To visit the official Färgfabriken site on Marvels and Catastrophes visit this LINK.

Marvels & Catastrophes is an interdisciplinary artist collective that was launched in 2018 as an act of defiance, in the hope of creating an alternative set of creative strategies capable of addressing the increasing disastrous effects of climate change. The premise was, and remains, simple: there is a body of unassailable science, concerning human agency and climate change, that clearly is not gaining the kind of broad consensus that is urgently needed to bring humanity together in common cause. Marvels and Catastrophes was established to examine not just the science, but to go further by exploring how earlier historic precedents and generational narratives worked to bind together populations and their cultures in the past. History shows that science and myth have always coexisted. Convincing the world population to work together on such a grand scale needs more than communicating the science. We also need to invent ways to fuel our imagination to act in concert. Our strategy then is to imagine, toy, and develop ideas, designs and concepts that can pull us out of this most difficult quagmire.

Unfortunately, we are now in the second year of the Covid19 global pandemic, where it would seem that the tragic evidence of what unchecked human activity can bring about on itself is undeniable. And yet conspiracy theories, false science, unregulated capital, bad politics and a shockingly weak social contract continues to undermine collective action. Marvels and Catastrophes, as a work collective, hopes to counter these widely held myths with a more critically constructive set of propositions that would work on more positive outcomes. The virus, a symbol of when the last vestiges of the wild encroached upon and overrun by human negligence, can also be a sort of diagram for resistance.

/Peter Lang, founder of Marvels & Catastrophes

The group Marvels & Catastrophes are participants in and contributors to the Listen project, but their work will also be represented in the the Symbiosis-exhibition. Through the artist group, Listen is integrated into the Symbios project, which creates synergies between the two processes.

Participants

Ana Barata Martins (Lisbon) is a visual artist based in Stockholm whose practice is focused in essay-films, site-specific installations, textile printings and field research. The main interests that inform her work are diverse such as post-colonial social phenomena, local folklore and vernacular knowledge, and the concept of the herbarium as a method to rethink narratives and behaviours that romanticise nature.

Cristina Ferreira (Lisbon) lives and works in Poznań, Poland and has a B.A in painting by the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon and M.F.A in Painting by the University of Fine Arts of Poznań. She works on the themes of displacement and alienation mainly through performances, installations and participatory projects. She has performed in both theatre and museum contexts.

Sofia Larsson is a landscape architect based in Stockholm. In the expansion of her professional role she uses artistic and conceptual methods to explore materializations of power and values in the built environment.

Åsa Agerstam is a designer and interior architect based in Stockholm. Agerstam understands her work as objects with their own dramaturgy. She often works with systems of thoughts or a family of objects rather than within singularities and has an ongoing love affair with materiality.

Vesna Salamon is a Croatian artist based in Stockholm and Zagreb, whose work bridges the realms of environmental science and cultural history. The focus of her work also addresses environmental issues by hinting at the danger of the human impact on nature. Her objects are communicating with contemporary issues such as pollution, consummation and Anthropocene and showing both the strength and fragility of humanity.

Jérôme Malpel / Iris Lacoudre / Grégoire Deberdt / Antoine Plouzen Morvan
Three architects and a filmmaker get together to explore the narratives of architecture. They formed an artistic collective in Paris after studying and working in various countries (Japan, India, Brasil, Argentina, Sweden). By combining the practices of architecture and documentary filmmaking, the group is portraying the way our lives shape the spaces we live in.

Andres Villarreal is a Swedish-Colombian artist, filmmaker and writer who lives and works between Stockholm and Berlin. Villarreal’s practice often explores the relationship between representation and production of reality; and deals with questions relating to time, narration and memory. The work,using film, photography, installation and text, is often situated in the borderland between fact and fiction.

Alexander Paulsson (PhD.) is based in Malmo, Sweden and teaches and writes about political economy, the politics of ecology, and the making and consequences of science and technology. Being trained in the fields of history, politics and business, Paulsson combines the study of the urban environment, administrative devices and ecological processes with the history of economic and political concepts.

Gustav Karlsson is a planning architect based in Stockholm. He’s the founder of Scapeous arkitekter, a spatial planning studio exploring the borderlands of perceived spatial transition.

Gerda Persson is an architect, living and working in Stockholm. For Marvels and Catastrophes, Persson researches the old industrial area of Lövholmen, a piece of land that tells a story of the massive and constant human activity of reshaping our environment.

Bo Pilo is an interior architect based in Stockholm. Pilo obtained his Master Degree in interior architecture and furniture design at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm in 2014. Together with architect Gerda Persson, Pilo founded the architectural office Persson Pilo Arkitektkontor in 2020.

Florence Taché is an architect based in Paris. Her work investigates possible frictions between architecture and contemporary environmental uncertainties. Current research explores how shifting paradigms and narratives in our relationship with nature are questioning the ways in which we design and inhabit our built environments.

Dates & Locations

May 25 – June 6 2021, Marvels & Catastrophes are invited to Färgfabriken’s Open Studio-program, as part of the Listen-project.

NOTE: Special opening hours

May 25–27, Tuesday – Thursday at 11–4 pm
May 28, Friday at 11–8 pm
May 29–30, Saturday – Sunday at 11– 5 pm
June 1–3, Tuesday – Thursday at 11– 4 pm
June 4, Friday, at 11–8 pm
June 5–6, Saturday – Sunday at 11– 4 pm

No pre-booking necessary, but you might have to wait shortly to enter if there are many visitors before you.

Admission is free!