wake of the disaster, Aberfan was visited by a psychiatrist
from the area named Dr John Barker. Struck by the tragedy
of the occurrence, Barker became convinced of the idea
that it was likely that people would have had premonitions
that something terrible was going to happen, and asked the
newspaper Evening Standard to solicit letters from readers
who had either had premonitions about the events themselves
or knew someone that had.
Dr. Barker founded the Premonitions Bureau in 1967, an
institution to which people could submit visions or dreams
that they believed to be of future events. The purpose of the
bureau, in Barker’s eyes, was two-fold: to determine how
often these things turned out to be accurate, and to act as
something of an early warning system for future disasters.
In the same matter, we took the opportunity of the Open Studio
at Färgfabriken to create a new version of the Premonition
Bureau, and edited a form to fill in people’s visions and
premonitions. Later on, we can connect those information
gathered and try to relate them with real events. What do we
learn from premonition? In an age where we can explain so
many things and science has answers to almost everything.
120
RENEWAL & METAMORPHOSES
PREMONITION REPORT FORMS
#01
Report Form: I dreamt that you weren’t to be
trusted. There was a dinner and cameras. The
sound of loss through an accent. I served on
the sidelines. Fire turned into water and dust. I
am awake and calm.
Have you experienced or witnessed a
fulfilment of you precognition? Yes
If yes, could you describe it?
I was badly treated like my dreams anticipated.
When the time came I was prepared so pain
turned into an insignificant grey buss
#02
Report Form: A few years back I had a new
job and dreamt every night about death. One
dream that I still remember was very vivid and
contained dogs with chopped off legs in a red
lake. I later read that dreaming about death is
a sign of change in your life.
Have you experienced or witnessed a fulfilment
of you precognition? No
If yes, could you describe it? ---
#03
Report Form: I have had, some months ago,
and for some time, this terrible premonition
about plane crashes. At that time, my
boyfriend was travelling a lot (especially across
oceans) and every time he was leaving on a
trip I had that same anxiety coming back. Then
I was constantly checking this flight tracker
website so I would follow the flight on its route,
and strangely feel safer once it had crossed
the ocean. I would sometimes fall asleep as
the flight was still on route, and when I woke
up he would have arrived safely. The same
way, when I fly over an ocean or sea, I often
times find myself in this state between sleep
and awake, where I feel its the end and we are
going to disappear into the deep blue water.
Have you experienced or witnessed a fulfilment
of you precognition? No, Not Yet
If yes, could you describe it? See previous
box. When I find myself flying in order to feel
better, I read a lot about plane crashes, and
made a map of all the plane crashes in history.
Not so many in comparison to the amount of
planes flying nowadays.
#04
Report Form: - Greta Thunberg condemned
to prison for conspiracy and treason against
EU economic interest. USA and NATO attack
Iran. Race for moon and mars won by China
rings the end of occidental leadership. Greta
Thunberg is liberated after the capitalism
defeat. She becomes the symbol of the new
worlds and is prayed by thousands of followers
as the new god.
Have you experienced or witnessed a
fulfilment of you precognition? No
If yes, could you describe it? ---
#05
Report Form: I am an animal with leopard
skin. My back is hairy, dotted with leopard
spots. The leopard is dying but I am being fully
reborn. I am making love to an animal of the
same kind.
Have you experienced or witnessed a fulfilment
of you precognition? Yes
If yes, could you describe it? I have chosen
to be my inner self, my body has become an
organ of feeling, taste and small are stronger
than desire. I am more alive, more sensitive,
more animal.
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO 121
WASH YOUR SINS
We deal with shame, remorse and each one of us carry
around a little bit of feeling of not acting right. As we are
now in a climate crisis, the anxiety rises and it is hard to
know how to act good. Every action has consequences, and
we are definitely aware of the fact that we can not live the
way we used to live if we want to remain on the Planet. The
confession parlor “Wash your sins!” is the perfect opportunity
to write down something done wrong, in order to identify the
cause.
122
RENEWAL & METAMORPHOSES
CONFESSION FORMS
#01
When was the last time you confessed?
5 years ago
Confession: I flew to Amsterdam in an
aeroplane last week
Context: Inside an aeroplane 1km above the
ground heading south
Consequence: Co2 emissions into the
atmosphere, risking future generations. But
the plane would have flown anyway.
What did you learn? The system is wrong
Any regrets? No
Feeling better? Yes
#02
When was the last time you confessed?
18 years ago (lol)
Confession: I have fallen prey to competition
with people who were supposed to be my
friends and wished bad things upon them
because they wished bad things upon me
Context: A very very distant friendship
Consequence: Guilt. More distance
What did you learn? That they’re not my
friends, but I have to get over myself too.
Any regrets? -
Feeling better? Yes
#03
When was the last time you confessed?
Never
Confession: I’m not convinced I voted for the
“right” party today. But at least I voted and not
on what I do not agree on. I also do not like
most food, but that’s not socially accepted so I
eat it anyway and say I liked it.
Context: Political / food related
Consequence: Uncomfort
What did you learn? Do not know
Any regrets? No
Feeling better? Yes
#05
When was the last time you confessed?
5 minutes ago
Confession:I wanted to vote yesterday. I
registered to vote in Stockholm for my country.
I missed a step. I was not able to vote. I tried
to find someone who would not vote and
convince them to vote for me. I failed. This is
the first election I miss. I feel very bad, almost
depressed.
Context: The far-right uprise in EU
Consequence: We will know tonight…
What did you learn? Check twice
Any regrets? Yes
Feeling better? Meh
#06
When was the last time you confessed?
Almost never
Confession: I stole 3 cups from Färgfabriken
because they are beautiful
Context: Beauty
Consequence: Heart full of love and happiness
What did you learn? Just do it
Any regrets? No
Feeling better? Yes
#07
When was the last time you confessed?
I never did before
Confession:I sometimes deliberately forget to
keep my loved ones informed about where I go
and buy myself a few days of total freedom.
Sometimes I feel guilty about it but I need the
peace of mind.
Context: Being exhausted and a will to see the
world beyond the ordinary
Consequence: None so far, but could be not
so funny some time
What did you learn? That I like white lies
Any regrets? No
Feeling better? No
#04
When was the last time you confessed?
Way too long ago
Confession: I gossip too much
Context: The reality of our everyday life
Consequence: I wonder
What did you learn? Let’s see
Any regrets? No
Feeling better? Meh
#08
When was the last time you confessed?
A week ago
Confession:I fell for someone else when I was
dating someone
Context: Love
Consequence:Confusion
What did you learn? Life is tough
Any regrets? Yes
Feeling better? Yes
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO 123
JUST DO IT:
IF YOU WERE AN ARCHITECT
Playing station on architecture and ethics. The construction
station is a role play game based on decision making and
understanding of consequences from one action. The station
proposes different questions to put oneself in the role of an
architect and reflect on the ethical struggle of the profession.
Starting with “if you were an architect would you...?” and
statements such as “...draw an uncomfortable bench for a
train station?, “...draw a nuclear power plant?” etc. We are
dealing with so many decisions to be made with sometimes
dramatic consequences, what if the best decision would be
not to do anything?
1. The Demolition Situation
You get called up by a client about a new project which has these super
cool park features and you say yes immediately out of joy and a flattered
ego. At the start up meeting you realise this new building will be built on
the grounds of an already existing building facing demolition.
QUIT DESIGN PUSH IT
When the project is presented you ask neutrally in front of everyone why
the old building is being torn down. Your client laughs uncomfortably and
states that it’s not modern enough to work on today’s market.
QUIT DESIGN PUSH IT
After a questioning glance the client says they
did a conservation proposal but that it didn’t
turn out in favour of the old building. You ask
why again and the other fourteen consultants
move around in their chairs out of nervousness
and ideas of relevant questions
You go back to the office and vacuum the
internet for information on the building’s
ecological footprint and put together a folder
in InDesign that explains why tearing down
existing buildings is bad for the environment.
You send it as an email to your client. Your
boss finds out.
QUIT
DESIGN
QUIT
124
RENEWAL & METAMORPHOSES
2. The Soil Situation
Your company has been running low for a while and you fear recession is
dawning. An old client calls you up and offers you to draw a masterplan
for an amazing new ecological area built on a field with top class soil for
food production
QUIT DESIGN PUSH IT
Since you know farm land is a non-renewable resource and that the
country only produces half of it’s necessary food supply you feel a bit
uneasy about the project and ask for some time to think the project
through.
You come to think of the fact that one of your employees is having a
baby in two months and another one just moved into a new apartment
and is deeply indebted. At night you dream vividly about baby bird heads
popping up and down squeaking to be fed worms. You roll around like
this until dawn before getting up and writing an answer to the client.
QUIT
DESIGN
3. The Stadium Situation
You win an international commission to design a spectacular Olympic
stadium arean in a country with dubious human rights
When the win hits the news the press starts calling you up. The
journalist asks about your thoughts on workers rights, the country’s low
scores from the Humans Rights Watch, slippery ethics and your role in
taking the project.
QUIT DESIGN PUSH IT
You answer like Steven
Hill that your position
as an architect is
to work in the spirit
of international
civilisation
You mention fleetingly
like Rem Koolhaas
that censorship in China
might as well be a
long gone memory in
fifteen years but that
the state television
building will remain
You say like Zaha
Hadid that it’s not an
architects duty to take
care of the issue that
700 migrant workers
die while building your
spots centre.
You argue like Jaques
Herzog that your stadium
has the potential
to radically transform
society and that engaging
is the best way
to have impact
DESIGN
DESIGN
DESIGN
DESIGN
FÄRGFABRIKEN OPEN STUDIO 125
A CARTOGRAPHY OF
THE ANTHROPOCENE
PROJECT BY ANDRES VILLARREAL In the current historical moment we witness an immense increase in so-called climate angst
in conjunction with climate crisis awareness, yet people feel a lack of any fruitful means of
combating it. What are the current outlets for this great force of anxiety and will to action and
are they the right ones? Can capital be seen? How do you map the unmappable and is it possible
to make the mesh of invisible global power structures, networks and flows of capital visible or
imagined? What are the individual components that comprise the issue of climate change? A
cognitive map of the so-called Age of Humans.
127
IT’S ALL ABOUT BO’S NEGS YO
[2019-05-20, 19:38:12]
Bo:
i added it now.
[2019-05-20, 19:38:58]
Matthew:
Cool
[2019-05-20, 19:39:18]
Bo:
it's huge
[2019-05-20, 19:39:34]
Matthew:
Haha, I'm sure it is
[2019-05-20, 19:39:43]
Bo: i didn't include media.
[2019-05-20, 19:39:51]
Matthew:
I'll see what I can do with
it
[2019-05-20, 19:46:31]
Bo:
oh this is the public chat
[2019-05-20, 20:00:44]
Carlota:
[2019-05-20, 20:01:21]
Carlota:
Kudos to being twelve again
[2019-05-20, 20:08:36]
Matthew:
Hahaha
[2019-05-20, 20:35:26]
Bo:
hahaha!
[2019-05-20, 21:27:06]
Justinas:
phew, I'm almost back with
you. Sorry for dropping out
so long. Coming on friday,
eager to help any team. If
any luck, will stay with you
untill 2nd june.
[2019-05-20, 21:29:05]
Bo:
welcome back!
[2019-05-20, 21:30:27]
Lea:
Same here! I'm in stockholm
from today till the 1st. Next
two days around the school
and from Thursday see you all
at Fargfabriken
[2019-05-20, 21:34:28]
Matthew:
The whatsapp chat is
fantastic
[2019-05-20, 21:35:26]
Matthew:
It will be an interesting
minor narrative running
through the book
[2019-05-20, 21:37:06]
Matthew:
I found some great old school
computer fonts as well, so it
will look like the text on a
shopping receipt
[2019-05-20, 21:38:23]
Andres:
This chat is mind blowing in
all kinds of ways
[2019-05-20, 21:39:37]
Matthew:
I've only just read the first
few lines, but there is
already so much going on
[2019-05-20, 21:43:49]
Bo:
brilliant!
[2019-05-20, 21:58:44]
Vesna:
Can't wait for next episode
[2019-05-20, 22:08:39]
Jerome:
The layout and font are so
great too!!
[2019-05-21, 00:20:17]
Ana:
Hahah when you guys almost
reported my disappearance to
the police
[2019-05-21, 00:20:25]
Ana:
I think i was taking a nap
[2019-05-21, 08:03:37]
Ana:
Should we edit the Facebook
event?
[2019-05-21, 08:04:32]
Ana:
Like change pic, write open
studio in the title, and
write everybody names in the
beginning of the text?
[2019-05-21, 08:05:07]
Ana:
Cause many people won't
scroll that down
[2019-05-21, 08:06:11]
Ana:
Also are we printing posters?
[2019-05-21, 08:07:18]
Anna A:
Go for it!
[2019-05-21, 08:45:21]
Andres:
I think title is fine as
it is
[2019-05-21, 17:20:11]
Peter:
Are any of you going to the
graduation ceremony at the
Artakemie Thursday at 15:00?
I'm not sure I'll arrive on
time but if someone is going
ill find out if they are
handing out certificates
[2019-05-21, 18:10:04]
Ana:
Who has work that will be
exhibited in the open studio
space?
[2019-05-21, 18:10:35]
Ana:
We are going to make an event
that bettet articulate the
exhibition part of the open
studio
128
BO’S ESSENTIALS
[2019-05-21, 18:17:09]
Anna A:
Just make sure the events are
well conected to eachother,
people will get super
confused. But it's too much
text as it is now.
The list of people exhibiting
stuff throughout the week is
in the fb-event and schedule.
[2019-05-21, 18:17:36]
Anna A:
Are you doing another list
now? Why?
[2019-05-21, 18:18:47]
Andres:
We can link to it within that
event too
[2019-05-21, 18:19:39]
Bo:
are you making two different
fb events?
[2019-05-21, 18:19:49]
Andres:
In the fb event its ambigous
and not so clear its also
mixed
[2019-05-21, 18:19:56]
Anna A:
It seams like it...
[2019-05-21, 18:20:00]
Andres:
Everyone were doing
individual events anyway
[2019-05-21, 18:20:08]
Andres:
There are like 6 of them
already
[2019-05-21, 18:20:19]
Bo:
for what purpose?
[2019-05-21, 18:20:27]
Andres:
I dont know but people did
[2019-05-21, 18:20:39]
Andres:
For people to know whats
going on
[2019-05-21, 18:20:53]
Andres:
People are asking how what
when to come, for purpose of
clarity
[2019-05-21, 18:21:11]
Ana:
We should have a an opening
day and hour for the
exhibition part of the
program too. That's why it
would be useful to add an
event for that
[2019-05-21, 18:21:46]
Bo:
sums up facebook perfectly
[2019-05-21, 18:22:46]
Andres:
It makes same sense or even
more sense than individual
events that everyone did, so
shouldnt be a problem to make
a clear joint event right
[2019-05-21, 18:24:13]
Anna R:
Could we make the existing
event clearer? I thought that
was the joint event?
[2019-05-21, 18:25:09]
Ana:
But you did your own event
already
[2019-05-21, 18:27:45]
Anna A:
It's different to make an
individual event to share
specific info about that
happening than to split the
whole group into two events.
Maybe someone could try to
give the event some love and
time to make it better. Only
titels? No info for exempel.
And then links could be added
with more info about the
specific projects.
[2019-05-21, 18:28:04]
Anna A: I agree that it is
weird not to have one place
with all info..
[2019-05-21, 18:28:30]
Anna A: At least at one
place.. maybe R-Lab blog is
better. I dont know.
[2019-05-21, 18:29:24]
Ana: The people exhibiting
or having objects in the
space, lets meet on Thrusday
at 11 am at fargfabriken
and discuss it live. If you
cannot join we can do skype!
[2019-05-21, 18:30:35]
Bo:
i work then
[2019-05-21, 18:31:49]
Andres:
I didnt do an individual
event because that just
seems more weird imo but the
current event is confusing,
we will look at it now and
see what can be changed
[2019-05-21, 18:34:10]
Bo:
is anyone there tomorrow
afternoon?
