celebration of Hägerstens Botaniska Trädgård's Swamp Night Feast
Fruit circle ceremoni by Hägerstens Botaniska Trädgård during Swamp Night Feast
Incontinent Structure as displayed by Hanna Ljungh in 2013. For WRA Karlstad Ljungh is making a new sculpture and additional installations.
celebration of Hägerstens Botaniska Trädgård's Swamp Night Feast
CONTROL MARETOPIA
MARETOPIA IN THE WATER RESEARCH AREA IN KARLSTAD
The exhibition Water Research Area (WRA) was initiated by the muncipality of Karlstad in collaboration with Konstfrämjandet Värmland. The exhibition partially takes place open-air in Karlstad, is open to everyone and takes place from July 2 to August 20, 2016.
Departing from a focus on Karlstads connection to water in light of climate change, Maretopia invited for this occasion the artist trio Hägerstens Botaniska Trädgård and the artists Hanna Ljungh and Peter Ojstersek. We asked the artist to reflect on the question of control in relation to climate change.
Maretopia will have three different exhibition areas:
- Kvarteret Almen - here Maretopia is showing works by Hägerstens Botaniska Trädgård and Hanna Ljungh
- Sundstatjärns northern each - here Maretopia is showing works by Peter Ojstersek and Hanna Ljungh
- The Public Library - here Maretopia is showing works by Hanna Ljungh
The exhibition opens on Saturday July 2 at kvarteret Almen. (celebration of Hägerstens Botaniska Trädgård's Swamp Night Feast 4.00 to 5.00 PM, walk over to Sundstatjärns northern beach from kv. Almen ca. 7.00 PM)
Control Maretopia
“Karlstad is one of the country’s cities with the highest risk for flooding” (report from Gothenburg University)
What does it entail to relate to this future scenario? What are our fears? What does today’s catastrophe research look like? For Water Research Area Maretopia is building two floating platforms that invite to experience a floating green house with food plants, a pumpkin that has the prerequisites of becoming the world’s biggest and a therapy couch inside, and an invitation to everybody in Karlstad to take part in a special swamp ritual.
The moving platform will function as a land mark that renders the insecurity and our need to feel safe visible, to have control, find solutions for the future. What are we able to control? Can it be of value to let go and lose control? Maybe we have to give more space to the water? How is the water regulated, which is the water’s role in public environments? What is our relationship to water, water cultivation and research in ecology?
Just like mnemonic exercises in which associations to place, events, feelings and objects are of central importance, the experience of Maretopia should entail a sensitization for the relevance of sustentation issues in future urban scenarios.
Today’s society is to a large degree built on a feeling to have secure access to foot everywhere, all year round. Bigger, more and better transportation possibilities – with these cultivation parameters many fruits and vegetables, such as tomatoes and strawberries, have traded in their taste for a more selling appearance.
In his piece Jukebox for Pumpkin, Peter Ojstersek will grow a giant pumpkin on Maretopia. It can call into question continuous while it also is able to feed a lot of people. The pumpkin maybe becomes larger than what is good for Maretopia’s raft. The audience’s settings for the jukebox define its destiny.
Hanna Ljungh’s installaton Incontinent Structures: Barrage for Karlstad as well as a slideshow with pictures of dams ((Incontinent Structures: Grand Dams (Russian roulette)) can elicit our need and desire for leakage, that which can, should and is allowed to leak out and the control efforts linked to this. The audience is invited to sit down on a therapy couch (Incontinent Structures: Sessions) and talk about their anxieties regarding floods, lack of water or other climate changes. Some things are easier to carry, if we can share them with others, allow the penned up fears to come forth.
During the vernissage the citizens of Karlstad are invited to celebrate the Swamp Night Feast together with Hägerstens Botaniska Trädgård. The Swamp Night Feast is a part of a new holiday, the Holiday of the Swamp, which Hägerstens Botaniska developed during a visit at Art lab Gnesta during July 2015. Prior to the celebrations of the Swamp Night Feast in Karlstad the botanical garden listened to threats of flooding and adapted the celebration to the current situation. The Swamp Night Feast is constituted of rituals, ceremonies, symbolic food, song and music. In order to give the citizens of Karlstad the opportunity to also take part in the Swamp Night Feast celebrations in the future and be ready when the crisis hits, or free themselves from the grip of the everyday life for a moment, the group is leaving instructions as guidance and support.
