(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
KRONOTOPIA
The study group Kronotopia consists of eight artists from the art platform Skogen, who participate in the City of Gothenburg's project "Art during the construction of the Western Link". The study group will for two years conduct artistic research of various aspects of the Western Link - social and political, as well as aesthetic. These processes include excursions to construction sites and dialogue with people who are either involved in or affected by the Western Link, such as engineers, archaeologists, city planners, construction workers or residents. Other methods used by the study group are audio and video recording, writing, researching various archives and collegiate conversations
Within the framework of the study group, the participants create works of art based on their individual practices or in smaller collaborative groups. The works of art are presented continuously during 2020-2021, in the form of, for example, printed matter, video works, sound works or performances. During the project, various forms of public and in-depth conversations also take place at Skogen or on the construction sites, based on issues formulated by the study group.
Knowledge and materials created in the process form a collective archive. All the artists in the group are free to continue working with the archive material, which further creates an intertwining of individual and common artistic processes, thinking and learning.
The project "Art during the construction of the Western Link" is a collaboration between the cultural administration and the Traffic Office in the City of Gothenburg.
The study group Kronotopia consists of eight artists from the art platform Skogen, who participate in the City of Gothenburg's project "Art during the construction of the Western Link". The study group will for two years conduct artistic research of various aspects of the Western Link - social and political, as well as aesthetic. These processes include excursions to construction sites and dialogue with people who are either involved in or affected by the Western Link, such as engineers, archaeologists, city planners, construction workers or residents. Other methods used by the study group are audio and video recording, writing, researching various archives and collegiate conversations
Within the framework of the study group, the participants create works of art based on their individual practices or in smaller collaborative groups. The works of art are presented continuously during 2020-2021, in the form of, for example, printed matter, video works, sound works or performances. During the project, various forms of public and in-depth conversations also take place at Skogen or on the construction sites, based on issues formulated by the study group.
Knowledge and materials created in the process form a collective archive. All the artists in the group are free to continue working with the archive material, which further creates an intertwining of individual and common artistic processes, thinking and learning.
The project "Art during the construction of the Western Link" is a collaboration between the cultural administration and the Traffic Office in the City of Gothenburg.
Andreas Engman
Johan Forsman
Benj Gerdes
Annika Lundgren
Rita Nettelstad.
Barrie Sutcliffe
Klas Trollius
Patricia Vane