[2019-05-21, 18:36:10]
Anna A: But if the thing
needs some explenation and
more text is out of the
question it is not weird to
have a link to more info on
the jointpage, if that is to
another event or individual
blog or whatever. But to
split the event in two is
weird. Hahaha, ok just
different views on what is
weird and not
[2019-05-21, 18:37:24]
Andres:
No one said splitting
anything
WHATSAPP GROUP CHAT TRANSCRIPT. MAY 2019
STOCKHOLM 129
IT’S ALL ABOUT BO’S NEGS YO
130
BO’S ESSENTIALS
WHATSAPP GROUP CHAT IMAGES. MAY 2019
STOCKHOLM
131
Woman, Native, Other:
Making Friends with Trinh
T Minh Ha
This arpentage workshop considered
doing research and practicing
friendship in public as a political
act. We aimed to explore friendship
as a lived condition, wherein one
befriends ideas and issues as well
as people, and which has its own
responsibilities and demands. We
also wanted to bring attention to the
issue that knowledge production is
always situated and it is always the
result of a series of interactions and
inspirations between people, not the
work of a single author. Focusing
on decolonial feminisms and the
power of form and structure, we all
met Trinh T. Minh-ha’s seminal book
‘Woman, Native, Other: Writing
Postcoloniality and Feminism’.
We explicitly banned any type of
sound recording to the enable
intimacy and freedom of the
participants. Instead, a live text was
produced alongside the session,
our words, thoughts and questions
chorally woven together alongside
Minh-ha’s.
What’s an arpentage?
Arpentage is a tactic of collective
reading and annotation that has its
origins in popular culture. it consists
ARPENTAGE
of chopping up a book, reading it
together and reassembling it through
voice and interaction. The story has
it that it was developed by factory
workers in the newly industrialised
France, who wanted to read Marx’s
Kapital and become emancipated
– but simply didn’t have the time.
Today, we may be living in another
kind of immaterial factory- yet, like
our factory worker counterparts,
as cultural workers (projectarians?)
working under the rhythms of
constant deadlines, accelerated
capitalism and exhausting affective
labour, we simply do not have the
time, either. We are constantly
asked to produce and reproduce, to
smile and continue, no matter the
topic. But how to cope? Through
this session, we ask ourselves: could
chopping up a book, reading it bit by
bit, and understanding it through
everybody else’s eyes make some
sort of change?
Participants: Anna Jakobsson,
Matthew Ashton, Lea Vene, Vesna
Rohacek, Orestis Nikolaidis, Peter
Lang, Juanma González, Anamaya
Farthing-Kohl, Ana Barata Martins,
Andrés Villareal
PROJECT BY CARLOTA MIR (WITH ENRICO FLORIDDIA)
1. Image: Orestis Nikolaidis
PROJECTS 133
A live text by Carlota Mir
31.05.2019
1. Conversations held in the
minutes previous to meeting Trinh
T Minh Ha
Feelings, models, not fitting, class
Difficulty to categorise
Realising your heterosexuality
before preschool
I asked her out and she said no
We were two years old
Being a woman and queer versus
being white and middle-class
Speaking English and not being
asked
Not being asked as a tool
Not passing as white for the
first time in Sweden
Controls in the metro in France, it's
usually racialised people who get
checked
Talking about all the categories is
difficult
Not fitting in the categories,
primary school
The Colonial past of Australia,
history is written by the winners, by
those in power
We are both male and white, we
are all white
Moving to Spain, meeting feminism,
looking back on your childhood
experiences and reading them in a
different way
The power of jokes, banter and the
discomfort of positioning myself at
either ends of the spectrum
2 – Making Friends with Trinh T
Minh Ha
Story
Consciousness rising
I will tell you something, stories
are everything we have
How does the west look at other
nations?
I’m tired of being blamed for my
ancestors mistakes
But you should be blamed
because blood became your
privilege
How do we deal with that guilt?
Guilt responsibility
Being an author as a woman of
colour one must learn to forget
one's self
The minorities voice is always
personal, the authorities voice is
always impersonal
The illusion of a single message
Her sense of the story overflows
the boundaries of patriarchal time
and truth
How do we write from the womb?
Childbirth and writing
Writing as bodily feelings
Links between writing and
translation as a female process of
writing
134
CARLOTA MIR
Men don’t translate they create,
translation must be seamless it
must be invisible just like social
reproduction
Translation, metamorphosis and
changed meanings
What is the role of the image
breaking down the binary in the
image disruption editing duration.
She is using ideas about film in the
process of book writing, translating
film into writing
This has nothing to do with the
book, it's something that came
to mind on foot on horseback on
motorbike
Watch waiting how do you position
your body?
The right to interfere, to change the
imposed choreographies
Which kind of gestures are we
forced to choreograph as people?
How are we oppressed and how do
we meet?
Vietnamese squatters free bench
who tells the story?
What constitutes these early
storytelling origins?
There could be memories of women
Of course the child's story
represents fantasy and the adult
manipulates the story for the child
to understand the world they live in
Sexual parts where stories
originate in the mouth or in the
ears
Sexual organs and organs of
transmission
Weaving stories
Witching figures and the woman
as warrior
The story will happen that's
ominous but you can't stop the
story from being told
Tongue tie in order to not be tongue
tied they cut your tongue in order to
untie it and tell a story
Refuse well-behaved writing
following the norms
Stone language art of the
masses
How is writing architecture or art
liberating and how do we follow
norms in order to be recognised?
The guilt, women are being
described as thieves
Being able to read or write for a
woman equals to stealing a man's
culture, his comfort discomfort and
guilt in order to be heard
The feminine as feeling not as
rationality
Words and bodily function
Closure and openness are one
ongoing process
We do not have bodies, we are
our bodies
Validating feeling death, like life, is a
process
The author is created through the
text
PROJECTS 135
The story that tells the story
Language and difference and thirdworld
women
What is your motivation for
reading this book?
Difference as a mutual responsibility
Ideologies of separation
Does a genderless society
reproduce unidirectional
patterns?
Reproducing gender, reproducing
sex as convenient mythologies
convenient for imperialist societies
Reproducing gender norms
as cultural preservation and
preservation of virtuosity
The house is a place where
culture can exist outside of
capitalism, or is it really?
Perhaps you are not a woman
otherwise you will know the latter to
be false
Fear of losing use of language
Losing and winning, loss of privilege
through language as transformation
An idea is a concentric universe
You become one or another
Story-writing becomes history
where does truth come into it?
Kinship.Silence as a refusal to
partake in the story
My silence goes unheard, unnoticed
what should we do?
I don't want to be part of this way
of telling a story and writing history
anymore
Personal experience of silence as a
salutary lesson
Silence as a form of action
Why is silence not brave?
Do the masses become masses by
themselves or are they the result of
a theoretical and practical operation
of massification?
How do we practice that active
silence?
Silence and listening is an active
practice for men who want to be
feminists
We need to make a network of
people who practice active silence
Silence as trauma we need silence
We are talking so much when you
are silent it speaks, when you speak
it is silent
On how to make something
speak without speaking yourself
Reducing the male ego of the
author is finding a way for the text
to speak without the author
Can the text ever be separated
from the ego of the author?
A lot of voices are so tiny that we
don't hear them, how do we make
space for the little voices?
We are currently responsible for
making society, how do we amplify
these little spaces?
How do these voices take place?
There are these stories that need
136
CARLOTA MIR
2. Image: Peter Lang
to be told in the same way the wind
goes blowing across the mesa
One of the most political things a
white male can do is be silent.This
is a beautiful act of making space
Silence doesn't mean you're not
listening
What would happen if we all
stopped talking? we would hear
thousands of things?
The choir is where everybody sings
together
I should shut up more and that's
clear active listening is a meaningful
practice
Silence as things that are
impossible to talk about
How to talk about the
impossible?
PROJECTS 137
12.56
Pursuing perfection, swimming laps, counting them.
Nothing will happen.
PROJECT BY VICTORIA VAN KAN
The following series of photographs were
taken from Umeå’s central swimming pool,
Navet (The Hub). The pool is located along
the central axis of the city, one block away
from the Utopia shopping mall and aligned
with the main bus station. It functions as an
indispensable public space for the city.
PROJECTS 139
144 VICTORIA VAN KAN
PROJECTS
145
FOR THE FIRST TIME
OUR WORLD 1
What it takes is to let go. To let go and rely on the one thing
one can know for certain: that time is constantly passing,
a continuum that does not let itself be stopped by either
burdensome pasts or anxiogenic predictions of the future.
To let go is not equal to become passive and listless. To
let go is to be receptive. To pay attention and be aware of
one’s surroundings. Aware of impressions from the present
as they meld with previous experiences. The direct material
surroundings are transformed through the amalgam with
memories into an imaginary image. The individual experience
is unique, and the encounter between one’s self and the world
is finely-tuned through imagination. It offers the possibility of
dwelling poetically 2 as well as experiencing the world as if
for the first time 3 . My study has been an immersive one,
where I have let myself submerge into the depths of poetic
imagination – poetic reverie. What I search lies deep down.
Embedded and over-layered. But to actively search is futile; to
focus makes the goal slip away.
There is a poetic quality to being in the world. Possibly a basic
trait to our being, though one that is easily neglected. Given
that basic needs for survival and living are covered, it should
not cause controversy to regard it as a potential key to wellbeing.
Our being in the world is a dynamic relationship between
our surroundings, spaces and perpetually changing societies.
It is a constant maneuvering of perception, the handling of
stimuli, the composition of perceptions of direct surroundings
with memories of the past, shaping the movement into the
unpredictable future.
1. Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space (New York: Penguin Books, 1958)
2. The text ’Poetically Man Dwells’ by Martin Heidegger was first presented in a lecture in 1951.
3. Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space (New York: Penguin Books, 1958)
PROJECT BY ANNA RISELL
I have turned to daydreaming as to find a mode through
which one could find clues to future scenarios. Daydreaming
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4. Pallasmaa, J. The Architecture of Image – Existential Space in Cinema (Helsinki: Rakennustieto Publishing, 2007)
5. Ibid
– reverie – as a state of presence where one allows oneself
to submerge through layers of space, to fall back into
memory, and to access the multi-fold of a certain place. I have
investigated reverie as a means of seeking out the marvelous
in everyday life, as a means of emancipating imagination 4 . An
investigation of poetic images to stir our sense of being in the
world and in relation to visions of the future. I have tested it
as an antidote to images of catastrophe, a way of responding
to crisis without generating more crisis.
Sensitizing the Boundary Between Ourselves and the World 5
The room has two windows. The ventilating system of the
building is wrecked, making it impossible to keep the openings
of the room shut. Both of the windows are kept ajar, through
them not only fresh air flows, but also sounds of the vicinity
seeps in. An industrial area, rusty and run down, the near-by
water attracts seabirds and a breeze. In occasional ruptures
the exterior enters the room.
The room houses a video piece, one among several other
installations. The piece is a composition of sequences of moving
images, and it has served as a means of investigating the
experience and perception of everyday places as a source for
poetic reverie. The quest is performed through a condensed
stream of recurring images, each the foundation of a unique
experience. The compact sequence of more or less apart –
nevertheless familiar – images are in this sense encouraging
new, unexpected scenes to appear in the spectators mind.
The images appear along with the concrete sound of the
places they represent. Gradually several soundscapes
are over-layered, and ultimately also the visual images are
fused. An extreme version of the ordinary. The composition
intermingling with the images invites to look beyond the
apparent, to be attuned to our expanded awareness, bringing
forth a new world. Brought together, these images and sounds
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suggests the inherent source of daydreaming in ordinary
places, open to inhabiting and imagination. An appreciation
of the presence of remembered places is significant for the
perception of the present one. A sound, a scent, a shape in
the present triggers a perhaps long lost memory of a place.
These perceptions and associations accompanies the space
I presently experience and composes a whole experience and
atmosphere. I carry this sensation with me, thus shaping the
way in which I connect to that particular place, how I receive
places to come, as well as how I envisage the future.
Back in the room. One condition for the installations within
the room, is the presence and the closeness to one another.
The reception of the video is thus altered depending on the
interaction with the rest of the space; a remarkable and
unavoidable factor, where an unpredictable outcome is the
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only certain aspect. Thus, the piece receives an additional
layer from the room itself and its elements. Movements and
developments in the other installations are noticed within the
sphere of the video piece, in a positive way. Furthermore, a
big white tarp is supporting the video; a figure hard to pass
by without noticing. The tarp also features a performative
quality of being foldable, reshapeable, movable, stowable. For
that reason, interaction with the tarp is encouraged by me.
Although, since the material is sounding, it entails a particular
resistance. By handling the tarp, the room as well as the
video piece receive a distinct additional layer of sound. In its
presence, the tarp has a capacity to create a rupture in the
space. A familiar structure introduced to a new context, its
meaning and purpose altered accordingly. A rupture that
halts the visitor, presenting her to something irrational and
imperfect, activating her imagination. Inviting her to search
within, and through imagination create a complete experience
of the video, and not least, the room.
In Defense of Felicitous Space
In an otherwise changing world, the repetition of the
quotidian and its recurring nature gives a sense of security
and predictability. The stratum of functions and uses of the
built environment tells a story of what has been, and at the
same time, it indicates the place’s ability to evolve over time,
to not get stuck, outdated and useless. To let an existing
structure remain as the foundation for the next, to let new
talents inhabit the place, to perceive transition as grounding.
Traces of the former provides the present with a sense of
continuity and rootedness, a paradoxical relationship of
simultaneous development and permanence. Contradictions
rests in the interconnections, the irrational, although obvious.
An irrationality that invites imagination to root, and triggers
the dreaming mind. A dynamic that make up for the quotidian
to become the foundation for the extraordinary.
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ANNA RISELL
To surrealist Robert Desnos ‘the marvelous is the supreme
goal of the human mind’. He approaches the ordinary physical
structures that surround us in our everyday lives as a source
which he could tap into in order to seize the traces of the
historical unconscious of the cityscape. Within the layers of
the spaces of Marais, Paris, he encounters the echoes of its
former inhabitants, which fused with his unconscious mind
serve his listeners and readers with marvels and awe. 6
“If I walk here at night,
at night in these streets,
I hear the people –
it feels like you can hear the people
who walked here, perhaps in the ‘20s, ‘30s,
and even longer back.” 7
This depiction is given by an inhabitant in 1980’s Haga,
Gothenburg. It promotes a similar sense of connection as in
the works of Desnos, suggesting the human value of space
that may be grasped, which people unite in defense of. Haga
being one of the city districts in Gothenburg that during the
sixties and seventies were partly or completely demolished
as a result of the urban renewal paradigm of that time. The
force of industrialization and the insensitivity of modernist
master plans to human subtleties did not perceive the past
inhabitants voices recorded in the façades. The image of
poverty, overcrowding, and sanitary standards reminding of
the 19th century were according to Sven Markelius and his
fellows to be conquered. 8 Conquered through obliteration
of its built structures. Such were the policies towards a
welfare state in which any physical trace of poor working
class conditions were assumed to assassinate visions of a
prosperous future. An approach in complete opposition to
the richness of meaning 9 that is created through successive
over-layering.
6. Jourwalis. (2014, December 13). Haga – Stadsdel i förvandling [Video File]. Retrieved from www.youtube.com
7. Conley, K. Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous of Everyday Life. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003)
8. Asplund, G., Gahn, W., Markelius, S., Paulsson, G., Sundahl, E., Åhrén, U. Acceptera (Stockholm: Tidens förlag, 1931)
9. Venturi, R. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Second edition. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977)
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10. Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Reverie. Childhood, Language and the Cosmos (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960)
For the World of Worlds 10
Different times and tendencies are embodied in the built and
shaped; this allows one to read the generation of the place up
until the present, to understand society, to understand one’s
own development. Gaps and unexpected connections interrupt
our stride and invite imagination to take root. What creates
the image of the built, to a high degree consists of invisible
components. Social relations, meanderings of society, much
more, have an impact. Openness to change does not oppose
rootedness in the past; it is rather motivated by it. To put the
present in relation to what has been gives an understanding of
the continuum we exist in. I have searched within the ordinary
to find places which inspire daydreaming. A search in which I
have regarded an active perception of space as fundamental
for reverie. This has opened up for seemingly insignificant
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places to hold treasures of poetic imagery, and conditions
for hopeful atmospheres. Ordinary places, the backdrop of
the quotidian, leaves us conscious or unconscious of their
sensory and mental impact on us. Upon returning, each time
is a different experience, changing with the reverberations of
previous encounters of that particular place, or other, lingering
still. Thus, the moment of returning could be perceived as the
multi-layered result of several events and images, building up
for the creation of daydreams of possible future realities. Our
presence and perception being the interstitching medium.