Besides selecting music in the jukebox, sitting on the therapy couch and experience the swamp ritual, visitors are invited to leave cuttings from food plants in the greenhouse on special occasions.
Maretopias participation in the Water Research Area is kindly sponsored by:
Beijer Byggmaterial AB
Econova AB
GjordNära Tunnelväxthus - Vireta AB
Gustavssons Byggdetaljer
Hjertmans Sweden AB
Jackon Isolering AB
Kalenius Växtcentrum AB
OrganoWood AB
A big thank you to volunteers and Maretopia's members who helped build the rafts and the green house:
Anna Asplind, Nduwhite N. Ahannonu, Fernando Caceres, Janove Ekstedt, Stefan Engberg, Anna Maria Furuland, Jeremy Gallant, Mecki Granberg, Sukanya Khiekohuha, Karl Löfberg, Magnus Mellgren, Eriq Petersson, Ida Britta Petrelius, Rickard Råström, Bosse Sundqvist, Rut-Karin Zettergren, Nikolai Steenstrup - without you there wouldn't be any Maretopia!
More information about the artworks in CONTROL MARETOPIA
Hägerstens Botaniska Trädgård – Swamp Night Feast in Karlstad
Hägerstens Botaniska Trädgård (Hägerten’s Botanical Garden) invites the citizens of Karlstad to together celebrate the Swamp Night Feast. The celebration is composed with regard to the probability of Karlstad being hit by extensive floods in the future. Through the rituals and celebrations of this Swamp Night we train ourselves to together meet what may occur in a situation of crisis. Music plays a central role in Hägerstens Botaniska Trädgård’s body of work, which also is applies for the Swamp Night Feast. The songs have a therapeutic, healing and soothing character. They are reminiscent of both lullabies and punk stories.
In order to give the citizens of Karlstad the opportunity to celebrate the Swamp Night Feast in the future and be ready when the crisis hits, or free themselves from the grip of everyday life for a moment, the group is leaving instructions on how to conduct the ritual together with a music video a.o. as guidance and support.
About the artist group:
Hägerstens Botaniska Trädgård works with music and art. The trio has existed since 2009 and consists of the artists Johan Eriksson, Sofia Hultin and Ingela Ihrman. In contrast to many other botanical gardens, heritage, naming and categorization are not at the center of attention for Hägerstens Botaniska. Instead, they seek to keep their collection unsorted.
Here there is space for both the quotidian and the unusual and the garden does what is necessary in order to grow. Maybe the visitor will experience an imaginary holiday trip or a radio program which is directed towards gardeners with broken hearts. Other possible experiences are guided tours through the fruit counter at a local supermarket or the world’s saddest gallery opening.
(more info: http://sofiahultin.com/Hagerstensbotaniskatest.html)
Peter Ojstersek - Jukebox for Pumpkin
Jukebox for Pumpkin maybe is about success and failure, control and loss of control as well as external influence by an environment.
In a dome, 3 meters in diameter large, an IBC plastic tank of 1200 liters is placed, filled with one kubic meters of nutritious earth. In this a pumpkin seed of the kind American Giant is placed. The seed came all the way by mail from Canada and has an impressive genealogy with mother Holland weighing about 657 kg and father Meier being the world record keeper, weighing just over one ton at his time. It is not easy to be part of such a family tree and it is easy not to be able to live up to the expectations put forth in this context. The leaves of the pumpkin will grow out of the dome, forming a shield around, a little like petals around a flower’s stamen and pistils, the dome will look like the fruiting body.
In an apparatus similar to a jukebox the audience can select songs, there is music that has a positive influence and music with a negative influence on the pumpkins growth. The playlist is based on research conducted by Dorothy Retalack in the 1970s. One loudspeaker is placed in the earth and plays music to the roots of the pumpkin and one loudspeaker is placed in the room. The audience can give a name to the pumpkin, publish selfies with it or write on the pumpkin’s blog http://www.peter-ojstersek.com/coming-up/blog-g%C3%A4stbok-guest-book-jukebox-for-a-pumpkin/. If the pumpkin continues to grow, there will be new seeds which can be distributed to the public who in their turn can grow new pumpkins. The public’s choice of music will be collected and the data will form part of a reflection the artist will publish on his website after the exhibition.
