Cards of creature
Up on the hill hidden and encompassed between Sockerbruket, residentials and businesses. A short walk from Vagnhallen, Majorna lies this place, a bit of a puzzle from the past. If you manage to find the one entryway, climb a couple of odd staircases, you will enter some ruins that are all that’s left from the old fortress of Älvsborg.
Other than the ruins protected by annoyingly loud roofs, there are two trees watching in the middle of a patch of grass. The area is surrounded by various human debris and further out, bushes. You may or may not notice a fidgety broken chair.
The once important and well sought Fortress is now mostly inhabited by pigeons and the occasional soul in need of a refuge, this is also the site that chose us.
I think we all to some or different degrees in my studio had a hard time grasping our site and what to make of it, at least in the beginning. Somehow something clicked for me when it went from creating something of it or for it, to creating with it. For us this space and place was an entity in itself and therefore who were we to decide who was welcome or not? We were trying to engage with the site with our creature as a participant itself, having workshops where visitors were encouraged to commune with it rather than taking something from it. By different methods trying to understand and feel the creature rather than fix or promote it.
In line with this realisation, of creating with our site the creature, was the notion that it somehow felt wrong to take advantage of this place. The mere idea of colonising this place, this creature we were slowly getting to know better, felt revolting. We were acknowledging it as a creature, or as Ursula K Le Guin would’ve said, as kinfolk and therefore treating it with the same set of standards one would like to be applied towards themselves. Not to say that we might have interpreted our creature wrong from time to time, it’s difficult to tell when we don’t necessarily speak the same language, but this was at least my mindset moving forward.
This creature is something on its own, it doesn’t need our intervention, it was something we agreed upon and that shaped us and our approaches moving forward in the projects. Then again one could argue that we were the ones who designed this creature, as a way of framing our site.
Still I needed to somehow make it personal at some point, it’s simply my practice and the way I’m wired. This but in a way that encourages others to become personal as well. I was trying to do this by connecting the first set of cards, the cards that are my initial impression of the site from memory, and then matching those with the second set that is our continued conversations and relationship. These matching ones, the second set, will only make the most sense when you’ve visited the site yourself. It is more abstract and interpretive with the intention for people to get to know the creature themselves. The participatory matching being made is regardless of my personal intentions based on participants own conclusions and observations of the creature, on their relationship. They might not draw the same conclusions as myself, which is sort of the point, since no relationship is the same. I wanted it to be a bit difficult and obscure because that reflects the nature of the creature and its complexity. I’ve been, we’ve all been, observing and conversing with the creature, our site, and the matching creature cards is my narrative, helping comprehending the story of others.
They might not draw the same conclusions as myself, and that’s ok.