Starting from the Middle—Handshaking in Hökarängen

Art Projects as Working Methods for Producing the City Differently

Authors

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

Keywords:

contemporary art, gentrification, urban restructuring

Abstract

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. 

Author Biography

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.

References

Andersson, Ola: “Utan självklara möten ingen vi-känsla” in Texter om Stockholm och andra städer 1996-2016, Stockholm, Dokument press, 2017.
Butler, Judith and Athanasiou, Athena: Dispossession: The Performative and the Political, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2013.
Bishop, Claire: Artificial Hells, Participatory art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London, Verso Books, 2012.
Boltanski, Luc & Chiapello, Eve: The New Spirit of Capitalism, (trans. Elliott, G.), London & New York, Verso, 2007.

Borén, Thomas & Young, Craig: “Artists as Planners? Identifying Five Conceptual Spaces for Interactive Urban Development” in Murzyn-Kupisz & Dzialek, (eds.) The Impact of Artists on Contemporary Urban Development in Europe, Springer, 2017, pp. 299–314.
Colomb, Claire: “Pushing the Urban Frontier, “Temporary Uses of Space, City Marketing, and the Creative City Discourse in 2000s Berlin,” Journal of Urban Affairs, vol, 34, 2012, pp. 131–152.
Coleman, Rebecca & Ringrose, Jessica (eds.): Deleuze and Research Methodologies, Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
Dabaieh, M., & Alwall, J.: “Building now and building back. Refugees at the centre of an occupant driven design and construction process” in Sustainable Cities and Society, 37, 2018, pp. 619–627.
De Angelis, Massimo: The Beginning of History, Value Struggle and Global Capital, London, Pluto Press, 2007.
Deutsche, Rosalyn: Evictions, Art and Spatial Politics, Cambridge MA, London, The Mit Press, 1998.
Esche, Charles: “The Possibility Forum – Institutional Change and Modest Proposals” in On Curating, Issue 14, 2012, pp. 36–40.
Evans, Graeme: “Creative Cities, Creative Spaces, and Urban Policy” in Urban Studies, 46, 1003– 1040, 2009.
Frederici, Silvia: Revolution at Point Zero, Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle, Common Notions, New York, 2012.
Farías, Ignacio & Bender, Thomas, (eds.): Urban Assemblages, How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies, Routledge, 2010.
Foster, Hal: The Return of the Real, Cambridge Mass., London, The MIT Press, 1996.
Harvey, David: Rebel Cities, From the Right to the City to The Urban Revolution, Verso, 2013.
Kindgreen, Anna and Gunnars, Carina: “Konsten att sätta en plats på kartan och konsekvenserna därutav”, in Konsthall C, 10 år – en ofullständig historia, 2015, pp. 4–15.
Kwon, Miwon: One Place after Another, Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge MA & London, The MIT Press, 2004.
Jensen, Ole B: “Branding the Contemporary City – Urban Branding as Regional Growth Agenda”, Regional Studies Association Conference, Aalborg, May 28–31, 2005.
Lacy, Suzanne: “Cultural Pilgrimage and Metaphoric Journeys” in Mapping the Terrain, New Genre Public Art, Seattle, Washington, Bay Press, 1995, pp. 19–50.
Laister, Judith, Lederer, Anton, Makovec, Margarethe (eds): The Art of Urban Intervention, Loecker Erhard Verlag, 2013.
Ley, David: “Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification” in Urban Studies vol. 40. No. 12, 2003, pp. 2527–2544.
Lund, Kristina: Tvättstugan, en svensk historia, Stockholm, Nordiska Museets Forlag, 2009.
Lippard, Lucy R.: Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press, 1973.
Nyström, Louise & Lundström, Mats Johan: “The Life and Death and Life of Great Neighbourhood Centres”, in Built Environment 32(1), 2006, pp. 32–52.
Massey, Doreen: For Space, Sage, 2005.
Mol, Annemarie: “Ontological Politics. A Word and Some Questions” in Law and Hassard (eds.) Actor Network Theory and After, London and New York, Routledge, 1999, pp. 74–89.
Mumford, Eric: Defining Urban Design, CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline, 1937-69, Yale University Press, 2009.
Olney, Eve: “Collective Design: Moving Sovial Art Practice Beyond Representational Rehearsals Into Concrete Social Solutions”, in Mader & Meisner (eds.) New Infrastructures, Passepartout, Aarhus, 2020.
Petrescu, Doina, Trogal, Kim: The Social (Re)Production of Architecture, Politics, Values and Actions in Contemporary Practice, Routledge, 2017.
Pritchard, Stephen: “Place Guarding: Activist Art Against Gentrification” in Courage, C. & McKeown, A. (ed.): Place Making: Research, Theory and Practice, Routledge, London, 2018.
Richards, J. & Strandberg, J. (eds.): Home Works – A Cooking Book: Recipes for Organising with Art and Domestic Work, Onomatopee Publications, Eindhoven, 2020.
Rolnik, Suely: “The Geopolitics of Pimping” in Raunig, Ray & Wuggenig (eds.) Critique of Creativity, Precarity, Subjectivity and Restistance in the ‘Creative Industries’ 2011, pp. 23–39.
Sheikh, Simon: “Burning from the Inside – New Institutionalism Revisited” in Bismarck, Beatrice von, Schafaff, Jørn & Weski, Thomas, (eds.) Cultures of the Curatorial, Leipzig, Sternberg Press, 2010, pp. 361–372.
Sigler, Friederike (ed.): Work, Documents of Contemporary Art, London, White Chapel, 2017.
Virno, Paolo: A Grammar of the Multitude, for an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, (trans. Bertoletti, I., Cascaito, J and Casson, A.), Semiotext(e), 2001.
Yaneva, Albena: Five Ways to Make Architecture Political, An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice, London, Bloomsbury, 2017.

Downloads

Published

2020-12-11