Today’s society is to a large degree built on the feeling of having secure access to food everywhere, all year round. Bigger, more and better transportation possibilities – with these cultivation parameters many fruits and vegetables, such as tomatoes and strawberries, have traded in their taste for a more selling appearance. The giant pumpkin, which will be grown on Maretopia, can call into question continuous growth and accumulation, while it also is able to feed a lot of people. The pumpkin maybe becomes larger than what is good for Maretopia’s raft. Which settings the audience choses for the jukebox will define the pumpkin’s destiny.
About the artist
Ojstersek’s work as painter has been the point of departure for ongoing investigations in the mediums of sculpture, monumental engraving, photography and plants. Experiences from working with oil paint, tempera, water colours, Indian ink, led to a combination of pigment with soap or with industrial binders such as epoxy, polyurethane or silicone.
During the last years his fascination for nature led him to use earth, compost for growing staple crops such as corn, beans, squash, potatoes, amaranth, tomatoes, dahlias as artistic material. His interest links to his daily life and brought him to investigate biological processes in cultures of cultivation where plants, substrate, green houses and geodesic domes with pertaining technology for cultivation are components in works of art. His ambition is to develop these experiments to include aspects of health and environment in relation to plants in a structural entity.
For OpenART in Örebro he presented the project Chinampa. The title is inspired by Chiampas which are artificially made island the Aztecs built along the beaches in deep seas for largscale agricultural purpose. “Chinampa” consists of a green house structure in the form of a geodesic dome on a raft. Inside the dome traditional Aztecan crops were grown with the help of automatic watering and power supply from sun panels and battery. “Chinampa” touched upon questions of art, cultural history, gardening, technology and surveillance.
Hanna Ljungh - Incontinent Structure: Barrages for Karlstad
Incontinence is a term which often is used for describing a physical occurrence entailing difficulties to control one’s body. But the term can also translate the Greek term Akrasia which refers to a lack of self-control and moderation.
Hanna Ljungh’s sculpture Incontinent Structure as well as a collection of pictures and statistics about dams can elicit our need and desire for leakage, that which can, should and is allowed to leak out and the control efforts linked to this. The audience is invited to sit down on a therapy couch and talk about their anxieties regarding floods, lack of water or other climate changes. Some things are easier to carry, if we can share them with others and allow the penned up fears to come forth.
Barrages are buildings of society or monuments of a civilization. Resources and prestige have been invested in them. If the dam does not hold it means a great defeat and a threat, both physically for a surrounding and also morally against a whole society. Lack of control is a danger and anxiety for both individual and society of our contemporary society. The visual characteristics of our modern and monumental barrages has strong ties to modernisms clean forms and clear aesthetics. Here, modernism’s belief in categorizations and maintaining separations is referenced as well.
The sound of a water cascade can be understood to have healthy effects on us humans who to a great part consist of water. Barrages and sluices give an image of surging water which is led in a controlled manner in order to gain electricity from water power and control where the water ends up. The water's noise is a sign for environmentally friendly energy production but it also is a sound spectrum which we cannot interpret as meaningful, which lies beyond instances of control such as categorization and interpretation. In certain cases the sound of water can even bring on incontinence.
Incontinent Structure: Barrage for Karlstad is an update of a sculpture which Hanna Ljungh showed in 2013 in an exhibition in Stockholm and Birmingham.
About the Artist
Hanna Ljungh has in several previous works taken the relationship of humans and civilization with nature as point of departure; looking at how we try to control and exploit it. She has also investigated human, filmic and geological time in relation to each other.
In her latest work “I am mountain”, which was shown at Anna Elle Gallery in Stockholm she collaborated with a research station that measures glacier changes of the southern peak of the mountain Kebenekajse. Over the years it has been registered that the glacial tip has shrunk and the prognosis is it soon will be smaller than ever, meaning the peak will lose its standing as Sweden’s highest mountain top. Other well known works of her include e.g. the videos “How to Civilize a Waterfall” and “Vedergällning”.