Potential of the Gap ebok(2)

When we think of art as an integral part of the construction and transformation of urban culture, we find the public space as the main stage of this event. The public space, as José Pedro Regatão defends, is "a territory of political character that reflects the structure of the society in which it operates." (Regatão, 2007). This way, we may think the crisis of social structure as being the responsible for the identity crisis of public spaces, which may lead them to what is called "non-places”. These correspond to a functional logic that creates a contractual level of social relations, in contrast to the concept of place, which brings together space, culture and memory. Places are reservoirs of memory. They cover a dual visible and invisible landscape. Anne Whiston Spirn is a landscape architect that defends the place as private, "a tapestry of woven contexts: global, disclosed and lasting and ephemeral, local and reveal, now and then, past and future..." (Spirn, 1998). Addressing concepts such as space, public space, place, home and urban art, we intend to understand how art is responsible for social transformation in communities and what’s their place within them. Placing art in city public spaces will enable a dialogue between the collective and the individual, often prompting personal memories to enable the appropriation of space/place city.

The paper discusses the aesthetic aspects of place ‑making practices in the urban environment of Western metropoles that are struggling with the progressive undifferentiation of their space and the weakening of communal and personal bonds. The paper starts by describing the gen‑ eral characteristics of an urban environment as distinct from the traditional vision of a city as a well ‑structured entity, and in relation to formal and informal aesthetics and participatory design ideas. The author then focuses on two contrary but complementary tactics for translat‑ ing a space into a positively evaluated p l a c e: by domesticating it through introducing nature into an urbanscape; and by accentuating its alienness with the example of the urban explora‑ tion movement. The growing popularity of the latter is presented in relation to the discourses related to the decline of cities and the romantic endeavours for reaching into the realm of the unknown or the uncanny in order to rediscover and enrich the unique identity of a place. The paper ends with conclusions that present the necessity for the cultivation of a multidimen‑ sional aesthetic awareness and an aesthetic engagement as a crucial issue in the complex task of endowing places with a density of meaning.

How does physical space both reflect and contribute to the creative life of a city? In this essay, I question the difference between community and network, the relationships between physical space, time, and the cityscape, and how all of these seemingly disparate concepts come together influence creative culture. This essay is as much about the terms, conditions of the city as a place 'for' or 'with' art, as it is about imaginations, myths, and cliches. It is as much about Stavanger, as it is about New York, Berlin or Amsterdam. It is about recurring refrain of a neoliberal power of real estate ownership and the capitalist necessity of profit versus often precarious conditions of creative work (and life) and crucial difference between network and community. It is about social contexts of art, particularly about Norwegian egalitarianism and unique case of cultural distinction. Walking is an important activity and composition choice here. The text is written in the rhythm of strolling, wandering around, finding a way, and being lost again. When one thinks that the right way is finally there to follow, then there are various paths to choose again...

Spatiality and Symbolic Expression, 2015

The collective spaces examined in this chapter are situated on the frontier between the concrete and the abstract zones: they are real places that take on imagined significance or, conversely, things that are not real space that we talk about using spatial metaphors and approach with a territorial mentality. These are the spaces that people create in communities, and it is worth lingering for a second on the creative metaphor. Spaces can be created, produced; this language does not disturb us because we are used to using the word "'space'" with both a concrete and an abstract meaning. Michel de Certeau contrasts geometric, geographical space with a poetic, anthropological experience of space, but he uses the same word, espace, to talk about both, arguing that the first is like the immutable text and the second is like the ephemeral reading.<xen> 1 </xen> Concrete spaces are there to be discovered, but the way in which we discover them creates abstract spaces which that we invest with meaning. In this chapter we shall examine some very concrete spaces: a street corner in Brussels;, a commune in northern France, and the inside of a moving coach that carries a group of people from one to the other. Reflecting on the way in which these are linked to form a territory of the imagination, which in media environments is treated as if it were a physical territory, we shall see the way in which these environments themselves, whether on the page or online, seem to take on spatial characteristics.

