Blog
This week I start a one year digital art fellowship in Sweden.
After doing my MFA in Vienna on girls in the middle east and learning tons of tech and exciting new tools at the masters program New York University’s ITP, I decided to look for a residency.
HUMlab at Umeå university was the perfect choice, cause here I found a space where people from different backgrounds collaborate on creative projects. I will get a studio space at the fine arts department, hang out at the interaction design department and develop my projects at HUMlab, that focuses on offering a meeting place for the humanities and information technology.
I just moved into my new apartment in Umeå, which is gigantic compared to my little nest in New York. From the balcony I have a view over the whole city, in winter hopefully on northern lights! Ele Carpenter is the “other” digital art fellow at HUMlab this year and we will share this space with me.
This weekend I participated in a workshop by futurefarmers hosted by Bildmuseet. That’s the museum for contemporary art in Umeå and is a surprisingly exciting place, that invites critical young artists to organize participatory projects like the one taking place right now: Urban Concerns. A Johannesburg Art Gallery has engaged in a mutual cultural exchange project with Bildmuseet and have opened an on-line video dialogue between the two galleries and countries.
However, I participated in this workshop at Bildmuseet by artist Amy Franceschini, the founder of futurefarmers and was totally surprised to find out that she knows my friends in Braddock, who try to make this dead city of Braddock into an artist and activist city by using the empty houses as studios and getting involved in the community. Small world. I wonder if people in the U.S, who work in the intersection of art, activism and urban strategies all know each other? It is definitely a small number of people who would actually drop out of their daily routines to start a studio/farm/community center in the middle of nowhere. Maybe I become one of them, who knows..
Amy’s workshop was amazing. It started out with little group dynamical practices by the Austrian psychiatrist J.L. Moreno. (He invented the psychodrama as a technique for staging emotions and interactions in groups in order to help to establish more effective behaviour patterns.) After that we went outside the museum and collected plants, which we described and drew. Every participant chose one plant and tried to figure out which neighbors and “networks” this particular plant has. Amy had prepared wooden tools and equipment in style of early botanists and scientists as Carl Linnaeus.
Each participant made up a person whose characteristics mirrowed the plant’s attributes in a human personality. We ended up having around 10 fictional characters.
Amy now wanted us to create an urban structure or architecture for these people to live in.
What are their concerns and needs?
How could they be met?
What are their interactions and relationships like?
We build a funny prototypy model of our utopian city. It was a very nomadic, sustainable and mobile settlement. On Saturday, on the opening of the exhibition, we will show up as those characters and Amy will present her art project.