Do you want to share your perspectives, memories or stories about Gnesta? What is your personal way of looking at the city? Your favourite places? We are a group of international artists and curators wanting to get to know Gnesta through its residents for an upcoming exhibition that will be shown at Art Lab Gnesta. At the moment the artists can’t visit Gnesta for several reasons, so we need you to introduce them to the city and exchange ideas and material with them.
In fall 2020, Meryem Saadi and Sara Rossling were invited to take part in a residency at Art Lab Gnesta. We decided to involve three international artists: Milagros Bedoya (Peru), Tatiana Danilevskaya (Russia) and Abdellah M. Hassak (Morocco) and explore the question of connectivity and site-specificity in a Covid-19 context, where many residency programs are taking place virtually. How to connect in these strange times without meeting physically? How can artists explore and get embedded in a place when they cannot travel there?
We started to experiment with soundscaping to understand and connect with Gnesta. We spent hours walking in Gnesta, recording sounds and taking photos for the artists who were not there physically. We also shared historical references about the city and Art Lab Gnesta. However, one essential thing was missing in this process: the voice of the residents of Gnesta. If the artists were in Gnesta, they would have interacted with the people living there and involved them in their research.
This is why we would like to invite people with connections to Gnesta to be (virtually) part of our participatory project. We are interested in memories (written and oral), anecdotes, favourite places, sounds and images that can tell us something about your paths in relation to the city. The material will serve as inspiration and be sampled for the artwork – a collective sound piece that will also incorporate sounds and images from Lima, Voronezh and Marrakech, and be presented in an exhibition at Art Lab Gnesta in fall 2021. During this process of sharing, the participants will receive material shared by the artists too (either online or by mail) from their cities.
Here are examples of what can be shared with us:
- Images, stories or sounds of your favourite place in Gnesta
- Photos, videos, voice or sound recordings you have right now on your cell phone that can tell us something interesting about Gnesta
- Sounds from your home or from a location in Gnesta that is very important to you
- Memories or anecdotes that are connected to Gnesta
Please join us in this experiment and let us hear your voices and stories by sending us audios, images or texts at the email address gnestafranannanstans@gmail.com or in the FB group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2651657248458206
We would also be happy to get to know you more during a virtual Fika with the artists!
And we will invite you to the public presentation of the work (if Covid-19 restrictions allow it) and will be acknowledged as members of the project in the written text about the project.