Being sensitive to stimuli through this continuous presence
in space, creates conditions for one to build rapport with a
place. We appreciate ourselves as part of that space, thus
finding strength to defend it against adverse forces, motivated
by causes beyond physical appearance.
Turning to daydreaming, and encouraging the activation of
the imaginative mind, might seem a subtle act. This act is
rooted in a reaction to the time we live in, when reports of
the present and forecasts of the future strike a bleak tone.
I turn to daydreaming as a means of not getting caught in
a sense of despair. By doing this – not falling into passivity
or ignorance – I rather search for remedy and the key to
envisage a positive continuation to the way we live now. Or
be it to the aftermath of the probable disaster catastrophe
collapse, somehow paradigm shifting event, that might occur,
and fundamentally change our society as we know it.
***
Images: Stills from “For the First Time Our World” (2019), 12’44”
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21ST CENTURY ICON
Myths take their origins from what humans cannot explain. In
the late 50s, Roland Barthes tried to define modern myths in
an industrialized society less dominated by religion. He found
modern myths in narratives of everything from technological
development and red wine to wrestling and Einstein’s
brain. What if Roland Barthes would have written his book
Mythologies in the age of the internet?
PROJECT BY JÉRÔME MALPEL
After visiting the fascinating Museum of Cosmonautics in
Moscow, I couldn’t stop wondering, how does a country build
its own mythology, almost from scratch, leaving aside old
beliefs and religions, to put all faith into science and space
exploration?
The Soviet cosmonaut became a modern hero in the 1930s.
As the communist regime promoted state atheism, the
cosmonaut replaced the angel as a Christmas tree decoration
and the star of Bethlehem was swapped for the red communist
star at the top of the tree. Proudly, people would decorate
their homes in homage of the men and women, elevating the
country by making it into space. The popularity of the space
themed Christmas decorations reached a high point during
the cold war era of the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1959, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visited a corn
farm in America, he was so impressed by the production of
corn that he brought home some knowledge from the collective
farms of Iowa to start rebuilding the farming communities in
the Soviet Union.
1, (Opposite) Proposal for an icon
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Back home, the communist regime had faced some
uncertainties as the development models in place since Stalin
were showing some limits, and had started a long period of
stagnation. Khrushchev needed symbols for the people to
believe in a brighter future, so the corncob became a symbol
of the Soviet economy trying to reconstruct itself.
Naturally, it also became a Christmas tree ornament next
to the heroic cosmonaut. The corncob and other symbols of
agriculture are also visible on building ornaments, such as
the Pavilion of Agriculture in the All-Russia Exhibition Centre in
Moscow, just next to The Museum of Cosmonautics.
Is it precisely when a society is heading towards uncertainty
that it needs to build up a new form of belief system? Do we
need to be reassured that everything is alright by a selection
of imagery and visual content?
The religious icon has traditionally been a way to visualize
Christian mythologies. As an experiment, I wanted to explore
what a modern day icon could look like. We document, edit,
share, and react to visual content all day long. What is the
visual material that would be able to tell the myths of an era
where images are at the very center of our culture? Together
with the visitors at Färgfabriken, I wanted to create an image
that uses the traditional codes of the religious icon but with
a reinvented content. During the Open Studio exhibition, an
interactive workshop was presented to the public to create an
icon for the 21st century. Pinned to a board on the wall was
an A1 size image forming a base for the icon. The participants
were invited to place visual elements printed out from Time
Magazine.
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JÉRÔME MALPEL
2.The Museum of Cosmonautics.
(May 2019)
3. Picture of a cosmonaut Christmas tree
ornament.
4. Detail of a facade in the All Russian
exhibition center, pavilion of agriculture.
(May 2019)
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5B.
5C.
5A.
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JÉRÔME MALPEL
5D. 5E.
5. Elements for the background
A satellite picture of the eye of Hurricane Florence (5D) is the first element on the bottom.
Above it, a landscape taken from the latest picture of Mars from the Nasa (5A) is distorted to
create two vanishing points outside the image. Flying over, two different views of the planet Mars,
seen from a telescope (5C). A plan of a shelter for billionaires (5E) is set in the center, with its
large swimming pool and wine cellars. The background texture comes from an old map of the
Tolbachinski volcano in the Kamchatka peninsula (5B), edited in 1952 in USSR.
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Each year, Time Magazine publishes a list of the 25 best
inventions from new technologies and everyday objects, but
also strange and random things intended to make the world
better, or at least easier. The magazine also publishes the
list of the most influential people of the year, in other words,
our contemporary heroes. What if we use the heroes and
inventions of our time as visual elements for an icon in order
to reflect on our current belief system?
By an act of “re-medievalization”, several scenarios could be
depicted and freely evolve along the two weeks of the Open
studio. In the end, the icon illustrated a vision of our world,
where our heroes and villains punctuate our everyday life with
stories, dreams and actions.
The new image uses the traditional codes of the religious
icon:
• Use of reverse perspectives; to bring the focus to the
center of the image where the key event is displayed and
highlighted
• Composition structured under an arc in the lower middle
part, from the Earthly world to the Heavens on the top.
• Events freely displayed that can be simultaneously
represented and interpreted (death, ascension, grieving…)
• Use of gold color in the background.
***
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JÉRÔME MALPEL
6. Icon of the Last Judgment
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The blessed cultural ages of eternity
“Happy Times!”
THE PAST
THE FUTURE
Dark apocalyptic ages
“We´re all gona die!”
THE WAVE OF REAL FANTASY
“In altered states of consciousness this new perception of
the world becomes dominant and compelling. It completely
overrides the everyday illusion of Newtonian reality, where
we seem to be “skin-encapsulated egos” existing in a world
of separate beings and objects”
PROJECT BY GUSTAV KARLSSON
– Stanislav Grof, The Holotropic Mind 1
There have of course been “happy” and optimistic periods
between the darker ages in human history. Hunter-gatherers,
for instance, were probably never worrying about tomorrow.
Most likely they enjoyed life one hundred percent carpe diem
- finding meaning through nut-gathering and in a big variety of
now forgotten ascetic lifestyles. It’s easy to admit it’s a little
sad that those happy times are gone, never to come back.
But also since we started to spend more time thinking of
the future there’s been periods with strong belief in eternal
progress (as today within certain bubbles in some parts of the
physical and digital world). As soon as myths about apocalypse
decreased in popularity myths about eternal growth have
taken its place. It’s somehow easy to ignore these periods of
pure optimism, regardless of whether the future later told us
that the happiness was well founded or not – felt feelings are
real when they are felt no matter what. This insight gives us
an opportunity to simply zoom out and disconnect from our
individual conceptions and assess whether these conceptions
are confirmed through feelings evoked by science or if they
just are fantasies.
What remains when the peeling process is over is a real
feeling, felt in the present moment - based on a notion that
1. Stanislav Grof The Holotropic Mind (San Francisco: Harper, 1993). pp.91
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space (and the perception of the same) seems to change
over time (namaste). Depending on purpose these nice
experiences of perceptual moments contribute by influencing
worldviews as more or less optimistic. This volatile evaluation
in perception occurs regardless of which mixture of facts
and fantasies the conceptions sprout from - so does the
consequences the conceptions have on the physical and
psychological whole – here and there, in the past, present
and future. These real and readable consequences color
at the same time the perception of the same realities they
render from, which makes the balance of reality and fantasy
also disrupt and morph into a wobbly green wave of slime - it´s
a nice complex metaphysical confusion.
Stanislav Grof The Holotropic Mind (San Francisco: Harper, 1993). pp.5
In the Newtonian world - the perceptual process of evoking
feelings from conceptions (or the other way around) is
very much an individual process within one single person’s
forehead, if you look at the experience from a scientific or
clinical point of view. But like the Czech psychiatrist Stanislav
Grof puts it in his book The Holotropic Mind - “Up to now,
Newtonian science has been responsible for creating a very
limited view of human beings and their potentials” 2 - the
old modern Newtonian way of perceiving could also be a
perceptual paradigm actually preventing the bright futures
of the collective from dispersing the dark apocalyptic cloud
on the horizon(!) Taking a non-collectivist perspective on
consciousness is difficult, even though we’re living in the
most individualistic of times. It’s maybe not even possible or
necessary to make a separation, since human beings have
always been a social creature interacting with one another –
thinking and learning collectively through cultures and shared
dreams (of which the Internet is a distinct example). With this
said - still the opposite as influence from one single person’s
conceptions of the bigger whole is not to be neglected, think
of Gandhi or Greta Thunberg for instance.
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Philosophies and belief systems that somehow deal with
mythologies associated with concepts similar to a collective
consciousness go way back across all human history. With a
concentration towards eastern traditions where concepts of
the individual soul as part of a bigger whole influence all aspects
of life. To give a fair abstract on this topic, and to also put it
in a context of western urban design traditions, would result
in not just one but several books, so I stop there for now. The
term “collective consciousness” though was first coined from
a modern western perspective by the French sociologist and
philosopher Émile Durkheim in his book The Division of Labour
in Society (1893). 3 It has been argued whether perception or
consciousness is the best word to use, since the French word
conscience means both “consciousness” and “perception” 4 .
Regardless which one is the most suitable to use in this text
(I try to use both equally often) - since Durkheim (among other
social thinkers at the time, Marx for instance) sociology has
evolved into a broad range of mythologies which all somehow
work within a framework that embraced the idea of the
collective.
Regardless of which methodology we use for visualizing the
complexity of evolving social and cultural phenomenon - The
more individuals added to the field of view, the clearer the
tendency and importance of a single collective consciousness
appear. Another important emphasizer than quantity is time,
the more we zoom out over a long period of time, the more
each single individual disappears in the midst of the crowd he
or she belongs to. This collective perception can be illustrated
as a waveform with the feeling concerning the big question of
where we’re heading oscillating over time.
On one hand the collective has an optimistic and strong belief in
eternal development and progress, and on the other hand the
overall view is a feeling of depression and despair - associated
with dark and apocalyptic ages. The tension between the two
3. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (First published in 1893)
4. Wikipedia on Collective consciousness. (Accessed 2019) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_consciousness
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feelings associated with the two main beliefs (that also are
the two main axes) - optimism & pessimism – unfolds a wavy
shape as time floats by – The Wave of Real Fantasy.
The “real” part of the wave is conceptions based on actual
measured data of what the major collective understand as
real facts or truths – such as knowledge from measured
emissions from greenhouse gases, the polar ice that melts,
the increasing number of people suffering from stress-related
diseases, democracy failing and so on. The fantasy part
of the wave is based on the collective interpretation of the
same “real” data - at the same time as it also shapes the
conceptions of the “real” data - as expressed through myths,
rituals and dreams etc. The wave points out a forecast,
a direction of either up or down. The two waves coexist
and reinforce each other - containing billions of individual
perspectives, dreams, memories and conceptions as part of
the whole. The wave seems to oscillate regardless even of
how accurate a future prediction turned out to be in the end.
The Internet’s emphasizing effect has made the wave-length
shorter, as has its ability to soften the border between reality
and fantasy. A high level of realness is simply not on top of
the list anymore – real felt feeling associated with an imagined
(or real) conception regarding development in the present
moment is. (See Fig. A)
At some points all conceptions from all individuals intersect
(regardless if science or fantasy evoked the feeling of
conception) – these are the special moments of very nice
presents when the thin border between real and fantasy
dissolve into a reference point in the cosmos telling us: this
is it. This unique phenomenon occurs when the big collective
dream grows bigger than the individual dream, and all space
suddenly becomes equally good - it is a rare but very pleasant
phenomena.
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GUSTAV KARLSSON
Regardless if Odin, Émile Durkheim, Bruno Latour (ANT),
Deleuze & Guattari (Rhizome), Carrie Lola or Svea Månstråle
(among others) had the most influence on today’s collective
worldview, and regardless of which level of realness the
conceptions are based on - we can possibly agree on these
three simple Real Fantasy-statements:
• The more conceptions from individuals we add to the
collective consciousness - the clearer the tendency of a
single collective consciousness appears
• The more zoomed out the observation - the clearer the
tendency of a single collective consciousness appear.
(See Fig. C)
• The clearer the collective consciousness appears - the
more part of the collective consciousness the individual
feels
The Important Unconscious Part of the Wave of Real Fantasy
The wave of real fantasy, as described above, does not give
the whole image (even though it’s a nice and clean looking
waveform). Both the individual and collective perceptual
notion are likely influenced unconsciously – through dreams
that we are unaware of, as repressed fears or as ambitions
and desires. These unconscious experiences hold important
information and it would be stupid to neglect this knowledge
about life as superstition – at least until science proves the
concept of the soul as non-existing.
In the essay “The Structure of the Unconscious” (1916) -
Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung introduced the
term collective unconsciousness. In keeping with Durkheim
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5. Carl Jung The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works Volume 8 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) pp.342
6. Actor-Network theory (Accessed 2019) www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor–network_theory
sociological conceptualization, Jung shares Durkheim’s view
of a connection between individuals. In Durkheim’s case the
connection exists as knowledge production through social
interaction, and in Jung’s case it’s the genes or some spiritual
unconscious force that also creates a bond between the
individuals as part of the collective, a bond that we’re not
yet aware of. But if we remain open to the obscured, we
get signs of it through dreams and extrasensory perceptual
experiences. As Jung describes the concept in the essay - “The
collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of
mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every
individual.”. 5 This is a statement that clearly opposes both the
traditional modern idea where everything can be explained,
as well as more post-modern views - like for instance Latour’s
concept of the Actor-Network theory, that nothing exists
outside the shifting network defined by relationships 6 - or
maybe this “nothing” depends on the definition of what a
relationship is (or could be) - and by extension: if unconscious
connections are considered an equally important part of
networks as conscious ones.
To visualize a collective perception that also includes the very
important unconscious layer is difficult, simply because it’s
part of the unknown. And even if we did know how to visualize
the unconscious, it would be part of the opposite world to the
unconscious universe it was separated from - at the same
time as the process of separation begins.
The collective unconsciousness has no boundaries
***
This text is an excerpt from the book Real Fantasy (The Humble Draft, June 2019)
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GUSTAV KARLSSON
FIGURE A.
The wave consists of two undividable parts: “Real” and “Fantasy”
FIGURE B.
One hundred conceptions observed during a short time interval of one month
FIGURE C.
All individual conceptions observed over a time interval of 1000 years.
The Collective Perception
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SPREDFABRIKEN
Spredfabriken was built during 1951-1953 and designed by
the architect Nils Tesch. The entire building is in cast-in-situ
concrete with a pillar system both inside and in the façade,
where the diagonal structure in the northern and eastern
elevations give it a distinctive industrial character. It was
commissioned by Becker’s paint company, mainly as a storage
building for the raw materials used in paint production. Some
of it was highly poisonous and explosive and this was one
of the reasons the building has a heavy structure almost
fortress-like. The structure is dimensioned to resist bomb
attacks and the basement contains a bomb shelter for 1000
people, designed to withstand nuclear bombs. It’s walls and
roof are 1,5 meters thick and contain 3 200 tons of granite
that was excavated from Katarinaberget when the Katarina
garage was constructed, also functioning as a bomb shelter
for 20 000 people.
Construction of the building was carried out in two stages, the
first one is the northern part, house 35, and the second one,
house 36, with the bomb shelter in the basement. Originally
the façade was raw concrete but in 1957 it was painted in
yellow with the pillars in grey, using Beckers own paint of
course. The concrete, or at least the cement that the building
consists of, has probably passed the Cementa depot which is
located just next door and which has been in use since the
late 1940s. At that time, the cement came from Stora Vika
cement factory near Nynäshamn.
