The Exhibition
When visiting the exhibition, you will be able to approach Experiment Stockholm in two different ways. When entering our main hall you encounter the exhibition using all senses. This reflects what living in Stockholm is like, experiencing the city with the whole body, at eye level.
In the main hall you will find artworks utilising metaphors and artistic perspectives that make unexpected connections and associations. Nature and culture are being intertwined in this space. Stockholm is a biotope!
In the main hall you will also find a workshop area where we invite visitors of all ages and backgrounds to work with the challenges of the present and the future Stockholm region. Results from workshop activities can be added to the exhibition during the exhibition period, making it dynamic and changing – like the city. In the exhibition, Stockholm should grow from bottom and up.
As a visitor, you get to play an important role in Experiment Stockholm in more than one way. You will be able to contribute with your views of the Stockholm region in a great interactive mapping of public perceptions and experiences of places in Stockholm. In this way you let researchers, decision makers, and other fellow citizens know about your places of like or dislike in Stockholm.
The other way to approach Experiment Stockholm is by intellectual endeavour in our project rooms. In this space we will examine new architectural ideas and flip the common ways of city planning upside down. Could we create a more efficient traffic in Stockholm by reducing, instead of increasing, speed? Is it possible to create buildings which adds, rather than removes, natural values to the city? In Stockholm, there are thousands of empty office spaces. How could we make use of this resource? For example, we see a vision of a new Stockholm portrayed in the project Demeter by Jan Hietala and Moneo Brock Studio. Demeter is also a critique of patriarchal structures in the urban landscape and demonstrates how fruitful an interdisciplinary non-hierarchical collaboration between architects and artists can be. Fruitful cooperation between the various skills are also the basis for Experiment Akalla, a “maker space” that is now emerging in previously unused premises in a Stockhlm suburb, as well as in the study “Where is your Stockholm”, a collaboration with Stockholm Resileince Centre, where we visualize Stockholmer’s relationship to, and subjective knowledge of, places and spaces around the city.
Artists
Luis Berríos-Negrón – takes interest in the physical sensations of multidimensionality. He seeks to manifest some of these sensations by augmenting the “greenhouse” as a mental, colonial, material and physical spectre. In Experiment Stockholm, Berríos-Negrón will realize an artwork named Earthscore Specularium. As a follow up to the Nonsphere series, and as an attempt to return to an unfinished conversation with American artist Paul Ryan, Berríos-Negrón will stay in the exhibition with his family. Together with visitors they will practice and share ideas about living in Stockholm.
Read more about Earthscore Specularium.
Maretopia – is an artist collective initiated by artist Jens Evaldsson, based in Liljeholmen. Maretopia explores the potential for the waters of Stockholm. Their idea is to create a floating culture and eco-village on rafts, anchored just outside Färgfabriken. The first raft was built of left-over materials from the urban development exhibition Stockholm on the Move, that took place at Färgfabriken 2013. The rafts was built by IA1 Interior Design at University College of Arts, Crafts and Design.
Read more about the program held at Maretopia
Maretopia is an artist collective initiated by artist Jens Evaldsson, based in Liljeholmen. Maretopia explores the potential for the waters of Stockholm. Their idea is to create a floating culture and eco-village on rafts, anchored just outside Färgfabriken. The first raft was built of left-over materials from the urban development exhibition Stockholm on the Move, that took place at Färgfabriken 2013.
Three rafts outside of Färgfabriken are the result of the course “small building floating utopia” within the Interior Architecture and Furniture Design program at University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. The five week long course focused on floating utopias and was led by lecturers Sergio Montero Bravo and Rochus Hinkel, in collaboration with Maretopia. The course included a seminar series about water and methods in design anthropology which was organised with the help of Sara Reinholtz by Interaktiva Institutet. The students developed a vision of a floating culture house for which they then started to manufacture and build a theatre scene and an audience platform as well as a pedalboat. The rafts were launched on June 5th in Gröndal opposite to Färgfabriken.
The idea for these islands was further developed by the Interior Architecture student Cecilia Tjärnberg, resulting in two larger islands with plants cleaning the water and function as a floating habitat for animal life. In August Maretopia, in colloboration with curator Sarah Guarino Florén, presented the work “Kvadratmeterpris” (Square Meter Price) by Stockholm based artist Carl-Oskar Linné. It consists of a sign showing the price per square meter for housing real estate in the area of the sign.
Maretopia is for everybody. For those who wish it is possible to, at their own risk, visit the rafts by using a pedalboat. During opening hours you may borrow a lifejacket and get directions to the pedalboat by Färgfabriken’s hosts.
