A.I.R. BLEKINGE 2018
AUTUMN – Dalia Mikonytė, Adomas Žudys (LT), Dominika Skutnik (PL) and
Johan Stenbeck (SE).
SPRING – Julie Poitras Santos (US)
DALIA MIKONYTÈ AND ADOMAS ŽUDYS
Dalia Mikonytė and Adomas Žudys work as a duo. Dalia Mikonytė is a photographer and researcher.
She works with different themes such as personal experiences, feminism, identity and representation or signs and reality. Adomas Žudys mostly works with 3D-graphics and design, video mapping, street art projects, murals and stencils. Together they have developed a photogrammetry based project about the cities of Europe. Photogrammetry is a technique that mixes photography and 3D-graphics. Merging moving images and synthetic sounds Dalia and Adomas create virtual and surreal cityscapes. By editing the models, introducing “glitch” aesthetics and glue different building facades together, surreal and ephemeral perspectives of city landscape are formed. Together they create a collage of fragmented memories of cities. They call themselves Collectors of the Cities. During the residence A.I.R. Blekinge 2018 they expand their art project internationally. Their aim is to spread the idea of forgotten values and futuristic views in innovative and post-contemporary way.
Post residency
Presentation of the video installation by Dalia Mikonyte, Adomas Žudys & Pijus Džiugas Meižis:
Blekinge Study during the symposium Digital Urbanism November 15-16th 2018 at Blekinge Institute of Technology.
In the evening there will be a Live performance by Dalia Mikonyte, Adomas Žudys and Pijus Džiugas Meižis.
DOMINIKA SKUTNIK (PL)
DOMINIKA SKUTNIK (PL)
Dominika is attracted to the natural landscape of Blekinge. She is interested in erosion, sedimentation, crystallization and also the physical forces behind different rock formations. Her approach to sculpture is equal site- and process-orientated. Her plan during the residency was to work in a natural location/space in Blekinge and create a piece that relates to the geology and the sea-oriented landscape.
Recently she finished a poetic project called “Necklace for the Mountain”. It consists of precious gemstones that were spread out in a mountain region in Russia. The gemstones are like hidden treasures in the nature. Dominika has documented the work in a book, a picture poem. During the residency period Dominika made extensive research into the geology of Blekinge and the stone shoulders brought to Poland during the Ice age. She explored the granite cut in large scale by the main roads in Blekinge, and in old stone cutting areas. An idea for a future work is under development.
“My installation pieces are most often created in strong relationship with either environment, architecture, site, or tend towards being process-specific. I am more interested in working within challenging spaces (i.e. Gdansk Shipyards, former Lodz Ghetto of WW II, Sea fortifications in England, forest landscape in Finland) than within white-cube setting. At present I am working more and more with natural environments, stone quarries, sea, sea shore also with elemental natural components – like stone, salt, shells, precious stones. At the bottom there is always a probation into the phenomena of change, connection, exchange, working along a dynamic, earth-originated process.”
Website Dominika:
https://dominikaskutnik.wordpress.com/
My residency work in Blekinge was definitely a stone-driven event. That meant research in geology, petrography, movement of inanimate matter by glaciation. Also, I this meant a particular, close inspection of issues of conservation, veneration or lateral destruction of stony Scandinavian paysage. The process of data-collection, travelling to particular sites all over Blekinge was made possible by Konst I Blekinge and Ronneby Kulturcentrum teams, whose the knowledge, contacts, time and helpful attention were crucial to my a.i.r. research.
My interest zeroed on a question of how some parts of the environment are chosen to be preserved, respected and considered to be tourist attractions and how some, just as impressive are left unnoticed by it commonplace-ness, unappealing location or size. My project proposes to turn the gaze to the latter ones, particularly the “mountain ranges” that quietly hug the roads of Blekinge. Unassuming yet monumental in their own, special, brutal way, blown by dynamite and cut with diamond dust to make way for the human ways. Bringing one of these roadside “mountains” to attention, animating its surface with a polished gloss that brings out its natural, granite colouring would turn it into a very strange quasi-monument that can only be viewed momentarily, in passage, from the window of passing cars.
/Dominika Skutnik
JOHAN STENBECK (SE)
Johan is born and raised in Karlskrona and has a deep love and interest for Blekinge and it´s landscape. He is both an artist and architect and works in the borderland of sculpture, installation and architecture. An open mind and attentive listening are important ingredients in his creative process where he often searches for places that he can build a narrative around.
During his stay at A.I.R. Blekinge he painted a series of murals at Panncentralen in a residential area of Ronneby, Hjorthöjden. He painted a series of black- and white paintings connected to the myths of the Magpie on a modernistic concrete architecture, far away from the more picturesque parts of the old Spa-resort.