2017

In Map & Universe:making a site-specific artwork in Southern Sweden , the artist explores the development of a work created in 2016 that uses walking and storytelling to explore ideas associated with being lost. The courtyard at Brunakra, an 1889 farmhouse in Gislov, Sweden and an arts centre residency, was revealed through weeks of weeding and soil removal and a labyrinth was built within the old stone patterns using polished stones from the nearby Baltic Sea. At the reception, participants walked the periphery of the farm together, entered the central courtyard and walked the labyrinth, then traded stories about being lost. Contrasting the experience of having a map with that of being lost, this short essay uses the public project Map and Universe as provocation to investigate how the experience of being lost can provide new opportunities for awareness and communitas .

2020

No portion of the work referred to in the Thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning. I confirm that this Thesis is entirely my own work. I confirm that no work previously submitted for credit has been reused verbatim. Any previously submitted work has been revised, developed and recontextualised relevant to the thesis. I confirm that no material of this thesis has been published in advance of its submission. I confirm that no third party proofreading or editing has been used in this thesis.

Today I speak to you as an artist, more specifically as a maker of collaborative multi-user interactive installations in which several strands of imagery, including live movement, interweave in any installation event. The installations are driven by interactive systems which are themselves multistranded. In this paper I will be discussing these works from both the perspective of their artistic intentionalities and from the philosophical frameworks which underpin them. However, any theory I introduce does not explain the installationsnor do the installations do not demonstrate the theory. Rather theory and practice engage in an improvisational duet of ideas and artistic incarnations of those ideas. The installations are a complex interweaving of the practice and theory -an embodiment, a composite expression, if you like, of the initially inchoate ideas which drive my work. That stage of inchoacy is an important one in the making of a work … an important space-of-the-inbetween where ideas and expression are fluid, tentative. It is here that the integration between my practice and theory takes place …. usually intuitively.

When does a place start to be an exhibition space? In 1986 Jan Hoet, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, organized Chambres d'Amis: an outdoor exhibition where fifty-eight artists exhibited in private apartments. The show invaded the private sphere of the city, leaving the perimeters of the museum. This historical example enables introducing a by now common contemporary situation where artistic institutions stage extramural exhibitions in “alternative” places. Indeed, in the last twenty years, one can recognize the proliferation of artistic proposals that exploit the non-ordinary aspect of a place to create a "spectacular" event. Besides, today, we also notice the multiplication of art centers, nonprofit associations, festivals, that made the alternative space an ordinary space, where sometimes space is inseparable from artworks. Through the deepening of two study cases, the Trussardi Foundation in Milan and the Nuit Blanche in Paris, the paper studies the aesthetical role of the place within exhibition design processes, thus suggesting the necessity of new vocabulary and a new definition of curatorial modes for the contemporary art.

Punctum, 2019

While visiting the Swedish city of Lund to attend the Conference Visual Semiotics Goes Cognitive I came across two of the city’s museum attractions, the Kulturen Open air museum and the Skissernas museum (the latter is translated as the Sketch museum and also as the Museum of artistic process and public art). Borrowing from the walking-inside-museums ex- perience as well as from wandering the streets around them, the following text unfolds by way of observations on the nature of museums, on the exhibited items and what we en- counter in the streets. In this context multiple examples of artworks, related practices and emerging matters are discussed too.

"In Aristotelian philosophy, the process of change from a lower level of potentiality to the higher level of actuality is known as becoming. Maslow refers to this process as self-actualisation, or to become more and more of what one is, or capable of becoming. In order for the process of becoming to take place the dissolution of the normative values or understanding of one’s self and context is necessary (Turner 2008). This dissolution, a liminal phase, although initially destabilising, can create an environment conducive to the individual’s values and normal modes of behaviour being reflected upon and transformed. The paper introduces the role of liminal phases / liminoid spaces for the process of becoming, drawing from anthropological theories of Van Gennap and Turner, and the concept of individuation as argued through Maslow's concept of self-actualisation and Jungian psychology. Digital technology, particularly the internet, ”a natural environment for liminality” (Waskul 2004,40) in conjunction with open source software / culture and their inherent liminal qualities are considered as tools for the creation and production of liminal phases / liminoid spaces. Informed by Van Gennap and Turner’s ideas the contribution of participatory art / tech projects for the practice of place–making are considered as a process of becoming, both for participating individuals and their wider context. The paper considers how given understandings of place through participatory art/tech projects and the liminal phases / liminoid spaces could be undone. This then contributes to new understandings of place and the individual’s place within that context. In conclusion the paper explores the potential of this process to produce communitas , arguing that this is potentially a process of ‘becoming’ both for the participants and place involved. "