(commission)
Huvudgata, park, träd och sten:
En meditation över Västlänken och station Haga genom ljud, text, performance och objekt
(2022)In Huvudgata, park, träd och sten: En meditation över Västlänken och station Haga genom ljud, text, performance och objekt, Klas Trollius and Andreas Engman take as their starting point the West Link and the changed living environment that an infrastructure project like this entails.
Inspired by literature, music and art from the 1950s and 60s in particular, the artists have experimented with mixing methods and materials, such as text, objects, music and images, and then combining them in various spatial collage-like forms. A starting point for these processes has been to work with concrete material taken from everyday life.
Rather than being a contribution to the debate on the West Link, the artists explore what would happen if the West Link's subconscious were allowed to speak? The work features voices from official planning documents, personal reflections and the inner thoughts of an urban development project.
Specifically, a detailed plan and the regulations of the future Haga station has been used to compose a kind of meditation on the language and spatiality of the West Link. Here, the visitor is invited to approach Haga station in meditation by touching and feeling its various materials such as trees and Bohus granite, etc. A meditation object is designed to make it more inviting to feel the weight of granite in your hands, on your knees, on your shoulders or on your head. The interactive installation and soundtrack explores the relationship between the tedious slowness of meditation and the streamlining of everyday life that an urban development project like the West Link promises to the city's inhabitants.
In a performance that spans the entire day, parts of the texts are transferred to stones and wooden boards. Some of these texts are included in a publication and on loose pages for visitors to read. A material is accumulated during the day, and built upon during the subsequent public events of the project.
This performance and installation follows from the Dance Armstrong and The Log Sessions work shown at Skogen in the fall of 2021 that also was under the umbrella of the Kronotopia project. This time in public space the Dance Armstrong figure re-emerges as the custodian and host of the site specific meditation.
The work is presented in and around a costumized container in public space at Haga Kyrkoplan in Gothenburg.
You can listen to the meditation here!!
Kronotopia