Image: Gerda Persson, Screen capture from video transmission, Google Hangouts.

DAY 1.

The Session began with a brief introduction to the Färgfabriken Open Studio Program presented by Daniel Urey and Karin Englund. The Open Studio Program will be welcoming R-Lab in the coming Spring semester, and student participants will debate and develop public events conceived around Nordic Hazardlands and the Countryside Unfolds, the twin themes undergoing a prolonged exploration conducted by R-Lab.

In quick summary the students covered a range of distinct issues, but common themes among the presentations were nevertheless distinguishable. Gerda Persson presented a series of related questions regarding the abandoned and now destined for demolition factory building, the Spredfabriken, a early Swedish avant-garde building designed by the architect Nils Tesch with a curiously large bomb shelter below. Spredfabriken is located in the same Cimenta neighbourhood as the Färgfabriken, where R-Lab will be conducting it public sessions in association with the Konsthall’s Open Studio program this coming Spring. Gerda  diagrammed the speculative real-estate  process,  linking  tunnels, landfills and shelters using circular logic to depict speculative real estate practices in Stockholm that have been reshaping the city with little public debate.

Anna Risell’s presentation the power of daydreaming was also inextricably connected to the urban and countryside landscapes. She chose to present her earlier video with an original soundtrack. The reviewers, including Malin Heyman and Isabel Lofgren, commented on the role of the observer and the observed, pointing out the works of Bachelard and the altered meaning in French of the word “harzard.”  It was also pointed out that the rhythm and pacing of the film, the way in which Anna attempted to evoke familiar and unfamiliar spaces, would also help determine how the use of video clip montage  can  assist in producing altered strategies for perception.

Veronica Skeppe quickly jumped into the political waters with her reflections on the role of the red cottage in Swedish rising middle class culture, the adaption of a particularly Swedish Rusticus style and the introduction of a strangely  misplaced stylistic reference to white Mexi architecture. One of the more disputable issues raised by Veronica was the red iron based color produced in Falun, that was she described as being characterised as blood rock, or blood of the nation.   A discussion ensued on the tangibility of materials and the flows of identity. Isabel introduced the work of Vilhem Flusser and his resistance to kistch readings on nationalism.

Image: Veronica Skeppe, Screen capture from video transmission, Google Hangouts.

Anna Asplind’s experimental “Operation Stockholm” which consisted of organising a bus ride taking  an officially designated escape route outside Stockholm, was a sort of  preview of the kind of project that could integrate evacuation strategies within the overarching subject of potential disasters. Anna also considered the ramifications of underground food growth and human post-disaster survival.

Ana Barata, on the other hand, presented her initial investigations on her native Portugal, examining first Mozambique and Angola through a collection of colonial era  postcards, shifting her gaze in the process back to Portugal to document remaining traces of anti Salazar graffiti found across the capital of Lisbon. And Orestis, to conclude the evening’s session, proposed a reading list based on his work on the transformation of the landscape through the spread of digital-data based industries whose monumental size and scale is significantly changing the interface zones  between labor and landscape. In particular Orestis’ focus’ on the shipping industry provoked a valuable response from Malin Heyman, who brought up the deep linguistic and cultural connections between land and ships.

DAY 2.

Elena Mazzi’s personal experiences with earthquakes  while living in Italy influenced her interest in studying the aftereffects of earthquakes and also volcanos. These initial projects led to further studies on the human species under extreme conditions. Behzad Khosravi brought up questions on site specificity–just how significant was the singular context in relation to the body, while James-Taylor Foster recognised in Elena’s anatomical investigations the possibility of returning to more vestigial evolutionary states in earlier pre-historical life.

Image: Elena Mazzi, Day 2.

Seed banks were introduced into the day’s session by Lea Vene, whose perspective on the subject spanned from large seed vaults with major corporate funding sources to locally run community scale collections. With a 70% loss in bio-diversity in recent years, the question of seed archiving may appear increasingly urgent for longterm human and animal survival, though it could also be true that these grand projects are countering more grounded responses to the problem. Dougald Hine noted that in principle they remain survivalist strategies, and the storage of grains are not necessarily linked to human liberty, but most likely the opposite, agriculture can easily be seen as a form of control over nature and man.

Image: Bo Pilo presenting on day 2, with Behzad Khosravi.

Bo Pilo introduced his investigation into a possible world where today’s advanced GPS mapping systems collapse, leaving society to pick up more rudimentary forms of navigational assistance. Behzad Khosravi pointed out the significance of the GPS map, and picking up on Bo Pilo’s concerns for action and agency he pointed out that we are prodded by our phones every  month to look back at our history of activities.   James Hamilton, in characterising Pilo’s thesis as taking an analog turn to digital failure, commenting that he would see Bo Pilo’s objectives enhanced not only by the where, but the when. Dougald Hine, in noting the role of guidebooks in preparing the way for travellers and their barely disguised fear of asking directions from locals, which has only gotten more extreme through the reliance on GPS, further degrading human relations. Yet Hine asks if there could be technologies of ‘entanglement?’ James Taylor Foster channeled the ever-expanding surveillance of the control society precisely through these digital forms of mapping, but also drew us to role of attention as a commodity.

Image Asa Agerstam, December 7.

Asa Agerstam’s approach to her research reflected some of the concerns with the direction of the course, mainly about the northern countryside. Agerstam spoke about her earlier interest in Prepper communities, that  gained a new kind of ironic relevancy with the fires spreading this summer across northern Scandinavia. She began to research the farming of forests, used mainly in this region for paper production- that looked to her like so much bar code. But she also questioned the diminishing spirituality among the Scandinavian  population, something James Taylor Foster picked up on when he spoke of how surviving in the woods had become so popular today, at least as seen in the top ranked  YouTube series from Austrialia the “Primitive Hut.” The designed forests could be correlated to the absence, again according to Foster, of spiritual faith. Dougald Hine brought up a bit of history on the farming of forests, introduced in Germany at the turn of the 19th century, where farming reflected the economic demands in accordance with growth charts and accounting sheets.

Gustav Karlsson worked on making a wave diagram that would illustrate his thoughts on what he refers to as “Real Fantasies,” where apocalyptic visions cyclically intersect with real and possibly fatal outcomes. In other words according to Karlsson, his goal is to be able to reach a moment where the future, present and past exist in the same time, “not to predict the future, but to predict the present.”  Behzad Khosravi picked up on what he considers to be some fundamental Marxian references landing squarely in the Frankfurt School, but pulling into this orbit of phantasmagoria, eliciting a range of questions on reality and representation– that inevitably lead, again according to Khosravi, to Cambridge Analytica, the ultimate success story in establishing “para-fiction.”

Image:  Sofie Larsson, /Day 2.

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