The artistic program offered by Maretopia during the exhibition Experiment Stockholm consists of single day events on the water curated by Kristina Lindemann. Like a reflection in the water, the outdoor events will in turn be visualized or contextualized indoors at Färgfabriken, too.
PROGRAMME
31st Oct at 2 pm: Jonas Esteban Isfält – Scanning Territory: On Glitch, Green Screen and Watercolour Painting
We meet infront of the entrance to Färgfabriken, duration ca. 2 hours
On Saturday, October 31, photographer Jonas Esteban Isfält invites you to Maretopia for a presentation of his current work on the topics of glitch, green screen and watercolor painting in Romanticism. The Romantic era is associated with the birth of specific ways of speaking and thinking about ecology and national identity. The presentation will a.o. take up the question why these ideas might be interesting to reexamine today.
With an ever growing amount of visual information that we are fed each day, our way of processing information has in part shifted to superficially scanning, filing and rearranging in order to handle and navigate the information saturated landscape. Hence, how information is subjectively re-contextualized is now more important than its technological representation.
“The definition of computational photography is still evolving, but I like to think of it as a shift from using a camera as a picture-making device to using it as a data-collection device”. Kevin Conner, Photojournalism Ethics on Shifting Technological Ground.
A portable hand held scanner is usually used for digitizing text through moving the scanner over a surface where the text is located. Instead of scanning text, Isfält scans other surfaces around us. One could call it taking samples of a certain place. In a scientific process such samples might be gathered, catalogued or arranged and archived according to a certain hypothesis. In the process of transmitting information from its original place to the digital realm, pieces of information can go missing and the material is put together in an altered manner with gaps and glitches.
Isfält is interested in abstractions and errors in the digital photographic process and its relation to notions of truth and how we produce or relate to ideology. The arbitrariness of the glitch makes collecting data a non-scientific endeavor and questions scientific knowledge production itself. The ruptures, bruises and scars in an image can reveal underlying tensions and contestations and help us relate to aesthetic, technological and social issues.
The installation of flags on Maretopia can be seen as a token of being able to shift our views on territoriality. Made from chroma key green screen fabric, they can represent both the green of nature and the ecology movement. In addition, chroma key green is used for projections of CGIs (computer generated images), which means that we can project ourselves, and perhaps our imagined territorial affiliations, onto it.
Time and date not set: Carl–Oskar Linné
Time and date not set: Cecilia Tjärnberg
23rd Sep 5.30 pm: Performance by Era Isabel Serander & Sara Hedberg
17th Oct 4 pm: A name for the one who doesn’t move by Love Enqvist
We will meet at 4 PM at Gröndal’s boat club and take a journey, forgetting the cold for roughly 1,5 hours, getting to know more about some of Love Enqvist’s work. Please think of wearing appropriate outdoor clothing (hat, scarf, gloves and warm socks), also bring a blanket if you can. Space is limited, for a guaranteed place, please RSVP to maretopia.org@gmail.com until Friday 3 PM.
Love Enqvist has on several occasions used both the water and own personal memories as a starting point in his artistic practice, taking him from Stockholm to Istanbul by kayak, to the end of the world and a disappearing language as well as to a man, who travelled with a raft and shared his near death experience.
On Saturday, Love invites you on a performative twighlight journey, a physical and psychological drift, passing fragments of language and memory, movement and disappearance, travel and documentation. Life is flux and the journey aims towards a thought process on a story’s origin and destination.
24th Oct 2 pm: Konsthall 323 in conversation about mobility, neighbourhood and being close to water.
We meet outside Färgfabriken and will move between Färgfabriken, Maretopia and Konsthall 323, duration ca. 2 hours.
On October 24, Konsthall 323 will be present at/on Maretopia. Konsthall 323 is an art institution in a car, active since 2010 in places that can be reached by car. The kunsthalle is run by Frida Krohn and Ylva Trapp.
Since 2014 Konsthall323 has mostly operated in Saltsjöbaden, where there is a lot to discover for the critical gaze of contemporary art; job market conflicts, artist myths, capitalist dreams and death anxiety. Xet’s painted wardrobe doors, Grünewald’s enormous artists studio doors, shiny BMWs, tanned white skin, sun glitter and ice crystals. They have met skaters, hotel staff, castle owners, labour union economists, kunsthalle directors and free roaming dogs. They learned about jazz chaps, strike actions, watercolour painting, porridge house, capitalist history, skin technology.