The box-like volume and concrete facade with the visible
structure must have appeared as radical and modern in the
early 1950s in contrast to the surrounding classicist brick
factories. Its character is typical of brutalism, a tendency in
PROJECT BY GERDA PERSSON
1. (Opposite) Concrete model of Spredfabriken (1:400 scale) Image: Gerda Persson
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the history of architecture that barely existed in the 1950s
but which the building could constitute a first example of in
Sweden.
The building was used both as a warehouse and for the
production of paint. In 1951, Beckers was the first in Sweden
to launch latex-based paint. Spred was Becker's own name
for this, and the new product also made the company focus
more on selling its products directly to the private market, as
it was easy to use, quick-drying and odorless compared to the
types of paint that had existed before. In 1965, the new paint
factory was built, which connects to the southern facade of
Spredfabriken and the bomb shelter was not used any more.
In 1990, the building was linked to Nitrolack fabriken by a
corridor on level 2. Production remained in the building until
2005
In 2010 the buildings in Lövholmen were analyzed by the
Stockholm City Museum according to the classification system
used in Stockholm for the cultural heritage value of buildings
and urban environments. Spredfabriken and the other
industrial buildings were categorized as green, this means
that it has been considered to have high cultural-historical
value and to be particularly valuable from a historical, culturalhistorical,
environmental or artistic point of view.
2008 Skanska bought the property in Lövholmen from
Beckers, with the intention to turn the area into housing. Since
then they have applied for the permit to tear the building down
several times but the process has been delayed because of
the cultural heritage classification and because the whole
process of planning the area of Lövholmen has been on hold
until a new location could be found for the concrete company
Cementa. During this time, the building has been empty,
abandoned and exposed to vandalism.
172
GERDA PERSSON
2. SOUTH ELEVATION
(Demolished 1965)
3. EAST ELEVATION
4. NORTH ELEVATION
5. WEST ELEVATION
173
7. Image: Gerda Persson
6. Image: Henning Peinerud
174
GERDA PERSSON
In the plan for Lövholmen, developed by the city planning
office, it is clear that the building will be demolished along
with most of the other industrial buildings in Lövholmen. On
the Stockholm city webpage this is explained by the buildings
being empty and in bad condition. In December 2018 the city
planning board of Stockholm finally approved the application.
The building will be demolished in 2019.
***
In the fall of 2018, I developed an interest in “Spredfabriken” in Lövholmen. In May 2019 I
made a souvenir in the form of a concrete model in scale 1:400, as a memory of the building.
The model comes with an information brochure including drawings. I also made a concrete
sign that I put on the building.
NOTES:
All Information compiled by Gerda Persson
All drawings are from Stockholm city planning office archive
REFERENCES:
1. Demolition case, diary number 2018-12932, Stockholm city planning office
2. Stockholms Stad, 2017, Development plan for Lövholmen
3. Stockholms Stad, Lövholmen blir ny stadsdel (Lövholmen becomes new urban area),
www.vaxer.stockholm/projekt/lovholmen-blir-ny-stadsdel/
4. Leif Bivegård and Jonas Vikström, 2008, Becker’s color production at Lövholmen in
Stockholm, An industrial history survey, thesis project at Building and industrial heritage
education i Västmanlands län,
5. Martin Lagergren, Tyréns, Lövholmen 12 m.fl. Kulturmiljöutredning (Investigation of cultural
heritage of Lövholmen 12 et. al.), 2018
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NAVIGARE NECESSE EST,
VIVERE NON EST NECESSE
My first project at the architecture office where I work was an
accessibility signage project. Every Stockholm City school was
to be adapted to meet accessibility standards and within that
project a new program for signage was developed. My role
was to plan the sign orientation for individual schools, that is,
to choose where to put what information in order to orientate
oneself. I ended up doing this for over twenty schools and it
led me to more signage projects: some court buildings, a
historic market hall, a hospital, and even an airport.
PROJECT BY BO PILO
The buildings differed vastly in size, as you can imagine, and
spanned in age from the 17th century to a building planned to
be finished in 2025. Involuntarily I became the office signage
expert. In a company with over 500 people and many large
scale projects, that meant a lot of work, which was a good
thing in a recession, and it put me in long projects in contrast
to the usually short and more insecure interior design projects
I had expected to work with. Some colleagues felt bad for
me though, in their mind signage was more on the level of
electrical wiring when it came to designing buildings.
In many projects, signage came last or even as a separate
project afterwards, as its own thing to be added on but still
expected to adjust to the finished architecture. However,
readability, accessibility, and general principles of wayfinding
superseded the aesthetic requirements and sometimes
challenged them, often to the annoyance of the architect. Even
though the knowledge that this work required was basic to
any practicing architect - accessibility rules, an understanding
of how to orientate oneself - my colleges acted as if it was
something different and outside their comfort zone. I heard
it a few times, “you’re the only one who knows that stuff”,
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177
as if they couldn’t lead someone through a building they
themselves had planned. For an architect it was in an unusual
situation where my colleagues where being more difficult than
the client, who in my experience often understood the subject
very well. The signs - objects of information in the form of
text, pictograms, arrows, and orientation images - played an
important role in how their building would work and how its
visitors performed. They knew how signs could lead, include,
exclude, show, hide, and regulate flows of people.
My meetings with client and user representatives could
sometimes help them to better understand the building, and
the collaborative process of planning the signage was a way
for the user to gain ownership of their new work environment.
It also helped me to move from a schematic layout to more
specialised planning thanks to their thorough knowledge of
daily operations. It sometimes concerned behaviour that an
outsider would be unaware of, especially in emotionally charged
environments like court buildings and hospitals. Regulated
by discretion I had to avoid showing certain information at
points where it seemed to make sense from a wayfinding
perspective. To avoid confrontations, extra thought was put to
guide and gently separate visitors, members of a court, etc.
without losing important aspects of transparency. My favourite
situations were when information had to be avoided, when
signs where superfluous and human interaction took over. It
was as an affirmation that external automated guidance had
limits.
Signs were mainly for visitors, rather than staff. To some
extent signs filled the gap where human interaction had been
removed from a situation where it would have been expected.
To grab the visitor’s attention before they realised that they
were navigating alone, signage used signal colours, phrases
and symbols - elements that could be varied in intensity to
guide visitor behaviour on their route. To keep them moving
178
BO PILO
in the right direction and avoid jams or disorientation, signs
had to answer questions before they were asked and more
importantly reward and confirm when you were on the right
path. This was called turn-by-turn navigation, a stimulus
response strategy where the reading of an environment
played a smaller role while direction and reward were in
exaggerated focus. To be detailed, it bypassed the creation
of a cognitive map in the visitor’s hippocampus, which meant
that the building would not stay in their memory, making their
reliance on signage likely even on returning visits.
Positive reinforcement, like this, were most efficient when
distributed seemingly at random, which was inherently the
case with signage since the person being guided wasn’t sure
when to turn until a sign said so. When several simultaneously
possible directions presented themselves the anticipation of
an upcoming reward kept the visitor’s attention on signs,
ensuring their arrival at the intended destination. This created
habitual behaviour, a compulsion loop that made the visitor
susceptible to behavioural modification, they could be herded,
and conditioned with subtle rewards and punishments
towards desired outcomes. This tuning of action was useful
in environments where commercial and non-commercial
interests mixed.
Reinforcement was coordinated to detract from unwanted
emotions. For the purpose of optimised orientation and
some exceptions of controlled diversion into commerce, only
positive, strengthening, and productive actions and emotions
were promoted in the various information texts found within
the signage programs. This was of particular importance in
environments where signage controlled the behaviour of large
groups of people, where the harmony of the whole and its
capacity to move with a collective purpose had to be kept intact
in case of severe situations. Any distinction between people in
language use and symbols could undermine this. Symbols could
PROJECTS
179
trigger behaviour in ways that language could not. This explained
why despite their standardised looks, pictograms had in reality
been without an international technical standard for a long time,
due to the complexity and vastness of its subject matter.
The content, placement, and sometimes even sound of certain
key signs, like an orientation map or split-flap departure board,
were used to collect and “reset” people when they entered a
building, to make them leave negative thoughts outside and
focus on the practicalities of their visit, like finding their way.
Happy-or-not buttons gave visitors a chance to get rid of a
bad mood after a security control before entering the taxfree
zone. For safety reasons groups needed to behave in
controlled, measurable ways, in confluence. Mutual visibility
helped to produce patterns based on imitation and the visitor
surrendered and attuned to the group.
The over reliance on signage - external direction for orientation
- weakened the visitor’s memory of environments, many
used signs instead of memorising spatial information. Adults
could recall and give detailed descriptions of places from
their childhood but not remember distinguishing features
of their current workplace or commute route. The reliance
on signage prevented the build up of long-term memories. A
study of the memory habits of 6000 adults in eight European
countries found more than a third would turn first to signage
to find their way. This had serious impact on the development
of memories, because such stimulus response information
tended to be immediately forgotten. Our brains strengthened
memories each time we recalled them, and at the same
time forgot irrelevant memories that distracted us. Reward
based navigation bypassed cognitive mapping - acquiring,
coding, storing, recalling and decoding information about
locations and attributes in our spatial environment. Cognitive
maps were essential for everyday environmental behaviour
and, in a larger perspective, human survival. It was a coping
180
BO PILO
PROJECTS
181
mechanism through which we answered two basic questions
quickly and efficiently: where certain valued things were, and
how to get there from where we were. When navigating by
stimulus–response connections general aspects of spatial
relationships played a minimal role. The person knew that an
object was valued and one way of getting to it, but knowledge
of its whereabouts in relation to the location of other objects
was absent. Someone who really knew a route knew more
about that route than just the appropriate responses at
certain choice points and, because he thought ahead, was
also engaging in cognitive mapping. By cognitive mapping
you became independent of external direction, you were the
autonomous and efficacious cause of your own movements,
- an agent. Your movements were caused by you and under
your control, not by some external force. In some ways this
reunification was a process of self-decolonisation.
When I first learned to make technical
drawings by hand, it was the first year of my
bachelor, I spent evenings studying marine
navigation to get an inshore diploma. Crossconnections
between architectural drawing
and drawing sailing routes seemed inevitable,
at first on an abstract level, making
calculated lines meet for some planned
purpose, but eventually taking bearing,
reading landscape, grids, coordinates,
looking for reference points shaped my way
of thinking about space. It was during this
time I started collecting (taking) pictures of
informal meeting points, reference objects in
possible interactional networks, signs that
could imply an invisible infrastructure, things
by which to take bearing in a grid of memory.
For this text I included a selection of stools, a
water fountain, and a medusa head, all taken
in Istanbul in 2013 and 2018.
182
BO PILO
All images by Bo Pilo (Istanbul 2013 & 2018)
PROJECTS
183
1.
1. Take the map with you.
2. Go somewhere, anywhere you like.
3. Decide your current position and
direction on the map, could be anywhere
along the red lines.
4. Start to walk along the red line,
translate it as well as you can to your
own surrounding. Paths are equally
good as roads.
5. Get lost.
IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS
THROUGH CATASTROPHE
“Any old map will do” was the conclusion when a small
Hungarian military unit found their way through a snowstorm
in the Alps with the help from a map over the Pyrenees. 1
PROJECT BY ANNA ASPLIND
Can we use the map from one place or a situation to
gain new insights and understand the place we’re in or
the situation that is currently happening? To find out I
created a map of utmost symbol of catastrophe - Pompeii,
layered with the veritable aim of avoiding catastrophe - the
evacuation plan of Operation Stockholm 1961. The map
can be used to explore other places. The directions of
the evacuation plan will guide us through the networks of
Pompeii’s streets in the place we’re in at the moment. The
map is a tool to get lost, drift around the city. Is it possible
to find the miraculous through the catastrophe?
“It started in the morning with a cloud rising from the
crater. Then there came a black terrible cloud that
shot steam and fire. Shortly afterwards, the black
cloud lowered over the landscape and swept down
over the bay. Now came ash, but not yet so dense. I
looked around, a thick darkness threatened us from
behind and it rolled over the ground like a river. We
just managed to sit down by the side of the road when
it became completely dark. Not as dark as during a
cloudy night, but dark as it gets in a room when you just
blown out the light.”
A letter from Pompeii. Plinus (79 a.d)
2.(Left) Mundus Subeterraneus: Athanasius Kircher (1664)
3.(Right) Vesuvius - Athanasius Kircher
Weick, Karl E., Sensemaking in organizations, Sage, Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1995:54
1. “This incident, related by the hungarian Noble Laureate Albert Szent-Gyorti and preserved in a poem by Holub
(1977), happened during military maneuvers in Switzerland. The young lieutenant of a small Hungarian
detachment in the Alps sent a reconnaissance unit into the icy wilderness. It began to snow immediately,
snowed for 2 days, and the unit did not return. The lieutenant suffered, fearing that he had dispatched his
own people to death. But on the third day the unit came back. Where had they been? How had they made
their way? Yes, they said, we considered ourselves lost and waited for the end. And then one of us found a
map in his pocket. That calmed us down. We pitched camp, lasted out the snowstorm, and then with the
map we discovered our bearings. And here we are. The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map and had
a good look at it. He discovered to his astonishment that it was not a map of the Alps, but a map of the
Pyrenees. This incident raises the intriguing possibility that when you are lost, any old map will do.”
PROJECTS
185
4. Drifting # 2 Färgfabriken
When reaching the end of the red line we found a circle,
just like the one on the map! Next to it a hopscotch.
Is the hopscotsch archived knowledge? Is the
design and movement scores an ancient timegeographical
map over the universe? When
reading the German investigator Friedrich
Hirsch who devoted his life to study childrens
hopscotsch there is no doubt about it. The games
are transmitted from child to child with complete
faithfulness and a demand for accuracy that
otherwise can only be found in a cult. Situationist
# 5 Forgotten knowledge of the universe in the
childrens hopscotch
5. Fairy Rings
6. Calamari Rings
7. Drifting #1 Umeå
186
ANNA ASPLIND
9. Witch Rings
8. Sperm whale skin with Giant Squid sucker scars - Murray, J.
and J. Hjort (1912). The Depths of the Ocean: A General Account
of the Modern Science of Oceanography Based Large-
ly on the Scientific Researches of the Norwegian Steamer
‘Michael Sars’ in the North Atlantic
11. Hickelkasten, Hüpfspiel, Paradiesspiel,
Himmel und Hölle, Tempelhüpfen, Reise
zum Mond, Hinkekasten, Hüpfe-, Huppeoder
Hüppekästchen.
13. Bentley’s Snowflakes
10. Gurdjieff’s Enneagram can be found in the book
In search of the Miraculous, written by Russian
philosopher P. D. Ouspensky on George Gurdjieff’s
teaching of the fourth way.
14. Drawing for a Church:Francesco Di Giorgio
Martini (1439-1502)
12. Ideal Cities, from the left top corner: Filarete; Fra Giocondo; Girolamo Magi; Giorgio Vasari;
Antonio Lupicini; Daniele Barbaro; Pietro Cattaneo; Francesco di Giorgio Martini
PROJECTS
187
15. Drifting #2 Färgfabriken
“Where we do not react on myth but
truly live in it, there is no cleft between
the actual reality of perception and the
world of mythical fantasy.”
16. Evacuation plan Operation Stockholm 1961- Krigsarkivet
Ernest Cassirer in Rowe, Colin & Koetter, Fred, Collage city,
MIT Press pbk. ed., MIT, Cambridge, Mass., 1983
188 ANNA ASPLIND
17. The Naked City (1957) - Guy Debord
A psychogeographic map by the Situationists
If the architecture of fear embodies through bunkers and forts
along the nation borders, then the choreographed exercises,
controlled bodies and artefacts of the cold war can be thought
of as the time-space-geography of fear. Operation Stockholm
in 1961 is an example of this. At 06.42 on the 23d of August
a warning signal aroused 252 000 sleepy Stockholmers to
a fantastic summer day. The message in the speakers and
on the phones told Stockholm’s inhabitants to evacuate the
city immediately. The world’s biggest evacuation exercise was
a demonstration of the state’s’ ability to organize and take
care of its citizens. The event had some unexpected results.
The people saw it as an opportunity to become tourists in
the periphery of Stockholm. Local NGO’s and businesses
arranged entertainment and food for the arrivals. It became
a flourishing commercial gimmick.
