Urban Intervention
re-(t)exHile
re-(t)exHile is a research device that acts and reflects on the idea of the body as an inhabited territory, a physical and symbolic space where struggles, resistance, and social, political, and economic inheritances are reflected. This place of dispute is also a refuge, a minimum space for transformation and care.
Our project moves forward to investigate concepts such as identity and border through the medium of a flag with the inscription of the word outsider. Outsider is a work that has traveled through different geographies. Dislocating its function, the piece – the flag – is never located in a fixed place. It moves physically and alters its function, ranging from a refuge, blanket, wrap, and sometimes acting as a roof. Far from marking a stable space, the flag’s movement indicates the randomness of its limits.
On the occasion of the 4th edition of Lagos biennale, with the theme Refuge, we take this concept further by investigating the problem of textile waste that travels from the Global North to the Global South disguised as second-hand clothing. As a result of the "Fast fashion" phenomenon, consumption and overproduction of textiles, countries from the Global North send tons of second-hand clothes to African countries. Many of these cheap clothes end up once their short lives are over: on huge dump sites, burnt on open fires, along riverbeds and washed out into the sea, with severe consequences for people and the planet. By creating an installation in the air space, we make a minimal refuge exploring textile architecture through a piece produced with almost 500 second-hand textile material bought at the Katangwa market in Lagos.
Through a collective sewing action carried out by our team together with local collaborators, the piece was shaped throughout the duration of the biennial. The processual nature of the project was gradually modifying the shape of the refuge as we sew together and add parts to the flag.
The project aims to make visible the exploitative patterns shaped by the colonial legacy embedded in the secondhand trade and to advocate for sustainable fashion practices.
Project by: Maria Alejandra Gatti, Martinka Bobrikova, Oscar de Carmen, Anto Lloveras.
In lagos the project was joined by Adebola Badmus, the Creative Director of DSA LAGOS, and her team: Andrew Tokpo, Michael Laly, Tomiwa Oseni, Ayomide Adewale, Lateefa Abdul-Azeez, Abike Ibrahim, Rachael Akeju.
Special thanks goes to Ebunoluwa Orebanjo and Timilehin Oludare Osanyintolu.
The project is supported using public funding by
Acción Cultural Española AC/E,
OCA- Office Contemporary Art Norway,
Slovak Arts Council, Norwegian Crafts
The Migrant Assembly #4
UNITED BY PING-PONG was the title of the 4th public event within The Migrant Assembly at the square of Schous Plass, in the heart of Grünerløkka. The event was be organised as a ping-pong tournament for and by the community of Oslo Streetpingpong.
The event followed the basic interaction of the ping pong game, through direct meetings between the players/contributors, being the ping-pong tables the main facilitator for these meetings. The contributors were individuals that regularly gathers around the tables throughout the year, so the tournament was also mark an end to the season.
Through the tournament, from planning to realization, the sense of community was reinforced, as the contributors had to solve challenges trough discussion, debate and consensus. The vecinity to Christmas implied also an additionally opportunity to further reinforce the bonds between the community.
The event was realized with contribution by Javier Ernesto Auris Chavez, Niclas Nacka Jonsson, Grels Eriksson, Karin Persson, Åsmund Hasli and many more on behalf of Oslo Streetpingpong and the curator Maria Alejandra Gatti.
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Photo: : Jacky Jaan-Yuan Kuo
more about Oslo Streetpingpong
more about The Migrant Assembly
The Migrant Assembly is funded and supported by KORO – Public Art Norway
The Migrant Assembly #3
Round Table Cooking: The Neighbourhood Meeting was the title for a public event in Oslo, Tøyen, in the small park at the end of Håkan’s gate. The event was organised as a neighbourhood meeting on a Sunday afternoon. The event was based on cooking a soup together, where each guest contributes one ingredient, typical or special for our “neighborhood soup”. While cutting, preparing and cooking we will also open up some questions related to our neighborhood’s present situation and its possible future; for e.g, who are our neighbours? How much do we know each other? Can we as neighbours support and respect each other regardless of differences, working together towards creating a strong community, helping each other and enjoy the benefits of cultural diversity?
Through this meal, we are aiming to create a space where varying opinions can be shared, discussed and debated.
The event was produced in collaboration with Apolonija Šušteršič, Sarah Kazmi, Njokobok (Youssou Diop) and curator Maria Alejandra Gatti.
