Starting from the Middle—Handshaking in Hökarängen

Art Projects as Working Methods for Producing the City Differently

Forfattere

  • Signe Meisner Christensen Kunsten, Aalborg Museum of Modern Art and Dept. of Design, Architecture and Media Technology, Aalborg University

Nøgleord:

contemporary art, gentrification, urban restructuring

Resumé

This text analyses the project Home Works, an art program that took place in 2015–17 in Konsthall C, a contemporary art center in the Stockholm suburb of Hökarängen. The argument of the article is that Home Works can be seen as a socio-material practice of producing the city differently. I thus propose that Home Works provides an example of how art projects hold a potential as methodologies for enacting versions of the city that connect to contemporary social struggles as well as to the right to the city. The text applies a pragmatist, new materialist methodology and proposes that urban realities are enacted through practices and co-shaped by the spatial and architectural environment. Thereby I seek to discuss with an art discourse that has been preoccupied with defining socially engaged art as communicative (as a layer of reality that can be added or removed) and with a trend in urban studies which views temporary art projects as subservient to urban restructurings driven by gentrification. 

Forfatterbiografi

Signe Meisner Christensen, Kunsten, Aalborg Museum of Modern Art and Dept. of Design, Architecture and Media Technology, Aalborg University

Signe Meisner Christensen is an art researcher and curator working in interdisciplinary art-based research. She holds a postdoctoral position at Urban Design, Aalborg University and Kunsten, Aalborg Museum of Art. At Kunsten she directs the project Open, a public platform for collaborative artistic investigations in the city of Aalborg. She teaches at Urban Design and Art and Technology, Aalborg University.

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Publiceret

2020-12-11