PROJECTS
189
19. Operation Stockholm 1961: Aftonbladet. För vackert väder för
utrymning. 23 april 1961. Krigsarkivet
18. Evacuation plan Operation
Stockholm 1961 -
Krigsarkivet
20. Hesa Fredrik - SE. Kriget tar sikte på
civilt folk som bör lära sig att möta
faran. 1939, nr: 49 1⁄2 - Krigsarkivet
21. Futuro house. For military use outside
Söderhamn, Sweden - Fortifikationsverket
190 ANNA ASPLIND
22. Drömmen om ett torn outside Söderhamn, a participatory art project:
Anna Asplind, Orestis Nikolaidis & Guillermo Arsuaga
PROJECTS
191
23. Evacuation plan Operation Stockholm 1961 - Krigsarkivet
FAUX RED
“For a caveman, cave walls were taken for granted, and he
opposed them by painting on them and expressing his will
in opposition to nature (an expression of ‘beauty’).” 1
As in this quote from Vilelm Flussers text Bare Walls, painting
is an act of changing something given by nature (or culture),
something that is taken for granted. Colour is a holder of
aesthetic and political values which communicates subtly
or directly. Faux means imitation, fake or false and often
describes an imitation of materials such as marble and fur. The
red in the title refers to the red iron oxide pigment extracted
from the leftovers of the copper mining at Kopparberget in
Falun, Sweden. This particular red, today branded as Falu
rödfärg, 2 has caught my attention in a political climate of
increasing nationalism and conservatism. Faux Red resists
simplifications and nostalgia. Through projective explorations
it seeks to problematize colours, forms and materials in
relation to cultural and national identity and heritage.
PROJECT BY VERONICA SKEPPE
1.(Opposite) Falurädfärg/Falu red
paint depicting a brick bond, wood
cut, Veronica Skeppe, 2019
Colour as an artificial material, a material that
appears to be another, plays an important part in
Sweden’s material history. Because of the remote
northern geographical location and general poverty,
real materials have been too costly, hard to reach
and difficult to process by unskilled craftsmen.
Imitations of exclusive materials in paint has often
been the solution. 3 In this process of mimicking,
red iron oxide has a position of its own. The earliest
known examples are churches in the 1300s which
were built in local stones, covered in lime plaster
and finally transformed into a brick imitation with
the use of red and white lime paint. 4
1. Vilém Flusser, Bare Walls, The Shape of
Things A Philosophy of Design (London:
Reaktion Books, 1999) pp.78
2. www.falurodfarg.com
3. This is thoroughly described in the book Så
målade man, svenskt byggnadsmåleri från
senmedeltiden till nutid, by Karin Fridell Anter
and Henrik Wannfors, (Solna: AB Svensk
Byggtjänst, 1989)
4. De Röda Husen
PROJECTS
195
In the 1570s the Swedish King Johan III wanted to transform
the royal palace in Stockholm to a renaissance palace
enclosed in white marble with red copper roofs, precedented
in European castles. Instead of the real materials marble
and copper the King gave ordered the painting of the castle
in white chalk and the roofs in red using the pigment from
Kopparberget in Falun. 5 Image 2.
5. Karin Fridell Anter, Henrik Wannfors, Så målade man, svenskt byggnadsmåleri
från senmedeltiden till nutid (Stockholm: Svensk Byggtjänst AB, 1997) pp.64
6. Ibid.
In the 1600s wealth grew and Sweden expanded its territory.
A desire to demonstrate wealth is present in the built mansions
and palaces both in the cities and countryside. Mansions of
wealthy landowners were built in wood and painted red with greyyellow
window and portico frames to imitate brick, sandstone
or exclusive oak wood, which were used in the palaces in
Germany and Holland. Image 3. In the cities, exclusive buildings
were built in brick masonry and painted with red lime paint
and a regular brick masonry pattern were imprinted into the
paint. The facade could also be covered in plaster and painted
in red. 6 The painted image of the material is superimposed
on the materials with constructive properties and produce an
ideal copy of the underlying structure. Image 4.
Through time, the red paint is filtered through the Swedish
society, from buildings used by royalties and nobles to priests
and other officials. From city to countryside. In the 1800s
red was the dominant color of buildings in the countryside.
Cottages, barns and farmhouses were all covered in red paint.
Buildings of the wealthier classes are painted in yellowish colors
in order imitate the fancier sandstone and red is no longer
associated with wealth. The National romantic movement of
art, architecture and literature in Sweden where interested
in the historic Swedish crafts and traditions. The painter Carl
Larsson used his home, a farmhouse painted in red, and
its surrounding countryside as motives. In parallel a political
and social movement with the intention of providing the large
number of poor people with a good house, a home, grew. This
196
VERONICA SKEPPE
2. Stockholm from north, in
Civitates orbis terrarum,
fourth band, published in
Köln 1588 by Georg Braun
and Frans Hogenberg.
3. Drawing of brick building, Master Masonry
Anders Knutsson,1652, Stockholm
4. Red painted bricks with white painted
mortar lines on top of a brick wall.
PROJECTS
197
6. Cooking of Falu red paint
5. Type drawing and cost calculation of a
”egnahem” house, Torben Grut, 1905
198 VERONICA SKEPPE
is called the “Own your home movement”, Egnahemsrörelsen
in Swedish. Image 5. Large numbers of Swedes migrated to
America because of poverty and lack of opportunities and this
was a way of trying to keep people within the country. The red
cabin became a model and a symbol of the good home.
In the workshop Urban Herbarium: The Swedish Ground and
its Colours at the Open Studio at Färgfabriken, held together
with Ana Barat Martins, we wanted to reflect on what is
considered Swedish in relation to its landscape, folklore and
colours. Red paint was cooked from the traditional ingredients
for sludge paint, where flour, water and red pigment were the
main ingredients. By cooking the red paint, I wanted to learn
from the past as well as explore how it can be used differently,
as a creative practice and not only a preservation of a tradition.
In the workshop the red paint was used to imprint found
objects on a fabric. The red paint was combined with imprints
made in pigments from plants and other found objects from
around Färgfabriken. The large, collectively produced textile
can be seen as a representation of the surrounding place
of Färgfabriken. In a second experiment red pigment from
Falun was mixed with linseed-oil and with the use of stencils
applied in different figurative patterns to a stool. The rust like
colour give the stool an almost metallic impression beyond
the familiar aesthetic of a red painted cottage in the Swedish
landscape.
***
PROJECTS
199
7. (Opposite) The textile of imprints capturing the
surrounding urban landscape of the Färgfabriken area.
8. The stool with its rust like colour. Iron oxide or rust
being the main component in the Falu red pigment.
PROJECTS
201
I am trying to understand my role in this system.
Driving forces and motivations. Responsibilities and the line
of business.
The impression of the newly graduated architect that we
can change society for the better, that we have a place to
fill.
Architecture firms’ engagement in ecosystem services,
energy-plus buildings, densification and citizen dialogues.
Reality and ethics.
IF WE DON’T DO IT
SOMEONE ELSE WILL
As architects and planners we participate in construction
processes everyday, often with an attitude that what we design
will contribute to something good. Vibrant neighborhoods,
parks that enhance ecological connections, housing with
accessible public transportation that reduce our car
dependency. We draw lines on maps, chose materials and
streamline surfaces. Intrinsically interwoven with society’s
continuous machinery.
Meanwhile the climate is altered and disrupted. Construction
processes in 2016 were accountable for 21% of Sweden’s
greenhouse gas emissions. 1 Further climate effects
connected to construction derive from demolition of existing
buildings and exploitation of finite resources like natural
areas and agricultural land, 2 all common prerequisites for
architectural projects. Architectvs can work for clients with
dubious economical investments or in countries that violate
human rights. Some projects add to increased consumption
PROJECT BY SOFIA LARSSON 1. Boverket (2018) Hållbart byggande med minskad klimatpåverkan.
Boverket: www.boverket.se
2. Jordbruksverket (2013) Väsentligt samhällsintresse? Jordbruksmarken
i kommunernas fysiska planering, Jordbruksverket, Jönköping
PROJECTS
203
or transportation. Ongoing construction processes can have
social consequences like raised rents and forced moving
patterns. Land is affected by what we do, people are affected.
Most architecture assignments carry some aspect within the
fields of sustainability or ethics that are rarely displayed on
our websites or Instagram accounts.
The architecture consultant works simultaneously for the
public, the municipality, the developer, the architecture office
and ones own convictions. The mere core of the profession can
be described as the necessity of prioritizing among conflicting
interests, where housing shortages sometimes contradict the
preservation of farmland, cultural values contradict physical
accessibility, economic interests contradict the durability of
material choices and the human perception of safety can
stand against the habitat of the white-headed woodpecker.
To achieve an overview of a project’s physical and social
consequences can be challenging, and despite prospective
ethical doubts the dubious project is often accepted anyway.
Sometimes with the mindset that it would have been worse if
we were not the ones performing the task.
A consulting project is not a set deal, but it always comes
with premises from an earlier stage or decisions from a
higher authority. A comprehensive plan has been produced.
Politicians from the town council have passed the development
plan. A public hearing has been held. The developer’s profit
has been defined. Everything on the base of democracy.
Is it that simple?
PROJECTS 205
3. Östnäs, A. Arkitekterna och deras yrkesutveckling i Sverige, (Göteborg: Chalmers Tekniska Högskola, 1984)
4. Ibid. pp. 177-178. pp. 189.
5.Ibid. pp.136-137
6. Ibid pp. 26-29
With some naive frustration based on a few years working
as a landscape architect, I embarked on a journey through
the architecture world’s ideas and thoughts on sustainability,
projects and conceptions of the architect’s role. Without
having experienced recession or having been responsible for
paying wages, I have nourished a need for understanding why
projects with ethically questionable premises are accepted
by architecture offices, despite awareness of the project’s
consequences on the environment and social structures?
Society regards them as fully legal and in the process of taking
them on it is rather, depending on one’s ideological position,
the individual’s personal ethics that is challenged. How can I
be part of a project whose premises to a certain point do not
comply with my own convictions? Where do we draw the line?
Is there a line?
Ethical dilemmas are not new, nor unique to the architectural
profession. The conflict of loyalty between drawing for the public
and obeying the developer’s economic reality grew steadily at
the end of the 19th century in Sweden. 3 From a personal
relationship to the actual user of the building the client shifted
to an anonymous user during the industrialization period. 4 The
dilemma was intensified during the severe housing shortage
in the 1920s when architects’ altruistic awakening developed
together with the rest of society and the client base also shifted
from the bourgeoisie to municipal housing corporations. 5 In
the 1970’s the conflict of interest concerned issues of design,
quality and citizen participation after the Million Program’s
streamlined construction industry, 6 still relevant questions in
our times of housing shortage and an accelerated planning
process. Today climate change can be added as yet another
challenge in the tug of war between the developers, politicians
and society, between profit and climate, between the short
sighted and the long term based mindset.
206
SOFIA LARSSON
If we don’t do it someone else will?
In need of guidance on my role as an architect I started
conducting interviews. I contacted architects, landscape
architects, interior architects and city planners. Selfemployed,
employees, CEO:s and researchers within business
ethics, social psychology, philosophy and architecture. Thanks
to the participation and thoughts from the experience of the
interviewees a number of perspectives emerged.
Driving forces and motivations:
• Architecture practice’s historic dependency on power and
money.
• Responsibility, for the planet and the employees.
• Risk, social for the individual and economic for the office.
• Group psychology, moral courage and to be inconvenient.
• Tactics, choosing your battles and balancing contradicting
interests.
• Energy and awareness enough to engage in ethical issues.
• Individual driving forces, aesthetic as well as equalitybased.
• Navigation among the vast amount of information on
sustainability issues.
• Ideological convictions, impact through interaction or
alienation.
• Business strategies and platforms for reaching out
• Office atmosphere and loyalties towards the firm.
• Self perception of the vocation disconnected from reality
208 SOFIA LARSSON
I launch an hypothesis: would it facilitate the individual’s ability
to make clearer statements concerning environmental and
equality issues if the architecture office had an ethical policy?
Or a checklist for understanding what kind of project they are
accepting? Where the use perhaps would not consist of a
direct decision on taking on the project or not, but rather work
as a catalyst for discussion? To make an active assessment
of one’s possibilities for impact in every project and promote a
more active value based business strategy that involves more
people in the office?
Whether the proposition of an ethical policy was considered
by the respondents as a provocation or a benign approach
the expected approval was conspicuous by its absence. A
common policy for facilitating ethical statements as an office
was seen as either unnecessary, impossible or worth earnest
consideration, albeit ineffective.
Early in the process I realized that architects’ ethical
conceptions are more complex than something a simple
checklist can affect. That architects are difficult to unite
and that, despite our homogenous configuration, have such
different ideas on the architecture firm’s role in society. That
the most important parameter despite all good intentions
is to assure ones own office’s economic survival which
unfortunately precedes both societal and climate interests.
We need to make ourselves ambassadors of sustainability at
the same time as we are participating in processes that in
many cases produce the opposite.
We are part of society and part of the market.
Maybe that was the answer I was looking for.
It all depends on our conception of time.
***
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URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND ITS
DISCONTENTS
Or the insincere authenticity of modern life.
In the age of Trump and all the new more and more unbelievable
realities and narratives one could be forgiven for not knowing
what is true, real or dreamed up. In one sense we seem more
free than ever before to redefine stories and question the
most common and powerful narratives, in another however
our material agency seems to have been largely diminished.
But have we not in a sense always lived our lives in a realm of
constantly renegotiated narratives and reevaluations, have this
dynamic now not just become more blatant and accelerated?
And is there still not a prevalence of narratives of the powerful,
regardless of ostensible equality and lack of direct repression or
censorship? With ubiquitous big data surveillance, a constant
and oxymoronic construction of authenticity and where people
may feel as if their own thoughts were almost monitored, it
becomes ever more important to question these narratives
and suggest other alternatives.
This project investigates and questions what kind of common
narratives surround current city development and how this
influences urban daily life. Does positivist speech of growth
and prosperity sometimes enable exploitation and the erosion
of so-called consumer choices and of individual agency?
The mega-project Hudson Yards is a brand new area in New
York City, with 18 new skyscrapers built on top of a rail-yard to
a price tag of ca 25 billion dollars. This project can be said to
have hyper-gentrified an already gentrified area in the middle
of Manhattan, where many thought further development was
more or less impossible. Walking through this new area a
couple of things become evident, despite large open outdoor
PROJECT BY ANDRES VILLARREAL
1. View from atop of “The Vessel” in 2019
Photo: Andres Villarreal
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areas the premises remain curiously dead and inhospitable, it
is largely devoid of greenery and in its centre is situated a new
large shopping mall. Beside this mall there is also a large public
walkable sculpture called "The Vessel" and next to it is a structure
called "The Shed" that will host art and other spectacles and
happenings. It becomes fairly clear however that The Shed
and The Vessel both function as enablers and validators of a
project created to generate revenue and consumption rather
than to serve the publics interests in art or public communal
space. Through The Shed, contemporary art here functions
as a validator for the adjacent mall and while visiting it and The
Vessel people are also quite simply encouraged to wander into
the mall to shop. You are for example not allowed to enter The
Vessel without first securing a ticket and then having to wait
for 1 hour before one is allowed to enter, regardless of the
current amount of visitors.
Hudson Yards becomes a prime example of postmodern city
exploitation and of this newer form of city and real estate
development and and its implications for people and the
social realm. Here no expenses have been saved in terms of
architectural extravagances, yet all areas outside the shops
remain strangely uninhabitable and hostile, the only options to
sit are inside cafes inside the mall despite huge outdoor areas
that would fit perfectly as public communal space and large
void spaces inside the mall. It has already been derogatively
dubbed "Little Dubai".