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Photo: : Jacky Jaan-Yuan Kuo
more about The Migrant Assembly
The Migrant Assembly is funded and supported by KORO – Public Art Norway
The Migrant Assembly #2
Reunion of memories: A read assembly
hosting “Reunión”, a project by Dani Zelko with local Oslo guests: Ekaterina Sharova, Liv Brissach, Maritea Dæhlin, Sarakka Gaup, Ihra Lill Scharning, Yildiz Yalcin in collaboration with curator Maria Alejandra Gatti.
REUNION is composed of various acts that involve conversation, reading and writing: daily actions –though at the same time out of the ordinary- that always involve being face to face. Dani Zelko writes down poems that others dictate to him. They dictate to him as the conversation develops and then finally ceases. After fulfilling his task as a listener and copyist, he edits the books the following day and prints them with his backpack-printer. The writer reads his poems out loud, he listens to himself and the others hear him for the first time.
On the occasion of The Migrant Assembly, a selection of poems linked to contexts of emergencies, migration, borders and language, will be read aloud by people from the city of Oslo who would end their body, eyes and voice to read in a round of nine chairs the poems of people who are absent. A chain of actions, subjects dictating and reading, a scribe and a listener, spokesmen and listeners, books and poems. Actions and procedures for being with others.
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Photo: : Jacky Jaan-Yuan Kuo
more about Reunion
more about The Migrant Assembly
The Migrant Assembly is funded and supported by KORO – Public Art Norway
The Migrant Assembly #1
PARTICIPATORY IMAGINARIES FOR REST AND THE FUTURE OF RETIREMENT was a one-day assembly in public space focusing on interrogating the current retirement policies for Norway’s artists. In particular for nonEU/EEA artists living and working in the country as professionals who lack the right to a ‘patchwork economy’—that is the impossibility of having multiple and diverse sources of income beyond the arts’ economies.
Tackling current and real issues for artists’ communities is urgent, however not enough in an increasingly jeopardizing future. We must create new protocols of economic solidarity to provide long-term alternatives to secure livelihoods and artistic practices. Furthermore, we need to question bureaucratic regimes’ high-performance imposition upon artists and refuse institutionalized exhaustion. Is it even possible to rest when our livelihood depends on our hyper-productivity in the form of capital? Here ‘rest’, slowing down, and napping might become an early self-given retirement beneft, and a form of resistance.
The Assembly was produced in collaboration with Verdensrommet network , Rodrigo Ghattas, Jodi Rose, Karina Slettstad and curator Maria Alejandra Gatti.
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Photo: : Jacky Jaan-Yuan Kuo
more about Verdensrommet
more about The Migrant Assembly
The Migrant Assembly is funded and supported by KORO – Public Art Norway
Deconstructing an explicit content
Although we usually avoid looking at waste as the natural resources we are exploiting, we are all causing environmental destruction. Most of us appeal to an immersion in the nature as an escape route from the city, towards a type of landscape that often has to do with visualizing a natural paradise where the hand of man is not perceived.
The project talks about the needs that we currently have to understand another type of landscape. From the idea of generating a work of art and the representation of a landscape we want to build a landscape from different points of view, and at the same time execute a landscape as a political statement within the idea of definition of a sustainable landscape.
Sometimes it is believed that only an urban plan is enough where the new streets or parks in the city force to pose a new territory, but within the scale of the process has been expanding a new type of landscape within the definition of territory coined as exurban or peri-urban. In this type of territory lies another type of landscape, in many of them the landscape we find is a hodgepodge between the city and the countryside where natural infrastructure is mixed with an anthropic infrastructure of human waste.
We propose to rescue the idea of visualizing a landscape sometimes hidden in our memory, when we walk through a landscape constructed by the hand of man, where we avoid viewing unregulated landscapes caused by decontextualized fragments of a landscape that lives with our waste.
An increasingly common landscape, where the remains of productive or extractive activities are displayed.
Part of (x)sites - land art exhibition, Svenljunga, Sweden, 2018
more about (x)sites project HERE
OUTSIDER
We started from the idea of developing, in the allocated area, a series of spaces where the management of various human activities cause the least possible impact on other species and on the terrain itself; Posing a unique area of coexistence and confluence, a matrix for the world through an alliance between art and biocentrism, where the collective practice of social production and reproduction becomes social transformation, including the biological sphere. The group of actions that will take place between these elements has no limit. There is incompatibility, community, asylum and discord, decay, rupture and degradation, or collapse without rapprochement. There are coincidences and estrangements that make possible the presence of diversity.
