December, 14 – January, 26, Botkyrka konsthall
Opening: Saturday, December 14 at 12 – 3 pm.
Artists: Ewa Axelrad, Jorun Kugelberg, Elaine Reynolds, Dominic Stevens & Mattias Åkeson.
PART ONE: WHO ARE WE?
We are five artists who had the opportunity, under the Locis programme, to meet together and explore the relationships and potential synergies between our practices. We have each worked with themes concerning the relationships between people and the places they inhabit. More specifically, the relationship between body and space, ideas around architecture as a social product, the ways in which architectural space exerts control and the relationship between formally and informally created space.
PART TWO: BEING IN FITTJA/NOT BEING IN FITTJA
Through periods of immersion and distancing, zooming in and out, we have come to try and understand Fittja. We had two visits and in between we continued our conversations online. During our time apart, Fittja stayed for each of us as an important point of reference for our individual research.
We met with citizens, planners, researchers, people from both within the structures of power and people upon whom that power is visited. Through experiencing streets, shops, fields, people and conversations that were new to us, we have expanded our mental maps of the world and reconfigured our perceptions of the places from which we came.
We see ourselves as outsiders or guests in this place, and our research as being wholly subjective.
PART THREE: PAST FUTURES AND FUTURE FUTURES
Fittja was born of a vision, a dream for a bright new future and its existence is littered with new visions, plans for ‘development’, ‘liftings’ and ‘peoples palaces’.
In keeping with this, we will use the form of the proposal to construct an exhibition that communicates visions of work that we want to realise. Proposals that speak from Fittja but look at a whole spectrum of wider concerns.
“What can be described can also take place”
Wittgenstein: Tractus Logico Philisophicus
Residence Botkyrka through the programme of Locis invited Dominic Stevens to lead a residence in Fittja together with a group of four artists/architects from Sweden, Poland and Ireland. The group met for a workshop in July, and then for a longer stay in October. At the end of the exhibition, 26th January, the group is hosting a one-day seminar.
ABOUT LOCIS
Locis is collaborative arts programme between Leitrim County Council Arts Office, which is the arts department of a rural local authority in Ireland; the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń, which is an arts centre in a large provincial town in Poland; and Residence Botkyrka, which is an artists’ residency programme in a suburb of Sweden’s capital city.
Locis is designed to provide knowledge, resources and opportunities for artists to engage internationally. It further seeks to reinforce the belief that a vibrant arts practice can be maintained from anywhere and that networking across borders can occur from anywhere and with anyone within Europe. The three partner organizations have devised a two-year, three-country artist in residence programme where each country sends and receives a leading artist from their country to work with a group of emerging artists from the three regions.