Some claim we live in a new and more dynamic postmodern
world where we are more free to define and model social life to
our needs where some claim the the opposite to be the case
and would here rather like to substitute postmodernity with "the
cultural logic of late capitalism" as Fredric Jameson famously
dubbed it. The answer may very well be both these things at
the same time, yet the latter seems more likely to remain
stable than the former, and the former seems perhaps to exist
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ANDRES VILLARREAL
2. The Hudson Yards under construction in April 2017, as seen
along 11th avenue. Photo: Andres Villarreal
3. The Hudson Yards under construction in April 2019, as seen
along 11th avenue. Photo: Andres Villarreal
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more and more as an idea rather than a lived experience. As
the discursive realm may in some ways expand, although that
could also be debated, it is easy to forget that people’s access
to actual physical space is becoming scarcer. Some would
say that people as consumers have become appendages to
the generation of revenue, where personal agency has in fact
shrunk while simultaneously being narrated as having become
expanded.
This photo documentary project depicts the rapid change at
the construction site of Hudson Yards visually, as seen from the
ground. While looking monumental, progressive and vibrant on
the paper and when viewed from a distance but close up it is
rather a peculiarly dead place, both physically and emotionally.
There is very little to actually engage with here, besides going
shopping. During rapid changes like these it is easy to forget
what was before and how it looked and not the least felt. The
material transformation of the city can change not only your
visual perception, but also how you navigate the city space and
ultimately how you feel. Added to that are of course broader
consequences regarding the access to affordable housing
and public space. The pictures and perspectives serve as a
memory and as a documentation of this rapid transformation
and also simply as a reminder that once there was something
very different here where now these impenetrable silver
skyscrapers stand. Do we want a city that enables social
autonomy or one that erodes and inhibits it? The Hudson
Yards is by many already seen as a symbol for the erosion of
such autonomy.
Are there any similarities between the new hyper capitalist
construction projects such as Hudson Yards and the art world
and its current development? It is clear that the premises at
Hudson Yards don't need to serve any beneficial purposes
for "humans on the ground", much like art produced at this
stage of later modernity or capitalism do not need to have
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ANDRES VILLARREAL
any other purpose or value than as a signifier of value, where
collectors buy the works of young promising artists in bulk
hoping some of them will become famous and pay off as
investments in a similar way to stocks. And privately owned
art magazines can conduct journalism with the purpose of
maintaining the monetary value of certain products (art works)
through a discourse that disguises itself as being solely about
their intrinsic value. While both products, art, architecture/
infrastructure, could technically also serve more functionalist
or humanist purposes (and historically often have done so)
rather than strictly monetary ones, in the current historical
moment they clearly do not. But the crux is here that they at
the same time retain the pretence of doing so. While housing,
art and indeed most things in society has long been the subject
of profit, investment and speculation, such blatant decoupling
from other purposes seem to have accelerated exponentially
as of late.
One might ponder what kind of subjectivities are being created
in these environments where capital has become a so-called
automatic fetish, what kind of lived experiences become
possible and which ones impossible? What detached feelings
of alienation do such circumstances ultimately create where
idealistic purposes and functions are ostensibly and discursively
present but practically or physically very much absent? What
exactly is being internalised now, when the insincere appears
almost identical to the sincere and where it is also treated
and talked about, albeit perhaps not felt, as such? The idea
of the markets capacity for co-opting almost everything is not
new, neither is the question of the privatisation of daily life or
what type of subject this forced state of liking and internalising
insecurity and constant change creates. The question of how
to deal with this development, practically and discursively is
however an all the more urgent one to raise. Perhaps the
importance of space, both physically and mentally, should be
both remembered and rediscovered.
4. (Following page) View from atop of “The Vessel” in 2019
Photo: Andres Villarreal
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220
HEALING TREES
The belief that the forest is a healing force and that trees can
cure disease goes back to methods in Nordic folk-medicine.
The Nordic folk medicine is a tradition that is based on magic
and beliefs about supernatural beings, but also content where
experience and rational assumptions play a major role. These
cures can be traced to the Bronze Age, but the ideas had the
greatest spread at the end of the 1800s.
Throughout history, people have seen the old tree as a
connection with the ancestors, or with the world’s alpine.
In old folk-medicine a disfigured tree was believed to cure
disease or relieve pain. By transmitting the disease materially
and symbolically, the tree became the new carrier of the pain.
These trees were often associated with different types of
taboos and were believed to be able to transmit the disease
to the person who broke the taboo. 1 The physical surrounding
could also be used as a place of sacrifice where one could
leave objects (Image 2).
Soil preparation is a very old method meaning that the sick
person, usually a child, is drawn through a narrow hole (Image
3). The procedure was associated with a set of rules. It should
be carried out under absolute silence on a Thursday evening
when the moon was below, or that a penny, a linen cloth or
other belongings would be left in the tree. An interpretation
is that the child should be able to take part of the life force of
the tree and thereby be reborn. The tree became a a receiver
for human pain. 2 Protecting these trees could be crucial in
people's lives. 3 However, man’s relation to nature and its
resources has changed over time.
1.(Opposite) Rows of trees in a Swedish industrial pine plantation (Image: Åsa Agerstam)
PROJECT BY ÅSA AGERSTAM 1. Tillhagen, C. Folk Medicine (Stockholm: 1958)
2. Jorddragning. Nationalencyklopedin, band 10. (Höganäs: Bokförlaget Bra Böcker. 1993) pp.194
3. Persson, 0. Träd och människor (Stockholm: Skogsek förlag, 1977)
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2. Magical pouch, dated 1885.
(Image: Tillhagen, C. 1958. Folk
medicine. Stockholm pp.86)
3. Jorddragning: A traditional Swedish folk
medicine where a child is pulled through a
tree to recover from sickness.
(Image: Uppland 1918)
4. Plantation pine is usually harvested
before trees reach 100 years, with a
diameter that can easily be embraced
by a child. (Image: Åsa Agerstam)
Sweden is deserting landscapes. On
half of Sweden’s surface there are
quadrants of trees, planted at the
same time, of the same variety and in
straight rows. The national landscape is
currently transforming into a strict grid
architecture. Where there used to be
fields, there are now productive forests.
The tree trunks stand in endless rows,
forming a hectic rhythm where individual
trees seem to merge (Image 1). The
living forest land has been transformed
into an abstract painting. The forest
landscape undergoes the same kind of
change that the cities did in the 1960’s
in Sweden. 4
While a man may live long, the trees are
harvested in the modern forest at the
prime of their lifespan. Out in the woods,
most trees are already younger than
humans. There is hardly any sawmill in
Sweden that is prepared for coarser
logs than a child can embrace (Image
4). Throughout Sweden, untouched
forests which are home to a multitude
of species, have been transformed into
sterile monocultures where the trees
are of the same species and age. By
traveling further north, deeper into the
“periphery”, the forests are even more
brutally disassembled. 5 The Paper-mass
industry is the largest buyer of wood
from these productions.(Image 5)
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ÅSA AGERSTAM
Cultivating the trees to grow faster at the girth, they develop
more and more branches, wider annual rings and a lower
timber density. Straight trees are almost always better
than crooked. This is because it is easier for the industry to
handle them in their processes. Bends give different types
of negative fiber interference, but it is difficult to find any
disadvantages with straight wood. It is also usually better with
higher dimensions, as it will be more economical at all levels. 6
The crooked, aged and deviant has therefore no value to
exist. The diverse forest has throughout history been an
important place for humans to find comfort or hope. Taking
advantage of the opportunities that existed was natural.
The tree often symbolized their last hope. It is not difficult
to understand that a tree was believed to possess magical
powers if these severely ill people suddenly came on the road of
improvement. This value is rationalized away in current forest
industry processes when these spatial qualities are slowly
disappearing from our landscapes. The current colonization
and exploitation of resources is a result of being remote
from nature. Modernization and urbanization have made life
divided into two parts. The sense and rational belong to the
city life, and what does not fit there, relationships, feelings,
hope, spirituality, irrational things, belong to a private space
that is separated from everyday life and the platform for this
is the forest. This inner living space is threatened by the
physical processes that irrevocably inscribe themselves in the
landscape. In that sense, a disfigured tree is still a symbol for
our last hope.
5. (Following page) A Swedish pulp mill (Image: Åsa Agerstam)
4. Zaremba M. Skogen vi ärvde (Stockholm: 2012)
5. Schmitz H. Thinking Like a Mountain, (Stockholm: 2018)
6. Zaremba M. Skogen vi ärvde (Stockholm: 2012)
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226
PRESERVING A PUBLIC SPACE
“Building is the customary answer to most problems, the
demolition of a building is followed by a new superior design.
[…] Architectural authorship is measured in building objects
and subtraction exists to facilitate building.” 1
PROJECT BY BERT STOFFELS
Recently Robbrecht & Daem Architects won the competition
for the conversion of the Brussels Stock exchange into a beer
temple. The staircase (Image 1 & 2) of the Bourse was or
is symbolically, the most important public space in Brussels,
where people gathered to protest or to mourn in the case
of national tragedies. This place has now been depoliticized,
since political gathering and protest is prohibited. This fits
the plans of the Brussels government in their strategy of
commodification of the inner city to attract more tourists.
With this counterproposal I wanted to practice an urgency of
the architect to question or criticize the requested building
program. Therefore this intervention takes away materiality
from the bourse rather than adding new unnecessary
program.
Building subtraction.
‘Subtraction’ as coined by Keller Easterling could work as
a ‘designerly’ discipline in itself, a discipline that architects
should practice.
So this proposal was also a way to find out how an architecture
of subtraction could be designed. The proposal questions who
has the right to author the destruction of a building.
For this reason the proposal tries to mainly preserve the
qualities of the public space connected to the bourse and
1. (Opposite) Staircase and plinth of the Bourse. Image: Bert Stoffels.
1. Keller Easterling, Subtraction. Critical Spatial Practice 4, Edited by
Nicolas Hirsch & Markus Miessen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014)
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its symbolically loaded staircase, as a theatre of the city,
by subtracting the building up from the plinth. The winning
design for the beer temple proposes to cut out slices of the
plinth to so-to-say make the partly privatized program of the
building transparent and publicly accessible (Image 3). The
plinth of the bourse as the substructure of this type of neoclassical
architecture creates a story-high plateau to put the
superstructure on a stage and give it a prestigious appeal.
This intervention reacts on this architectural gesture of the
pretended opening up of a public plinth by subverting the
position of this plinth as a monument in itself that becomes
superstructure. A memorial to the public space that once
was there.
The model (Image 4) shows two different scenarios in time. In
summer the public plinth could become a public basin where
people can just sit next to the water or swim. In Winter the
water can be taken out so that the foundations show their
labyrinthic qualities in which people can hide from the public
eye to create a different kind of public space than the ones
we know today in Brussels’ city center.
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BERT STOFFELS
3. Render for the design of the open plinth.
Image: Robbrecht & Daem architecten.
2. Staircase and plinth of the Bourse.
Image: Bert Stoffels.
5.(Following Page) Model. Image: Bert Stoffels.
4. Birdseye view plinth of the Bourse. Image: Bert Stoffels.
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THE SUN RISES EVERY MORNING
AT THE SAME PLACE
AND SETS EVERY EVENING
AT THE OPPOSITE SIDE
« O sol aparece todas as manhãs do mesmo lado e some
- se todas as tardes do lado oposto. Chove, faz frio e
calor, “as luas” vão passando, há tempestades e nevões,
porque é assim mesmo e não pode ser de outra maneira
(…) Qualquer fenómeno é um “aviso” ou um castigo
sobrenatural. Desconhecem a explicação rudimentar e
lógica das coisas simples. A história da Humanidade,
principia e acaba, para cada um, na sua própria vida. »
Maria Lamas, “As mulheres do meu País”. (Lisboa: Actuális,
Lda.1948)
“The sun rises every morning at the same place and
sets every evening at the opposite side. It rains, it’s cold
and warm, the moon cycles keep going, there is storms
because it is like that and it can’t be in another way.
Any natural phenomena is a warning or a supernatural
punishment. They don’t know how to explain and the logic
behind simple things. The History of Humanity, begins and
ends, in each of themselves and their own lives.” ¹
This sentence by Maria Lamas is a description of a problem
that had been haunting Portugal for a long time when she
wrote about it in 1948, and unfortunately continued to be a
problem until quite recently. She was talking about Illiteracy.
PROJECT BY ANA BARATA MARTINS
1. Translation by Carlota Jérez solely of this excerpt of “As mulheres do
meu País” (Maria Lamas) for the purpose of this publication.
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In her book she talks about Illiteracy among farmers and
peasants living in the countryside, and specifically about the
life and miseries of the Portuguese women. In this quotation,
reference of a natural world is juxtaposed with the naivety of
a people dependent upon it. People that live directly from its
land and don’t know any other landscape. People that can’t
explain the world around them.
I wonder how different are we from these people? Our western
neoliberal societies valued by information and data driven
systems. How much has illiteracy changed its meaning and
relevance? How much is this quote relevant to describe us?
How illiterate am I regarding the natural world that surrounds
me? My detachment to the land scares me, to know I can’t
read the signs of its needs. That I can’t protect it and reinvent
a path that can reunite us. In the self absorbed mirror infinity
we live in the History of Humanity does really feel like it starts
in each of us and ends in our own individual lives. This couldn’t
be more real unfortunately, the delusional believe that we only
need our own selves to thrive in life.
The artwork The sun rises every morning at the same place and
sets every evening at the opposite side is composed of several
elements: a site-specific textile work close to the water near
Fargfabriken, another textile piece at the Open studio space,
and photo documentation of Årstafältet, one of the largest
ongoing real estate developments in Stockholm. The fabric
pieces are dyed with found materials and natural pigments
from Årstafältet and the quote by Lamas is imprinted on them.
This work intends to be critical towards our view of nature,
the production of knowledge and the exploitation processes
that natural areas undergo, as most accessible nature is
either man made or developed for commercial and industry
purposes.Besides the textile pieces, video documentation of
the artwork in the water was also displayed at the exhibition
space.
234
ANA BARATA MARTINS
2. 3.
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235
HERE I AM.
SO GLAD YOU ARE.
PROJECT BY JUSTINAS DŪDĖNAS
Two-dimensional creatures in Vonnegut’s “The Sirens of
Titan” have all their physical needs secured. They know no
competition, no sex, no danger. So all they do is repeat to
each other the only two phrases which exist in their language:
"Here I am, here I am, here I am” and “So glad you are, so
glad you are, so glad you are."
It resembles the operation of GPS satellites, who constantly
chirp "My name is ABC" and "Time now is 123", a chatter
which lets us know our own positions on Earth. To orient
yourself is to map your relations, distances and directions.
So I devised an internal observatory. It resides hidden in a
piece of ice, which was noticed in Umeå by the R-Lab team,
conceived as multilayered model for circular time and melted
shortly after, some day in March 2019.
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Ice block in Umeå
existed on 27 March 2019
Geological map of IO
Photo of a photo of
“Cockroach” by Valdas
Ozarinskas displayed in Vilnius
CAC 2018
Ground-plan of the Diorama
Building, London 1823
Myrrhis Odorata collected and
catalogued by Anna Asplind on
24 May 2019
The ever-changing Vista by Neil
Spiller, 2008, Junk Jet No2
Ordinary Möbius strip
R-Lab team on 27 March
2019 observing a shopping
cart in a frozen Ume river.
Diagrams of shapes of
stories by Kurt Vonnegut
Proof that a single point in
space can spin continuously
without becoming tangled
Archer fi s h
Flat Earth map.
Orlando Ferguson, 1893
240
JUSTINAS DŪDĖNAS
241
BUILDING A NEW LANDSCAPE
PROJECT BY ELENA MAZZI
During my time at R-Lab I carried out several projects linked
to water: how we use it, how we deal with it, what are the
resources we have and how much we care about it. Some
of them have the form of proper artworks and are still in
process. Meanwhile, I have decided to open up a workshop
for children and teenagers that has been performed already
in several places. The workshop, titled ‘Building a new
landscape’, intended to start from a reflection on the crisis
situations and necessities related to the daily use of water,
encouraging participants to become aware of the hidden path
that water makes in our daily lives, such as in the architecture
we live every day, among these, the one we worked at in
Stockholm; Färgfabriken.
The following images are some of the structures that have
been created by the workshop participants.
Try to guess what they are!
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243
3.
2.
244
ELENA MAZZI
4. 5.