The project is part of Agrikultura Triennial that is organized by Kulturföreningen Triennal, and curated by Marek Walczak and Amanda McDonald Crowley in July-August 2017 in Hyllie, Malmö.
The project was realised with a generous support of Nordic Culture Point.
strategies to minimize the error
“Strategies to minimize the error” - Dumpster-diving tactical action planning for a citizen hacker is a collective and intergenerational practice of social production and reproduction. With this project we are making a recipe for dumpster-diving. In the recipe we describe all necessary steps one needs to know to locate the food surplus commonly found in the containers of the supermarkets. The recipe is intended to function as a tool to develop a work beyond the institutions. The idea is to develop a recipe by the citizens for themselves intended to produce new strategies of collaborative consumption open to economic sustainability. To carry out the recipe, citizens who already recycle and dumpster-dive in the city of Copenhagen participated in the process in the weeks before Alt_Cph. We have developed a series of activities related to the conservation and degustation of the surpluses, and raise the use of the assigned space at The Factory of Art and Design during our stay as an open social space, where have developed the work of collaboration with the community through neighborhood activities.
The project was commissioned by Råderum for Alt_Cph Cross_Cuts during Copenhagen Art Week in 2016.
photos: Pernille Johansson, Martinka Bobrikova
1000 bottles of tap water
Norway has the second best quality of tap water in the world, provided for its citizens. A few years ago, a report on Norwegian television questioned the source of water used by the luxury bottled Voss brand. Supposedly these uniquely designed bottles are filled with water from the urban network, the same one that caters the city of Iveland. 1000 bottles of tap water; Intends to generate, for a limited period of time, a social ecosystem outside of everyday consumption. The intervention will be carried through the re-appropriation of a common consumer product; bottled water. Handcrafted tap water will be bottled, to explore the concept of Utopia and setting a value of transition from the current power in the economic sphere. The intervention provides 1000 free water bottles filled from Oslo tap water to people circulating in the surroundings of the central train station in Oslo.
The project was commissioned by Kunst Vardo for FEED festival 9-24 APRIL in Oslo.
Photo credits: Ayatgali Tuleubek, Eirik Slyngstad
Do It YourSelf
Kitchen dialogues come from the idea of lounging around the kitchen outside of the consumption system through the alternative of creating various social interactions. The project aims to change consumer sensory intellectual concept of overproduction of food from supermarkets. Apart of that, we also like to focus on another aspect of the project, which involves transport/ smuggling of waste though, Europe. Not only we personally hunt the food in the local dumpsters, but we also move the food from place to place to offer to different audience variety of products not possible to gather in the that place. The formula we seek in Kitchen dialogues is that people can taste "the problem of surplus".
The project has as a reference “Food” of Gordon Matta-Clark, Rirkrit Tiravanija relational works, Dieter Roth, “Eat Art” of Daniel Spoerri, “Food Cultura” by Antonio Miralda or Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Fillia's “Manifesto of Futurist Cooking”.
The exhibition is part of a larger project that has taken part and form in many different way around Europe and Asia. shown at Trailer gallery in Umeå, Sweden in march 2015.
The Protester
This sound documentation presents an urban intervention, which took place in Malmö on the 29th of March, 2012, between 12pm -2pm.
Through a powerful sound system installed in a danish van used for demonstration in Copenhagen, we drove through the city projecting the sound of a crowd. “The Protest” started in Möllevångstorget and proceeded towards Triangeln, Föreningsgatan, Amiralsgatan and then surrounded the old town with 2 breaks at Stortorget and Gustav Adolfs Torg with a final stop in Triangeln.
The installation presents 8 sound tracks of documentation recorded during the event. The first 5 tracks, in chronological order, were recorded during the first 20 minutes of walking from Möllevångstorget to Triangeln. The next 3 tracks refer to the part between the breaks at Stortorget and Gustav Adolfs Torg.
36 Grocery
36 groceries questions enhancement and development, current production models and existing consumption in the first world. Market strategies no consistent with the sustainability of our natural resources.
The current laws and prosecutions of the control of food quality within international agencies and government policies, require the food companies, food logistic parks and supermarkets to scrap food products containing any deterioration in its wrapper or container, and food products without being perishable at the moment.
We are showing 36 food products with some deterioration in its wrapper or container in 5 advertising show cases of the Gothenburg University. These food products were collected in a trash containers of the Swedish supermarket company "Willy’s”.
