Displacement and Hospitality

Wandering and Walking methodologies

Bring your best walking boots and join us for the upcoming Displacement and Hospitality working group meeting this September. We will spend the day both inside and outside, trying out different approaches to Wandering and Walking with presentations by:

Nisrine Boukhari – UmArts Artist Researchers in Residence this fall, Nisrine is an artist-theorist, lives in Vienna and Stockholm. In her art-based research projects, she uses language to invoke a distinctive mind’s energy on discovering a new terrain of the imagination implicating the body as well as the mind in an immersive poetic and conceptual experience by using conceptual writing, fragmentation and deconstructed narrative.
Her artistic practice emerged from the study of the art walking through the mental driven movement of the body into different aspects. In recent years, she uses the drifting mind as part of her long-term research on the state of Mind-Wandering where she investigates the effects of trauma on the human psyche and the use of the artistic practice in a therapeutic trajectory on how as an artist can create visual/textual environments where viewers experience their own perceptual processing through the art experience. Thus, Boukhari has coined the term Wanderism and announced as a State of Mind.

Juanma González – artist born in Madrid that currently works and resides in Stockholm. Founder of Flat Octopus, an artist-run collective started in 2019.

“Since the late 1970s, Permaculture has attempted to find creative solutions to the current ecological, energy and social crisis from a critical, intuitive and constructive view. With the subtitle “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, the first principle focuses on an inner exploration of oneself in order to generate a new way of understanding and interpreting our relationship with ourselves and the place where we live; what makes me feel good will also make others feel good, both people and nature. Using walking as an art production method, I created two situations in the form of journeys where participants were actively involved in an exploration to discover nature and the urban environment from a new perspective and to reflect how we relate and react to it.”

Linda Sandström – social geographer, have a PhD in Geography and work as an associate professor. Linda does research on spaces’ of gendered fear of violence, intersections of race and gender, and planning for safe urban environments.

For more details contact UmArts research coordinator Clara West at clara.west@umu.se or Working group chair Lisa Nyberg at Lisa.nyberg@umu.se

The event will take place alongside Daniel Movilla Vega’s installation work in progress at UmArts, Strangers at Home. The project is exploring how volunteer housing support for asylum seekers in Sweden is reshaping domestic architecture.  

Programme

13.00 Welcome and introductions

13.10 Daniel MV walk through Strangers at Home – a work in progress.

13.30 Madeleine Eriksson – Scales of Ordering Labour

13.50 Discussion

14.00 Break

14.15 Moving North Presentation and film

14.45 Discussion about all the projects

15.00 End

Madeleine Eriksson will present her current research into  Scales of ordering labor: the economic landscapes of supply chain capitalism, in partnership with Andreas Nuottaniemi, looking into several temporary barrack-villages springing up in Skellefteå, mainly to house international labor migrants hired by subcontractors. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in a barrack villages, the aim is to explore how workers shape economic spaces and landscapes, and to scrutinize the spaces and landscapes that they must inhabit and endure (Mitchell 2011).

We will then screen the Moving North film, and have a roundtable discussion about the issues arising through our research practices.

The group will also discuss ways of commemorating Palestinian artists and writers who have been killed in the genocide in Gaza, to honour their lives and works.

Madeleine Eriksson & Andreas Nuottaniemi: Scales of ordering labor: the economic landscapes of supply chain capitalism.

Following decades of neglect and a decline in population, numerous locations in northern Sweden have transformed into hubs for various “green” megaprojects. Among these enterprises, the establishment of a new battery plant in the municipality of Skellefteå has gained considerable attention. Despite local expectations, it has become increasingly clear that the companies’ accelerated time plan ignores the time needed to plan sustainably for the expected population increase.

In the municipality, several temporary barrack-villages are now springing up, mainly to house international labor migrants hired by subcontractors. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in a barrack village, the aim is to explore how workers shape economic spaces and landscapes, and to scrutinize the spaces and landscapes that they must inhabit and endure (Mitchell 2011). These are landscapes shaped not by the workers themselves but through the global ordering of migrant labor in supply chain capitalism (Tsing 2009). Different from previous large-scale industrial developments in Sweden (Schön 2012), the new megaprojects produce a labor landscape which pays little attention to the importance of people’s life situations, and broader social contexts (Bhattacharya 2017).

Bhattacharya, T. (2017) Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Edited by T Bhattacharya, Pluto Press.

Mitchell, D. (2011). Labor’s geography: Capital, violence, guest workers and the post‐World War II landscape. Antipode, 43(2), 563-595.

Schön, L. (2012). An economic history of modern Sweden. Routledge.

Tsing, A. (2009). Supply chains and the human condition. Rethinking Marxism, 21(2), 148-176.

The Moving North group introduced their short film and research process at the Transformations 22 Conference ‘Artistic Research in a Time of Change’ at Vetenskapens hus, Luleå University of Technology, 17-18 November 2022.

UmArts interdisciplinary practice-based research in art, design and architecture addresses freedoms which are directly related to human rights and responsibilities.

At the Free to Create European Conference on Artistic Freedom evening program of events at the Arts Campus –  UmArts presented two projects that investigate the politics of public space. The projects raise questions of who has access to public space and whose rights and freedoms need protecting?

Folketsstad: A city of many parts, 2022 (17”40)

Screening in the Architecture School Auditorium

The Folketsstad film documents a group process of researching social inclusion in the city of Skellefteå in Northern Sweden. The film raises difficult questions about migration, social cohesion and displacement, highlighting who is included and who is excluded from the rapidly expanding development of Sweden’s northern cities. The new employment opportunities open doors for many, but at the same time we see how legal boundaries create extreme forms of social exclusion. Traveling to designated refugee housing on the outskirts of cities demonstrates the processes of bordering and a distance created by national legislation and societal processes. These questions concern migration legislation at the national and European level. This UmArts research project was supported by: Vision i Norr New European Bauhaus project, ArkDes and Vinnova.

The Winter Garden

Umeå School of Architecture

The Winter Garden is an experiment to reactivate public space using an inflatable structure that can be used indoors and outside. The project explores how participatory urban winter gardens can have a regenerative social impact in Nordic urban contexts and how temporary structures can help us formulate new architectural languages. The project is transdisciplinary collaboration at the intersection of culture, art, architecture, human interaction and environmental science, addressing the climate emergency.  This UmArts Small Visionary Project has been developed by Alejandro Haiek Coll and Maria Luna Nobile at Umeå School of Architecture, in partnership with: UX Lab at the Department of Informatics, and the Department of Environmental Sciences.