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245
THE WORD FOR WORLD IS
ENTANGLEMENT
STEP ONE: LIVING WITH THE ILLUSION
“There are stories that help us notice, and stories that get in
our way.” 1
PROJECT BY FLORENCE TACHÉ
Day One
Between 2014 and 2018, American artist Lars Jan and the
Early Morning Opera set up a series of performances called
Holoscenes [Image 1]. Situated in public space, an aquarium
like sculpture was alternatively filled with water and drained,
while inhabited by performers conducting everyday behaviour
- getting dressed, reading a newspaper, tuning a guitar, lying
in bed, … and barely transfiguring them, never showing any
sign of distress, despair or panic.
This work is one of many that reveals our ambivalence
towards the issues around climate change: we adapt, but we
don’t really care, trusting our technical genius to get us out
of it. We are resilient, a quality that could save us, but also
makes us remain indifferent. We get lost between a kind of
apocalypse rhetoric and its complementary end-of -the-worldsalvation
promises. We are going crazy precisely because we
know something is happening, but we can’t see it nor touch it,
nor experience it. Just as if we had collective myopia.
1. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom of the end of the world. On the possibility of
life in capitalist ruins. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015)
1.(Opposite) Image from the performance Holoscenes,
by Lars Jan and the Early Morning Opera (2018)
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247
Day Two
2. See for example: A.Canavie- chanvre wallon / video ad for the development of hemp culture (2018) www.youtube.com/F1q2kYvHw30
B. Skogsnäringen driver tillväxt i världens bioekonomi / video ad by Skogsindustrierna, (2015) www.youtube.com/aSWQEZeUK6A
C. Innovationer från skogen, ett alternativ till olja och plast / video ad by Svenska Skogen, (2018) www.youtube.com/seERny80KyU
D.Svenska Skogen – Här växer framtiden / video ad by Svenska Skogen, (2017) www.youtube.com/Dl94uL96650
Wandering in Stockholm and Paris metro this past year,
here are the kind of words I got exposed to through some
commercial campaigns that advertised seemingly “innovative”
and “sustainable” productions:
This forest is where your clothes grow… infinite resource…
everything that is made from oil can be made from the forest…
this endless life cycle…can be planted over and over again…
bio economy is an economy that is not based on consumption
but on cycles…many fantastic visionaries work to develop
bioeconomy…both growth and sustainability, at the same
time…the more we cut trees the more the forest grows… 2
What is not said here is as interesting as what is promoted:
The energy and water craving processes, land use, social
and territorial conditions of these sustainable products. In
other words, the encompassing webs of connections that
link our way of life to the silent violence of accumulation by
dispossession and environmental destruction.
Such “Green” narratives do not change a single thing in the
power games that rules this world. They still set everything’s
value on need and utility. They still rely on the illusion of infinite
resources and eternal growth - on mastery and possession.
They deny the fact that we live in a world of breaks and shocks.
They perpetuate the existing forms of domination and create
new forms of control.
One powerful characteristics of this system is that it creates
both the problem and its solution, over and over, preserving
the conditions of its survival along the way. The crisis we face
requires something different in kind, not just in degree.
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FLORENCE TACHÉ
2,3,4. Stills from Innovationer från skogen: ett alternativ till olja och plast (Innovations from the forest: an alternative to oil and plastic)
Video ad by Svenska Skogen, 2018. www.youtube.com/seERny80KyU
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3. www.businessinsider.fr/us/walmart-robot-bees-farming-patent-2018-3
4. Claire Colebrook, Death of the posthuman, essays on extinction, (London: Open Humanities Press, 2014)
5. Still from NewBees -- The future is already here. A video by Greenpeace international, 2014 www.youtube/CGTNjPow3LM
Day Three
Bees were among the first species that humans ever drew
on the walls of caves - along with now mythical aurochs and
mammoths. They are about to become the first species
we think we can replace by our own little robots, branded
Walmart robots, [3] or by a feather in the hands of some
modern slaves. Their usefulness created the conditions for
their replaceability. Technology has become a lure in such a
way.
“By the end of the world, we usually mean the end of our
world. What we don’t tend to ask is who gets included in the
“we”, what it costs to attain our world, and whether we were
entitled to such a world in the first place (…) “ By asking how
we will survive into the future, by anticipating an end unless
we adapt, we repress the question of whether the survival of
what has come to be known as life is something we should
continue to admit as the only accessible option […] What is
left of the human needs to confront the absence of value.” [4]
Robot bees don’t know how to make honey and wax, do they?
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FLORENCE TACHÉ
STEP TWO : THE THINNING OF THE VEIL
“You never know what is enough
Unless you know what is more than enough.”
William Blake, Proverbs of Hell.
We have built a world for ourselves, where there is no more
other. Not anyone, not anything on Earth is entitled the
recognition of being a part of our world, of co-making it with
us. Yet the world is not a pre-constituted entity to which life
must adapt. The world is a production of the living who are
part of it. On the other hand, the world is always an artifact
of another species.
To be in the world always means to be in touch with other
species. We live in a world designed by and for other living
species. One could even say that “There is no politics between
humans, but only between species.” 5
Still, it seems that only the children in our modern globalized
westernized world are allowed a connection of some kind to
animals, through books and lore. As soon as we are becoming
adults, “fully human”, we are denied the possibility of inhabiting
the same world. Shutting down non-humans from our everyday
life is practically a rite of passage towards entering the adult
community.
When we send animals in space,
they are on their own. They
always fly the preparatory ship
and rarely return. The best way
to realize that outer space as
humanity’s possibility of survival
is a lie, is to remember that we
can’t even imagine living with
dogs up there.
6. Laika the Soviet space dog, the first
animal to orbit the earth.
Image: Wikipedia
5. Emanuele Coccia, La vie des plantes, une métaphysique du mélange (Payot/Rivages, 2016)
PROJECTS
251
Maybe we need to re-learn to pay attention to the world we live
in. The rational thought that came to dominate the world from
the 19th century is today recognized as deeply connected
with global processes of industrialization, and consequently,
global warming. Not everything can be measured by rational
systems, though. We could try and see the alligator appearing
in the flooded streets of our cities 6 like a possibility, like one of
our entanglements to the place we live in, and not just as our
worst childhood nightmare come true. 7
Science-fiction and fantasy novelist Ursula Le Guin invited us
to do so, already a few decades ago:
6. www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-47112044
7. Dieter & Ingrid Schubert, There is a crocodile under my bed, (Lemniscaat,1980)
8. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night” in Dreams must
explain themselves, The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K Le Guin, (Gollancz, 2018)
“Those who refuse to listen to dragons are probably doomed
to spend their lives acting out the nightmare of politicians. We
like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark;
and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night.” 8
STEP THREE: SEEING BEYOND THE DAMAGE:
BUILDING NEW NARRATIVES
The Sheep and the Metropolis
July 2019 : I’m joining for a day the Transhumance du Grand
Paris, a two-weeks long walk through Paris suburb with 24
sheep and their shepherds. A dozen people have joined and
we are acting like shepherd dogs, guiding the sheep through
the city. As simple an act as it is, we can quickly tell that it is
much more than a walk in summer heat with wooly animals.
In addition to questioning the place of agriculture in urbanized
areas, it also addresses territorial issues in a particular way.
Encounters. Smiles. Children and old people. Shared customs
and memories – did we know that fig tree leaves can be used
to turn the milk into cheese? Adapting both itinerary and pace,
through these familiar streets and parks, sheep walk at a
2km/h speed. Looking for water. Hacking a neighbourhood
252 FLORENCE TACHÉ
7,8. Images from Transhumance Grand Paris (July 2019). A two week walk
through Paris with 24 sheep and their shepherds.
(Image 7: Florence Taché. Image 8: Stéphane de Sacutin /AFP )
party, being offered juice – water in a children’s plastic pool
for the sheep. Talking with the shepherds, ideas emerge on
alternative ways to connect Paris with its suburbs. Why not
create a continuous network of pasture space around Paris,
allowing animals to wander from a city to another? They could
create bonds between different cities and people, as well as new
narratives and fantasies around which everyone can gather.
There are only 50 sheep in the whole metropolis today. Seeing
how efficient they are in cutting grass and hedges, but also in
making people engage with each other, I guess there could be
much more urban shepherds around Paris in the future.
PROJECTS
253
The Oysters and the Hurricane
When Henry Hudson entered New York Harbor in 1609, he
had to navigate around 220,000 acres of oyster reefs. As the
city developed, builders used oyster shells as a construction
material. They were one of the most popular street food in
the 19th century and a significant economic value for the city,
until overexploitation and a degraded water quality led to their
complete disappearance by the year 1906.
Brooklyn, 2013: A year after Hurricane Sandy, I hear about
people who have reintroduced oysters in the East River. 40
years after the Clean Water Act, New York Harbor remains
a massively degraded natural system, but oyster reefs have
the ability to transform it: they provide habitat for thousands
of marine species, filter water, and can help shield shorelines
from future storm damage.
9. Oyster and Clam Stand, New York (circa 1900).
As of June 2018, 9 active
oyster reefs (7acres), 3 floating
oyster hubs, and 27 475 800
oysters have been installed in
New York waterways. In 2035,
there should be a billion. It’s
even possible that by 2050, the
water will have regained good
enough quality for the oysters
to be considered edible. Similar
systems are to be developed in
Cape Cod and North Carolina.
Mussels have also been
implanted in the Bronx River. In
Europe, a dozen countries have
collaborated through NORA
(Native Oysters Restoration
Alliance) since 2017.
254
FLORENCE TACHÉ
We need to stop seeing the “Anthropocene” as a transient
state, when it actually is a new condition of instability and
unpredictability. We now live in a world of breaks and shocks.
Not everything will end well, and the crisis will hit some harder
than others, but we can learn to see viable places, even if they
are viable differently from what we know today. Both these
projects contradict the idea of Man as the absolute master
of his environment. Such collaborations between animals and
humans are significant examples of an integrated approach
to resiliency and proactive planning for climate change. If we
want to learn to live in damaged worlds, we need to stop
relying only on our ability to improve our technology ; we must
look for these “latent common”, temporary alliances mobilized
in a common cause, even if (and above all when) it implies
negotiating with other species. Making worlds is not just for
humans.
LANDING ON THE VOLCANO
The answers to our contemporary crisis we should not seek
in the fantasy of promising new techniques or open-toconquest
lands of outer space, when we can’t even figure how
to coexist with dogs there. We should first learn to rely on the
ground we already inhabit, to renegotiate our codependency
with our environments: the Earth is not inert but does things.
The archetypal manifestation of which are volcanoes, being
“sometimes calm, sometimes agitated” as Susan Sontag
would write. We need to learn to take this as a fact, and,
with Bruno Latour, make our priority to land on Earth. 9 Even
if it’s on a volcano.
In any case, we should not fear the disappearance of our
world, only the emergence of a world where the absence of
possibilities would be the norm. And remember: we can still
play cat’s cradle with a damaged string.
9. Bruno Latour, Où atterrir ? Comment s’orienter en politique, La Découverte, 2018.
***
PROJECTS
255
IT’S ALL ABOUT BO’S NEGS YO
256 BO’S ESSENTIALS
WHATSAPP GROUP CHAT IMAGES. 2018 - 2019
FOUND OBJECTS
257
GALLERY MOČVARA
(ZAGREB, CROATIA) IS RUNNING A THEMED
YEAR LONG PROGRAM IN 2019 ENTITLED
“COLLAPSE ON HOLD” ELABORATING THE IDEA
OF A CATASTROPHE.
This topic is not approached as necessarily dark and futuristic, but
is situated in the midst, between present and future. Fiction remains
on par with reality, marked by tensions, transformations, and new
hierarchies. Surviving in these times demands from the individuals to
revise their own attitudes, form new alliances, and overall act critically
and reflexively in relation to their past practices. This approach does
not force the complete renunciation of all that is known, but rather
articulates curiosity in the search for alternatives, reconciliation or
salvation.
Destruction of one's identity, awe for the power of nature, or giving
up on social polarization are just some of the tactics that attempt to
prevent catastrophe. Alternative scenarios that take into account local
specificities initiate a dialogue between local and foreign artists, revealing
their mutual inter-connections in times of change and uncertainty. There
are no final solutions, but merely attempts to address problems that
currently create optimism and a sense of security. This dialogue is
situated in the realm of the spiritual, virtual or speculative.
BETWEEN THE 10TH AND 16TH OF DECEMBER
2019 CURATOR LEA VENE TOGETHER WITH
R-LAB WILL TAKE OVER THE SPACES OF
GALLERY MOČVARA.
In the gallery and the surrounding suburban landscape defined by
the river Sava, they will put the collapse "on hold" and rethink new
possibilities for the coexistence of humans and architecture with
nature, ecology and other species.
www.g-mk.hr
THE RESEARCH AND DESIGN
THINK TANK YOU NEED
TO OUTLIVE THE
NORDIC HAZARDLANDS
LABLAB
LABLAB is a research and design think tank dedicated to the understanding of the
social, ecological and spatial transformations of the Nordic and Baltic Sea Region.
www.lablab.se
Teach Revolt: neo-liberalism and education
management is a manifesto, a warning, that
the neo-liberal re-organisation of higher level
education is shifting educational practice from
trained teaching staff to corporate managers.
The difference is worth noting, whereas
pedagogy was once considered the domain
of educators on the front line of education,
nowadays these educators are seeing their
positions diminished, limited or outright
closed by a growing cadre of management
professionals whose background
demonstrates little concern for learning
and learning experimentation.
Instead, we are witnessing the shift from
a passive form of questioning educational
practices to an active form of propagandising
management accomplishments, with the
toll falling on junior teaching staff, and
students, who no longer find benefit from
long term teaching visions. Everything
in this new paradigm becomes managed
through cherry picked trend setting outside
“master” professionals who come in
independently of the institution on limited
short term contracts.
JOIN THE RESISTANCE
www.r-lab.international
Personalia
Anna Asplind is a Choreographer and artist based in Malmö/Stockholm. Through close readings of places
with an experimental approach to the dialectic space and movement - how we are allowed to move through
different rooms and what movements are expected of us in different contexts - she makes visible and
embodies the ordinary in our gestures and actions. By highlighting a place’s history, its functions and
inherent social norms, Asplind questions how we view and use the site in the present.
Anna Risell is an Architect and artist based in Göteborg. Anna is interested in the subtle tones of dwelling,
which she searches for in places of everyday life. Her modes of expression and reflection include painting,
writing and more recently, video. The investigation of perception of space has in collaborative projects also
expanded into working with scenography. Although her projects often explore urban environments and
phenomena, initial investigations and reflections are heavily influenced by many hours spent in the woods.
Andres Villarreal is a visual artist and filmmaker who lives between Stockholm and Berlin. Andres received
their MFA from The Berlin University of the Arts in 2018 where they studied under Hito Steyerl and has
previously also studied sociology. Andres often deals with questions of how discourses and tropes emerge
and are cultivated in society, the relations between memory, representation and production of reality and
how these are narrated. The transformations of life in contemporary society through things like digitalization
and commercialization are of course important topics and their current research revolves around private
and urban spaces and how they are transformed and to what consequences. The work is often situated
in the borderland between fact and fiction. Andres is currently a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study
Program in New York City.
Bert Stoffels is an architect and junior researcher at KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture. His research is
focused on the connection between architecture and ideology. He graduated as a Master in Explorative
Architectural Design in 2016. He collaborated on research projects for the Ghent-based research cell ‘the
Drawing and the Space’ and worked with Alt-architectuur and NU architectuur atelier in Belgium.
Bo Pilo is an Interior architect based in Stockholm. Studied electroacoustic composition at EMS (2005),
post-graduate program Going Public, Konstfack (2012), MA in interior architecture, Konstfack (2014),
post-graduate program Research Lab - Architecture, Artifacts & Signs, KKH (2018). Current research
explores spatial cognition and behavioral manipulation. Collected study results are placed in semi-fictional
settings to amplify and sometimes skew the narrative.