This Saturday you can listen to sound pieces from there; observations of a society by the water, characterized by order and tidiness, safety, emptiness, grand buildings and stories and where Konsthall323 sees great development opportunities. The talk will also revolve around the question what happens when a kunsthalle does not operate in fixed premises and how Saltsjöbaden influenced the program of the kunsthalle.
28th Oct 1 pm: Art Lab Gnesta – Swamp Storytelling
Artist Signe Johannessen and curator Caroline Malmström have collaborated on numerous projects throughout the past few years, both within and outside of Art Lab Gnesta’s artistic program.
At Maretopia they present their work with Swamp Storytelling, a work that departs from the swamp as a symbol for current climate politics, necessary transformation processes and the cradle of life.
The project started as an exchange with the marine biology research station ANET (The Andaman and Nicobar Islands Environmental Team) in India. They wanted to combine the disciplinary field of natural science with artistc production on climate issues and at the same time sought to study how art can function as a transmitter of knowledge for new research. In the exchange the artists were invited to a close dialogue with researches and professionals in order to formulate new perspectives regarding questions and challenges climate change poses as well as managing a catastrophy.
As a part of Maretopia they link together the Indian and Swedish swamp with the waters of Liljeholmsviken and invite to a talk on what we can learn from a swamp. The talk will also be based on a workshop Signe and Caroline did with second and year year students from Konstfack’s textile program. It took place outside Gnesta and the students each wrote a fable as an artistic statement in reaction to the workshop.
Please note: The program is preliminary and will be updated regularly. More events will be added during the course of the exhibition.
You can become a part of Maretopia by joining in the collective or get a newsletter about the ongoing activities; sign up here. You can also follow the project on Facebook and Instagram.
Maretopia is a development of the art project Mare Liberum (2013), which was initiated by Marja Knape, Santiago Mostyn, Lisa Gideonsson, Gustaf Londré, Jens Evald son, Andy McDavitt and Heather Jones.
Students from University College of Arts, Crafts and Design – Interior Architecture & Furniture Design who participated in the coarse and built the rafts: Anton Normark, Cassandra Lorca Machiavelli, Cecilia Tjärnberg, David Lundberg, Elias Båth, Elin Östling, Elisa Hedin, Emma Strömberg, Frida Wallin, Helena Winberg, Malin Bosdotter Marcus Badman, Martin Thübeck, Revaz Berdzenishvili, Sandra Meurman and Vilde Lee Thumper.
The project is implemented in cooperation with: Sergio Montero Bravo, Rochus Urban Hinkel, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design – Interior Architecture & Furniture Design, Peter Lang, Royal Institute of Art, Jan Ryden “Experiment Stockholm” Färgfabriken, Curator Sarah Guarino Florén, Designer Sara Rein Holtz, Curator Kristina Lindemann.
Further thanks to: Briggs & Stratton, Jackon AB, Konstfrämjandet, Erik Sjödin, Fernando Caceres and many other artists, researchers and architects.
Anna Asplind – is a dancer and choreographer. In a video piece, she addresses the urban landscape that stretches from Liljeholmen to Haninge, moving beyond the inner city. In a landscape organized around the car, Asplind instead moves by foot, bike or public transport. In Experiment Stockholm, she will also organize bike Dérives, where the participants randomly drift through the cityscape, encountering the city in a different way, unexpectedly discovering new sites and perspectives.
Read more about
Bike Dérive
During a month’s time the choreographer Anna Asplind has “drifted” by bike between Färgfabriken and the art gallery at Haninge kulturhus. To drift, or to perform a dérive, is a method that was used by the Situationists, a political and artistic group in Paris in the 1950s. Just as they investigated how the urban environment of the industrial age influences our emotional state, Asplind has used the dérive to investigate the effect the suburbian landscape has on the traveling body.
In cooperation with the audiovisual artist Marcus Wilén and the composer Tomas Björkdal she has created a video piece where the psychogeography of each place propels the journey forward from one scene to another. In a suburbian landscape designed for the car they have taken the time to stop and be present in places made hostile to stay in by the loud noise, threatening speed and brutal form. The car’s dominance in this environment creates borders and barriers to the traveling body which makes meetings between people more difficult. By opening our mind, breaking our habitual pattern of movements, and letting go of our preconceived notions we can see and experience new things.
During Experiment Stockholm she will also organize bike Dérives, where the participants randomly drift through the cityscape, encountering the city in a different way, unexpectedly discovering new sites and perspectives.
