Stockholm Art Week: IntraGalactic arts collective

During the Stockholm Art Week, the IntraGalactic arts collective fills the Public Art Agency on Skeppsholmen with several performances. Join the programme inside and outside the building, get drawn or draw, attend a lecture, watch video works and experience an archive carried by ideas. This evening event is the release of Viaduktens avsked, a digital publication and an online archive based on a collaboration with IntraGalactic arts collective and the Public Art Agency in 2018–2020.

Release of an archive brought to life on site

How do we archive the temporary activities, performative interventions and participant-based practices that change our public spaces? These are inquiries that IntraGalactic arts collective are exploring. Their artistic work is now gathered in the digital publication Viaduktens avsked which brings together performance-based processes and public investigations of the possibilities of public art. The title, Viaduktens avsked, literally refers to the rarely appreciated viaduct, which is often perceived as an unsafe place and is therefore built away from our public environments. Viaduktens avsked is an attempt to capture fleeting working processes, idea-based works and knowledgecreated by working performatively and with relationships in public spaces.

Gestaltad livsmiljö and Kunskapsnav offentlig konst

Between 2018–2020 the Public Art Agency had the governmental assignment Kunskapsnav offentlig konst (Knowledge Hub Public Art). The assignment was part of a new policy area called Gestaltad livsmiljö (Designed living environment). The archive and works that IntraGalactic now presents, were created as part of Local Art Projects 2018–2020.  The evening’s programme brings to life and reactivates the performance works in Viaduktens avsked that were created during that period.

Programme 14 May 16.30–19.30

16.30–17.30

• Introduction of the Public Art Agency & IntraGalactic arts collective’s archive release Viaduktens avsked.
• Maria Högbacke: Preference of the Eye
  Preference of the Eye is an interaction that invites you to draw, or be drawn. Preference of the Eye is partly the visual observation, and partly the line that is made as a drawing. An opportunity to choose what belongs to the sensual world, and to the interruption and space. The starting point for the material was meetings with people who took the time to stop and maybe talk for a while at the bus station in Östersund. In the archive, visitors are given the opportunity to sit down and draw eyes, or have their eyes drawn.
• Anita Wernström:  I want to walk through the space like I am carrying grocery bags  
  How does the body feel when we move in different places? How does it affect our bodies? What is ‘perceived insecurity’ in a public space? I want to walk through the place like I am carrying grocery bags when arms and shoulders balance equilibrium. When I carry my bags, I feel a presence, that the place is mine and I have a sense that I am on my way.
• Malin Ståhl and Anita Wernström: Jag är (I am) 
  Two voices are guiding the listener into an observation of one’s own relationship to the body, the urban space and the public spaces surrounding us. The work was performed for the first time as part of the conference Gestaltad livsmiljö, ett samhälle vi alla vill leva i (Designed living environment, a society we all want to live in), 2020.
• Hiroko Tsuchimoto: Gamla Busstorget (vykort) (The Old Bus Station [postcard])
  How can we respond to loss of public space? Can we reimagine social bonds and collective futures by applying the unprofitability and unproductivity found in the state of Melancholy? Hiroko Tsuchimoto re-enacts a performative farewell with a video installation and postcard distribution from a past event at Östersund bus station. The project is associated with the presence of Melancholy in the transformation of public spaces, problematizing the process of displacement, sanitization and privatization of public spaces as well as their destruction in the name of progress.

17.30–18.30

• Malin Ståhl: Busshållplatser i Jämtland (Bus Stops in Jämtland) 
  This work is building an archive of roadside typologies around the county of Jämtland. Collected at bus stops, various plants fill a box, dried and placed between tissue paper with the name of the plant on a small piece of paper. Each plant bears witness to different times; the season of when it was collected, the geographic climate time, the time of life in the specific place. In the work, the plants are recorded with their Latin, Swedish, Jamtlandic and Southern Sami names to recall to mind the development of science, the expansion of the nation-state, the settlers in forests and agriculture, and the Sami life in the place.
• Hiroko Tsuchimoto: Uninterrupted Dialogue (video installation, 15.41 min) 
  How can we respond to loss of public space? Can we reimagine social bonds and collective futures by applying the unprofitability and unproductivity found in the state of Melancholy? Hiroko Tsuchimoto re-enacts a performative farewell with a video installation and postcard distribution from a past event at Östersund bus station. The project is associated with the presence of Melancholy in the transformation of public spaces, problematizing the process of displacement, sanitization and privatization of public spaces as well as their destruction in the name of progress.

18.30–19.30

• Kajsa Sandström: Föreläsning – Arkiverandets omsorg (Lecture – The Caring Act of Archiving) 
  Based on her experience and role as a dance archivist, dancer and choreographer, Kajsa Sandström gives a performative talk on the theme of archives and artistic processes. Wearing white cotton gloves, archivist Sandström illustrates her practice of organizing and listing. During the work, she reflects on the archivist’s invisible role as interpreter of documents and creator of order, which enables the archive to be set in motion by future issues. What kind of documents and actions do artistic processes consist of? What kind of information can be extracted from the materials? In what way do documents and actions in the archive bear witness to what has not been preserved? How are archival documents reactivated in artistic processes and works?
• Anita Wernström:  I want to walk through the space like I am carrying grocery bags  
  How does the body feel when we move in different places? How does it affect our bodies? What is ‘perceived insecurity’ in a public space? I want to walk through the place like I am carrying grocery bags when arms and shoulders balance equilibrium. When I carry my bags, I feel a presence, that the place is mine and I have a sense that I am on my way.
• IntraGalactic arts collective: Breven till våra barn (The Letters to Our Children) 
  In 1992, Sven Wernström wrote a letter to his grandchild. The letter describes how the adults of that time consume the resources of the future. A catalyst for reflections on the future and the children of the future. The work contains an invitation to write your own letter to the children of the future.