Carlota Mir is a curator, researcher and cultural worker based between Stockholm and Vienna. She works
at the intersection between contemporary art, feminisms and social movements, art history, architecture
and critical heritage in a variety of formats – curatorial, pedagogic, academic, editorial, domestic – that
tend to hybridize and become something new. She currently combines her research in the PhD programme
in Philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with curatorial work on two artistic programmes in
Sweden: ‘My Friend is Here’ and ‘Girls Always Play in Twos’. The projects aim to develop new modes of
artistic knowledge production and exhibition, as well as building feminist networks of affect which can inspire
and sustain collective action.
Elena Mazzi is a Visual artist based in Venice. Her poetics deals with the relationship between man and the
environment he lives in and has to reckon with in everyday life. Mostly following an anthropological approach,
this analysis investigates and documents an identity both personal and collective, relating to a specific
territory, and giving rise to different forms of exchange and transformation.
Florence Taché is an architect based in Paris where she has been working both as an independent and
within architectural offices (including Dumont Legrand Architectes and Patrick Bouchain). Her practice
explores ways in which architecture can be designing situations as much as designing buildings. This
includes practical and research-based work investigating the contemporary tensions between production
and resources, collaborative ways of making those “situations” happen, and how narratives contribute to
our relationship to our environment. She also worked on scenography and exhibition design projects, as well
as some small scale comics production.
266
R-LAB MARVELS & CATASTROPHES
Gerda Persson is an architect, living and working in Stockholm. She studied in Stockholm and Mendrisio,
Switzerland and graduated from KTH school of architecture in 2014. Her research of this year is based
on an interest in how our history and physical environment is created by what stories are told and how
they are valued.
Gustav Karlsson is a planning architect based in Stockholm. He’s the founder of the spatial research
studio Scapeous (2011) and Urbanunplanning.com (2013). Karlsson orientate practically and theoretically
within spatial planning issues using speculative design methods to investigate urban and rural phenomena.
Current fields of interest stretches from growing and shrinking habitats, High-Tech Ruralism, extrasensory
perception, the collective (un)consciousness and The Realm of Real Fantasy.
Jérôme Malpel is an architect and curator based in Stockholm and Paris. He graduated from the School
of Architecture in Marne-La-Vallée in the studio Théorie & Projets under the direction of Jacques Lucan
and Eric Lapierre in 2013. He has been working in São Paulo (Triptyque), Buenos Aires (Alejandro Sticotti)
and Stockholm (Elding Oscarson, Kjellander Sjöberg) and was part of Curator Lab at Konstfack University
in Stockholm under the direction of Joanna Warsza (2016-2017) He co-founded the architecture gallery
Desplans in 2015, exhibiting sketches and drawings of international architects. He has curated exhibitions
in Paris (Pavillon de l’Arsenal) and Stockholm (Alma).
Justinas Dūdėnas was born and based in Vilnius, trained as an architect and semiotician and graduated
in “Rupert” Alternative Education Program. With an emphasis on spatial narratives, Justinas has initiated
public projects such as urban river-ferry “Uperis” and a podcast for public space and architecture “Aikštėje”.
He is currently co-running an office for exhibition design “Centras ir Institutas”.
Lea Vene is an art historian and cultural anthropologist. She works as a curator in the gallery Miroslav
Kraljević in Zagreb, Croatia. She was one of the organizers of ETNOFILm - festival of ethnographic film where
she curated film, exhibition and educational programs. Vene curates different exhibition and conference
programs as part of the International photography festival - Organ Vida. She is also a lecturer at the Faculty
of Textile Technology in Zagreb.
Orestis Nikolaidis is an Architect, editor, and cultural agent based in Vienna. He combines his interest in
participatory-based design projects on the threshold between art and architecture with work as an interior
architect. During his first year in Research Lab, he conducted a research-based project addressing issues
such as digital memory infrastructure and contemporary image while on his second year he focused on
the future of AI and the post-work society. He has been a board member of the architectural experimental
platform 255 since 2011 and was the director in 2016. He is a co-founder of the architectural collective
Madstock and has been organising the interdisciplinary architectural festival Bellastock for three consecutive
years. He was part of the curating team of the exhibition Ni Arte Ni Educación in Matadero Madrid in 2016.
Sofia Larsson is a Landscape architect and interdisciplinary artist based in Stockholm. Her research
interests are materializations of values, identities and power structures in spatial organization and
architecture. In extending her role as a landscape architect Larsson explores ways of pursuing alternative
practices and questions existing paradigms within the architect’s line of business.
Veronica Skeppe is an architect and founding partner of the collaborative practice Brrum. She is a lecturer
in architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology / KTH in Stockholm and has previously taught at
Konstfack / University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. In her work she seeks potential
for design experimentations in the intersection between materials, technology and representations. Recent
work has focused on histories of materials and how the aesthetic and political understanding of them have
shifted through time.
Victoria van Kan is an architect and photographer based in Brussels. Currently she is a part of Rotor
Deconstruction, a collective researching the possibilities of reuse in architecture. Beside she is exploring
the representation of the ordinary, or cruel banality, trough drawing, photography and video.
Åsa Agerstam is an Interior architect and designer based in Stockholm graduating from Konstfack in
2012. Through a philosophical and experience-based starting point, she uses a hands on approach in
research, where she often investigates the everyday materiality that surrounds us to discover new ways
of relating to it.
PERSONALIA
267
Filmography
Filmography: (basic running
themes: love story or reunion
with single parents and their
kids while volcano or earthquake
erupts, science of prediction
where guys get to rescue or
blow up threats, and religious
or spiritual themes, the dog,
and animals, mass extinction
events, Molochs, the Pompeii
films—the Last Days of Pompeii,
use the Vesuvius for their
films’ spectacular finales, a
sort of Deus-ex-machina, to an
otherwise straightforward and
rather dated Christian vs. pagan
love stories..
Stromboli, Terra di Dio, (Stromboli, Land of God).
Directed by Roberto Rossellini.
Starring Ingrid Bergman.
Released in 1950.
Dr. Strangelove, or I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Directed by Stanley Kubrick.
Starring Peter Sellers.
Released in 1964
Soylent Green.
Directed by Richard Fleischer.
Starring Charlton Heston, and Edward G.
Robinson,
Released in 1973.
Logan’s Run.
Directed by Michael Anderson.
Starring Michael York, Jenny Agutter, Richard
Jordan, Roscoe Lee Browne, Farrah Fawcett,
and Peter Ustinov.
Released in 1976
Stalker (Сталкер).
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring Alexander Kaidanovsky, Anatoly
Solonitsyn and Nikolai Grinko.
Released in 1979 (restored version: 2017)
Dante’s Peak.
Directed by Roger Donaldson.
Starring Pierce Brosnan, Linda Hamilton,
Charles Hallahan, Elizabeth Hoffman, Jamie
Renée Smith, Jeremy Foley and Grant Heslov.
Released in 1997
Volcano.
Directed by Mick Jackson.
Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche, and
Don Cheadle
Released in 1997
Deep Impact.
Directored by Mimi Leader.
Starring Robert Duvall, Téa Leoni, Elijah Wood,
Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell, and
Morgan Freeman.
Released in 1998.
268
R-LAB MARVELS & CATASTROPHES
The Core.
Directed by Jon Amiel.
Starring Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy
Lindo, Stanley Tucci, Tchéky Karyo, DJ Qualls.
Released in 2003
The Day After Tomorrow.
Directed by Roland Emmerich.
Starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ian Holm
Released in 2004
The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Directed by Scott Derrickson
Starring Keanu Reeves.
Released in 2008,
Tidal Wave Haeunde ().
Directed by Yoon Je-kyoon
Starring Sol Kyung-gu, Ha Ji-won, Park Joonghoon
and Uhm Jung-hwa.
Released in 2009
Knowing.
Directed by Alex Proyas
Starring Nicolas Cage.
Released in 2009
2012.
Directed by Roland Emmerich.
Starring John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor,
Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Thandie Newton,
Danny Glover and Woody Harrelson.
Released in 2009
Into Eternity.
Directed by Michael Madsen.
Released in 2010.
Melancholia.
Directed by Lars von Trier
Starring Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg,
Alexander Skarsgård, Cameron Spurr, and
Kiefer Sutherland.
Released in 2011.
The Impossible.
Directed by J. A. Bayona,
Starring Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and
Tom Holland.
Released in 2012
Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Directed by Benh Zeitlin
Starring Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry.
Released in 2012
World War Z.
Directed by Marc Forster.
Starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, Daniella
Kertesz, James Badge Dale, Ludi Boeken,
Fana Mokoena, David Morse, Peter Capaldi.
Released in 2013.
Pompeii.
Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson.
Starring Kit Harington, Emily Browning,
Carrie-Anne Moss, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje,
Jessica Lucas, with Jared Harris, and Kiefer
Sutherland.
Released in 2014
San Andreas.
Directed by Brad Peyton
Starring Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy
Passmore.
Released in 2015
Into the Inferno.
Directed by Werner Herzog.
Released in 2016.
Pandora (.
Directed by Park Jung-woo.
Starring Kim Nam-Gil,
Released in 2016
7:19.
Directed by Jorge Michel Grau
Starring Demián Bichir, Pellicer Héctor Bonilla.
Released in 2016.
Annihilation.
Directed by Alex Garland,
Starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason
Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Tuva
Novotny, and Oscar Isaac.
Released in 2018.
FILMOGRAPHY
269
Bibliography
“You could hear the shrieks of
women, the wailing of infants,
and the shouting of men; some
were calling their parents,
others their children or their
wives, trying to recognise them
by their voices. People bewailed
their own fate or that of their
relatives, and there were some
who prayed for death in their
terror of dying. Many besought
the aid of the gods, but still
more imagined there were no
gods left, and that the universe
was plunged into eternal
darkness for evermore.”
Pliny the Elder, describing the
conditions after the eruption of
the Vesuvius. AD 79.
PRIMARY READINGS
Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover
(London: Penguin, 2009)
Susan Sontag haunts this course. On
collecting volcanos, climbing the peaks of
death, miracles, the distinction between
disasters like a cold winter, vs. disasters that
constantly loom over the landscape, and yes,
the French Revolution.
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise
of Disaster Capitalism
(London: Picador, 2008)
Everything you ever wanted to know about how
we came to live inside the “iron cage” of neoliberalism
(see Max Weber’s The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism)
FURTHER FICTION READINGS:
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, (original
publication date: 1947)
A good thesis on human fragility.
Endo Shusaku, Richard A. Schuchert trans,
Volcano, a novel. (original publication date:
1972)
Very biblical.
H.G. Wells, Time Machine (original
publication date: 1895)
Read this and try to wonder how H.G. Wells
good have figured this all out already more
than a hundred years ago.
Stanisław Lem, Solaris (original publication
date: 1970)
A true cult classic, can be related to current
Gaia theories, but an amazing novel, and an
amazing satire on academic science.
270
R-LAB MARVELS & CATASTROPHES
NON-FICTION
Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell:
the Extraordinary Communities that Arise in
Disaster (London: Penguin Books, 2010)
Nathaniel Rich, Losing Earth: The Decade
We Almost Stopped Climate Change (New
York Times, 2018) www.nytimes.com
Recommended by Anna Risell.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (original
publication date: 1962)
Jared Diamond, Collapse, How Societies
Choose to Fail Succeed (London, Viking
Press, 2005)
On what it takes for a society to cut down the
last tree in the forest.
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and
Women: the Reivention of Nature (original
publication dates, between 1978 and 1989.
Susanna M. Hoffman, Anthony Oliver-
Smith ed.s, Catastrophe and Culture: the
Anthropology of Disaster (London, Oxford,
2002)
Emanuel Kant, On the causes of earthquakes
on the occasion of the calamity that befell
the western countries of Europe towards the
end of last year (original publication date:
1756)
Good to know we could have done something
about our current climate change mess quite
some time ago.
Paul Virilio, The Original Accident (Boston:
Polity 2007)
Peter Lang, Stalker Unbounded: Urban
Activism and the Terrain Vague as
Heterotopia by Default Editors: Lieven De
Cauter, Michiel Dehaene Heterotopia and
the City: Public Space in Postcivil Society
(London: Routledge, 2008),
On the work of Stalker, the Rome based urban
arts group
Peter Lang, Stalker on Location, in Karen
A. Franck, Quentin Stevens, ed.s, Loose
Space: Possibility And Diversity In Urban Life
(London: Routledge, 2006)
On the work of Stalker, the Rome based urban
arts group
Further Readings:
Andreas Killen Nitzan Lebovic Ed.s,
Catastrophes: A History and Theory of
an Operative Concept (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 2014)
Superstudio, 12 Ideal Cities (AD Magazine,
1971, December)
—an excellent demonstration on how to write
the future of architecture
On how we understand accidents, states
of exception, risk and prognostics, not to
mention the ‘last man.’ see chapters: Andreas
Killen, Nitzan Lebovic, “Introduction,” Eva
Horn, “The Last Man: the Birth of Modern
Apocalypse in Jean Paul, John Martin and
Lord Byron,” Andreas Killen, “Accidents
happen: The Industrial Accident in Industrial
Germany,” Matthias Dörries, “Anticipating the
Climate Catastrophe.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
271
Marvels and Catastrophes
R-LAB: Mavels and Catastrophes was
produced during the academic year 2018-
2019 within the Architectural Theory and
History course at the Royal Institute of Art,
Stockholm
Program Director
Peter Lang, Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm
The Art of Disaster Interruptive Workshop,
Istanbul: Ayse Erek, Aslı Kıyak Ingin, and
Serkan Taycan
Craftsmen: Artin Aharon (Harunlar Mekanik),
Mustafa Yasak (Yasa Oyma), Ismail Hız (Mert
Torna), Zafer Ugurluol (Ugurlu Neon), Tur
Reklam
Participants
Åsa Agerstam, Anna Asplind, Emre Aydilek,
Ana Barata Martins, Justinas Dudénas, Carlota
Mir, Gustav Karlsson, Sofia Larsson, Jérôme
Malpel, Elena Mazzi, Orestis Nikolaidis, Gerda
Persson, Bo Pilo, Anna Risell, Veronica Skeppe,
Bert Stoffels, Florence Taché, Victoria van Kan,
Lea Vene, Andres Villarreal
Contributors
Dougald Hine, Jennifer Rainsford, James
Taylor Foster, Behzad Khosravi, Isabel Löfgren,
Malin Heyman, James Hamilton,
Editors
Peter Lang and Matthew Ashton
Design
Matthew Ashton (www.sp-arc.se)
Art Consultant
Vesna Salamon
Credits
Färgfabriken: Daniel Urey, Karin Englund
Hinterlands + is a LABLAB public program
on the frontier of mental and spatial change
in the Swedish - German countryside(s).
Hinterlands + is funded by the Goethe Institute
Schweden.
Special guest for the Hinterlands + program in
Umeå was Martina Doehler-Behzadi, Director
of IBA Thüringen Germany. Her presentation
was on Stadtland or Countryside Nostalgia.
UMA Umeå: Ana Betancourt (rector),
Marie Kraft, (Instructor)
With invited guest Madeleine Eriksson (UMU)
Bildmuseet: Anders Jansson.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Magnus Ercisson, Susann Löfberg,
Åsa Andersson, Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal,
Kim West, Katarina Nitsch, Torun Hammar,
Sophie Tottie, Christina Pech, Pelin Tan, Peter
Geschwind, Roemer Van Toorn, Christoph
Draeger, Sigrid Sandström, Thordis Arrhenius,
Frances Hsu, Alexander Marek, Daniel Urey,
Marie Kraft, James Taylor Foster,
All images associated with individual research
projects are copyright of the author, unless
otherwised referenced.
About the type
Eurostile was designed by Aldo Novarese in
1962 for Nebiolo Type Foundry in Turin. It
became particularly popular in science fiction
literature and films produced in the 1960s and
1970s, used for the credits of several early
seasons of Doctor Who, as well as extensively
used on props throughout Stanley Kubrik’s
1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Px437 IBM is a font based on Code Page 437;
the character set of the original IBM personal
computer. This character set remains the
primary core of any EGA and VGA compatible
graphics card.
Printed and bound in Latvia by Livonia Print
First edition 250 copies
ISBN 978-91-519-2347-5
School of Schools, Istanbul Design Biennial:
Jan Boelen, Vera Sacchetti, Eylul Senses
www.marvelsandcatastrophes.com
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