Asante arkitekter – is a young architectural firm which, on behalf of Färgfabriken, have designed a new house typology: Urban houses built in cheap wood and maybe also in fabric – the fifth building material. This approach enables other ways of building and invites new participants to partake in urban planning and construction, and so generates a more fine-grained social mix: Urban Diversity.
Read more about
Urban Weaving
Asante architects, Carolina Wikström and Frida Öster, is an emerging architecture office that has been commissioned by Färgfabriken to what could be described as a drawing made out of wood and weaving. This pavilion is the idea of another kind of city, with other kinds of houses.
In the north of Tanzania Asante is working on a children’s center. They have found great inspiration in the African tradition of craft and patterns. This tradition is especially strong with the Maasai people. The woven structures and patterns done in first round of frames was created by Maasai women.
The audience will be able to continue working on the pavilion’s façade in workshops during the exhibition. In this way a cultural exchange and a weaving of the Tanzanian and the Swedish will eventually occur.
Instead of a city built by the few for the few, Stockholm could be built by the many for the many. A Stockholm built from the bottom up, by many different people’s ideas and abilities. Asante imagines affordable urban houses built in organic materials. A city that is tactile and interesting on the human scale, with detailing at eye-level, within sight, within reach of our hands.
Stockholm needs urban planning that opens up the buildning of houses to completely new actors: so as to create a fine-grained mix both socially and architecturally. An urban weaving of urban diversity.
Osynliga teatern – (The Invisible Theatre) is a collaboration between Tomas Rajnai and Jens Nielsen. Osynliga Teatern creates interdisciplinary performances and cinematic experiences through sound, where the audience is invited to become part of the story and choreography. In the piece Hidden Ecology, they investigated a situation where new patterns of movement change the appearance of a map. Their starting-point is an idea that the architectural surroundings are set in the past, while the interaction between people and architecture occurs in the present. The use of space is in constant change, depending on who is visiting there. By exploring the city on the basis of non-specified patterns – where the visitor becomes part of the plot – Osynliga Teatern opens up the possibility of creating new paths to map and new stories to tell.
Read more about
Hidden Ecology
In the piece Hidden Ecology, they investigated a situation where new patterns of movement change the appearance of a map. Their starting-point is an idea that the architectural surroundings are set in the past, while the interaction between people and architecture occurs in the present. The use of space is in constant change, depending on who is visiting there. By exploring the city on the basis of non-specified patterns – where the visitor becomes part of the plot – Osynliga Teatern opens up the possibility of creating new paths to map and new stories to tell.
HIDDEN ECOLOGY
Imagine that you are walking through a city, and depending on how you move or what you do the sounds around you are changing while you are moving. When you approach a place or move away from it, the sounds you hear change their character.
You will go through this experience, guided by a voice and a GPS system, but as time goes on the voice becomes more and more personalized and together you discover the unexplored places. There is a scent of shipwrecks, concrete, forgotten childhood dreams, and the shadow of a face similar to your own.
You become aware of sounds that do not belong to this place, recorded memories of others who have gone here before you, and you’ll be instructed to leave a trace of yourself. Hidden Echology creates a world where the invisible becomes visible. The Audio Walk will guide you from Färgfabriken and onwards in pairs. After a while, you are instructed to interact with each other and then continue on your own path. A path where your subconscious and the reality slowly melt together. You are encouraged to both listen and see the city in an intimate way, in poetic light.
Together we create a dreamlike narrative that casts down our reference points and our perceptions of things.
An urban experience that gives you the opportunity to stand face-to-face with stories that are hidden in the streets around you. You are invited to discover the many rituals that we otherwise would not notice and that define a new sensory geography.
Svante Pettersson – is a lightning designer highly acclaimed both in Sweden and internationally. For Experiment Stockholm Svante Pettersson has created an installation called Color Trip, a light passage where you as in the city can be transformed and become someone else. In his book SEE THE LIGHT (2015) he shares his philisophy of lightning, addresseing everyone from architects to studenta and DIY enthusiasts.
Read more about
Color Trip
The installation Color Trip by lighting designer Svante Pettersson reflects upon the things that have always attracted people to move to cities. The freedom to think, speak and be whom you want. To get to a safe haven. To get to choose to be alone, completely anonymous, yet still surrounded by people – or to seek a new, self-selected community. It is about how we travel there, but also about how to retrospectively recall our journey.
Svante Pettersson has created a passage that illustrates this type of transformation. The passage moves between the more intellectual case studies in the project rooms and the artistic works of Färgfabrikens main hall. His means of expression is the interaction between the surface colours and artificial light, which is such an important part of our urban environment.