His degree work at Copenhagen Architectural School (June 2018) was a Cold bath house project. The collective name of the overall strategy has been ”The Closed Circle” where a cold bathhouse on the island of Högaholm, Karlskrona and its southern tip serves as the site’s social catalyst. The project investigates how a previously inaccessible natural and cultural landscape can be made available according to a global and local perspective in a region where the creative industry is becoming increasingly important for the city’s development.
Website Johan:
http://johanstenbeck.se/wordpress/
Under residenstiden har jag arbetat med offentlig utsmyckning i form av muralmåleri på Hjorthöjdens panncentral, en byggnad och bostadsområde strax utanför Ronnebys stadskärna. Liksom namnet antyder befinner sig området på en höjd och i periferin till den resterande stadsbilden, vilket präglar områdets karaktär, sociala omfång och dynamik.
Muralerna eftersträvar att knyta an till området genom att inskriva sig som ett naturligt tillägg i miljön, där panncentralens råa arkitektur fungerar som en canvas för motiven som spridits ut över byggnadens olika fasader. Motivens övergripande tema kretsar kring utanförskap, integration och fördomar, men fungerar också som projektionsytor för egna individuella tolkningar. Utsmyckningarna på Hjorthöjdens panncentral planeras att färdigställas våren 2019.
/Johan Stenbeck
JULIE POITRAS SANTOS (US)
“My site-specific visual practice takes many forms, including video, installation, writing and public projects. The relationship between site, story and mobility fuels a wide range of research and production, including the relationship between natural histories, myth and individual story; walking as a form of listening to site; and material agency in an age of climate change. Recent work uses walking as means to create community, investigate richly sited ways of knowing, and narrate new territories.”
During her residency in Blekinge Julie Poitras Santos recorded a film in the Ropewalk in Karlkrona and arranged a storytelling walk about flight.
Walk/public program in Ronneby, Sweden, May 2018
Flight Paths, significant moments of departure
Why do we leave and what is the journey like?
What do we carry with us, what do we leave behind?
In this evening event participants were invited to walk together, considering significant moments of departure. Perhaps you left home against your parents’ wishes; maybe when you go to work you have to leave behind your child; or maybe you have moved and left behind a favorite library or cafe. Maybe the departure was in haste, you had to leave your city with a moments’ notice, you grabbed a photo album as you rushed out of a burning home. Or perhaps the departure was more metaphorical, deciding to ”walk away” from a bad relationship, an old rage, a former dream. Departure – with its twin, arrival – asks us to give up something in order to find the new, but we aren’t always ready to go.
We began our walk at the entrance of Kulturcentrum in Ronneby, and walked away together through the narrow streets of the oldest part of the city, making our way to the town square. In the square we gathered to trade stories about departure and leaving.
Post Residency
Walking Backwards (Birger´s Walk)
Film screening at Karlskrona konsthall October 25 – November 2018
Julie Poitras Santos is interested in the physical work and human scale of the traditional craft of rope making and how working with the body is a form of memory making. “Walking Backwards” will weave together historical narratives collected from rope makers in Karlskrona, accounts of travelers and fragments from Xavier de Maistre’s 1794 “Voyage Around my Room” to create a fictional memoir that introduces a character constrained by place, work and class, but who imagines leaving it all for a life of adventure and travel.
The work takes the form of a video that braids together imagery from performers walking in the ropewalk and in the surrounding rural landscape of southern Sweden, hands that are making rope, along with other imagery gathered from the coastal region.
“Walking Backwards” uses the power of visual and narrative storytelling to investigate connections between home and away, longing and the lure of the unknown, and the paired acts of looking back and looking forward as functional ways in which we construct our identities.
Sited in a 17c ropewalk in Karlskrona, Sweden, Walking Backwards (Birger’s Walk) takes the form of a video that braids together imagery from performers in the ropewalk and the surrounding landscape of southern Sweden. The text weaves together historical descriptions collected from rope makers, ropemaking manuals, and fragments from Xavier de Maistre’s 1794 “Voyage Around my Room” amplified and enlarged by a piece of original fiction woven within the fragments to create an account of a ropewalker whose lover is lost at sea.
The Repslagarbanan (ropewalk) in Karlskrona, Sweden was built in 1692 and was in operation until 1960. It is now preserved as part of the city World Heritage Site.
Vocals and violin: Astrid Selling
Audio recording: Dan Setthammar
Slängpolska dancers: Peter Svensson, Maria Persson
Created in collaboration with:
Konst i Blekinge, AiR Blekinge, Sweden
Kulturcentrum Ronneby Konsthall, Ronneby, Sweden
Repslagarbanan, Karlskrona, Sweden
Inter Arts Center, Malmö, Sweden