Viaduktens avsked with 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.

How do we archive the temporary activities, performative interventions and participant-based practices that change our public spaces? The digital publication Viaduktens avsked brings together the IntraGalactic arts collective’s work, performance-based processes and public investigations of the possibilities of public art. The title 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 knowledge created by working performatively and with relationships in public spaces.

Gestaltad livsmiljö och Kunskapsnav offentlig konst

The Designed Living Environment Policy

When the Swedish Parliament voted to implement the new policy on designed living environments in 2018 the aim was that architecture, design, form, art and cultural heritage should interact in societal development to create public environments with long-term significance for our sense of community, health, and children’s and young people’s possibilities for lifelong learning. At the same time, Public Art Agency Sweden was tasked with strengthening the development of knowledge within the field of Public Art and creating communal environments.

Between 2018–2020 the Public Art Agency had the governmental assignment Kunskapsnav offentlig konst (Knowledge Hub Public Art). Its task was to meet the needs of competence development within municipalities and others to support the process of development of Public Art as a part of community planning and building. The assignment has since been a permanent part of Public Art Agency’s operation.

Part of Kunskapsnav offentlig konst

Local Art Projects was a part of Kunskapsnav offentlig konst (Knowledge Hub Public Art). In the project we followed twelve practitioners of art, spread across the country, who work with public art on their own initiative. One of them was (^/ – the sign for the finger snapping gesture – in which the IntraGalactic arts collective worked with performance as an art form to investigate the role of art in public spaces. The project framed the county of Jämtland through the public transport company, Länstrafiken, starting from the bus station on the square Gustav III:s torg in Östersund.

The release of the digital publication, which is based on the works created during the collaboration in 2018-2020, is an open-source format that allows an unbound archive form and provides the opportunity to change, expand and rebuild relationships and connections within the archive.

On this occasion, the IntraGalactic arts collective is represented by the artists Maria Högbacke, Malin Ståhl, Hiroko Tsuchimoto and Anita Wernström. Invited guest is dance archivist, dancer and choreographer Kajsa Sandström.

Programme 14 May 16.30–19.30

Kl 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 the line that is made as a drawing. To choose what belongs to the sensual world, and to the interruption and space. The starting point for the material was meetings at the bus station in Östersund with people who took the time to stop and maybe talk for a while before moving on. 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.

Biographies

• Maria Högbacke (b. 1982) is a visual artist who works with painting, installation and performative workshops as well as with the body through treatments and sessions. Högbacke’s painting is a process and exploration of the visual, and to some extent of the subconscious and the collective subconscious. Similar in process are her installations with objects that can be loaded with, for example, emotions or memories, often of common human experiences. Högbacke is educated at the Royal Academy Schools and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, the Art Academy in Düsseldorf and ENSBA in Paris.
• Kajsa Sandström’s (b. 1980) choreographic work is characterized by a long-term investigation of movement, image and behavioural processes that emerge between dancers and viewers in the performance. In her works, mirrors, photo and video projections have constituted an extended spatiality and reflective surface in relation to the bodies and movements of the stage space. Her solo, En spegel i handen (A Mirror in the Hand), premiered via live stream from Weld in Stockholm, at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. As a dancer, Sandström most recently worked with Mette Ingvartsen (DK/BE) and in the Weld Company (2013–2020). Sandström is educated at PARTS in Brussels (2000–04) and holds an MA from the Södertörn University in Stockholm. Since 2022, she has been working as a dance archivist at the Library of Music and Theatre in Stockholm, where she collects, preserves and makes available the cultural heritage of Swedish dance.
• Malin Ståhl (b. 1972) is a visual artist who works with the relationship to nature and landscape, both the personal relationship and the ideological historiography around a place. The bodily experience and the performative are starting points for artistic research that often spans several years. Ståhl is interested in the ordering and sorting of Western culture as a foundation for knowledge in relation to nature’s own organization. The material is embodied in watercolour, text, video, performance and in collaborations and exchanges. Ståhl lives and works on Frösön in Jämtland and is educated at the Iceland Academy of the Arts (BA) in Reykjavik, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Slade School of Fine Art (MFA) in London.
• Hiroko Tsuchimoto (b. 1984 in Hokkaido) is a visual artist who creates contexts for participation in different types of rooms through her own observations and interpretations of traces and repetitions in everyday life in the form of audio-visual material, dialogue, drawing, performance, tactile installations, walks or gardening. Addressing colonial notions of the nature and construction of otherness, Tsushimoto’s projects oppose imperialist motifs and the inherent dichotomous perspectives inherited from Western culture. With the help of co-workers, both human and more than human, she weaves together stories about past, present and future. Tsuchimoto is educated at the Musashino Art University (BA) in Tokyo, Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design (MFA) in Stockholm and the Sint Lucas School of Arts (MA) in Antwerp.
• Anita Wernström’s (b. 1980) artistic practice is rooted in the body, learning and the collective. In a continuous exploration of materiality and the intuitive, the creative work is constantly ongoing. Wernström creates space for an investigation in which performance, video, drawings and carefully selected images and objects can come together and find new expressions and conversations. Wernström is educated at the Slade School of Fine Art (BA Hons) in London, she lives and works in Stockholm, including as Curator of Learning at Moderna Museet.