Otok Prvic 2025
Lag 34 2025
Drywall 2024
Eftersom jag är ett träd som en gång skall huggas ned–
Tillverka inga gärdsgårdar av mig,
Hugg inte upp mig till ved.
Gör mig till en spång över floden,
Till en dörr eller en tröskel,
Där man hälsar på varandra.
H. Radauskas, ‘Jag är ett träd’
Land Use and Artistic Practice
This research project addresses labour and material flows in green space, and the public organisations that govern land. It explores dependencies, tensions and asymmetries in how built and unbuilt environments are managed, and how landscape-based practices can shape the understanding and use of public greenery. Informed by activities in the forests of Gothenburg City, the project centres on woodland maintenance workers, technicians and managers, and their relationship to municipal land-use planning and governance. The project explores how knowledge and initiatives originating from the land could lead to alternative ways of shaping and using resources. It asks how forest resources, such as lumber, can be extracted and used within the municipality through methods that serve purposes beyond economic revenue, with attention to specific geographic conditions. In this context, the research explores holistic and local perspectives on the aesthetic consequences and possibilities of green space craft and labour in shaping landscapes and processing resources.
The conditions for governing nature in close to urban areas, where social and ecological values are overshooting economic ones, are drastically different from those in rural areas, where revenue from forestry and land is often a driving factor. While aestheticisation of nature by emphasising recreation and biodiversity in woodlands near densely populated areas could act as a barrier or a facade obscuring large-scale extraction, clear-cuts, and the degeneration of nature in the rural areas beyond, the research addresses resource extraction itself as an area of social, cultural and ecological intervention, using the municipal forest as an area for experimentation. The project aims to make connections between resource extraction labour and crafts that can be applied in handling, storing and processing what comes out of the forest, and to work across how such systems are represented in the landscape as infrastructure, buildings, objects and other materialities. The project focuses on how artistic interventions in this realm can not only support existing landscape-based knowledge holders and practitioners, but also articulate maintenance, harvesting and use of forest resources as a complex of public and political relevance through artistic and aesthetic perspectives.
On the one hand, the research examines how centralised artistic practices within municipal organisations, such as architecture and design, affect how landscapes, labour and resources in green space are valued. The research asks what neglect and abandonment, as well as what space for experimentation and self-governance, exist in administrative blind spots. On the other hand, it asks if and how situated knowledge, skill and artistic agency in woodland management and maintenance can contribute to new ways of ascribing value and act transformatively in how municipal green space is understood and used. By following workers and experts across the municipality's forests, and by arranging site-based workshops and seminars around material and technological interventions, the research tests how ways of working, doing and making in green space might be reconfigured, and how it could impact the material culture and spatial character of the city’s unbuilt landscapes.