Three week long participatory process for a public art commission in Bergsjön, Göteborg.
At first glance, the area between Gärdsås torg and Siriusgatan might appear to lack water. It does not. There is a small stream, puddles, the frequently present rain. There are the thousands of litres pumping beneath the bark of trees, and the immeasurable volume carried by every body moving through the place. All these absorbing root systems, all the evaporating moisture, all the slowly melting ice. Water moves in and out of everything, everywhere, all the time — it is what materially binds all living things together.
This observation became the thematic and philosophical core of att bära / bli buren (to carry / to be carried), a three-week dialogue and participatory process commissioned by Familjebostäder i Göteborg and Stadsmiljöförvaltningen in collaboration with Göteborg Konst. Working with seven young people employed as summer workers through the Unga Stadsutvecklare programme, the process used water as an entry point into the site’s relationships, histories, and possibilities — and as a framework for togetherness itself.
The methodology was grounded in a collective and performative research practice: one that challenges logocentric assumptions about how knowledge is constructed and communicated, and that insists on the inseparability of the one who knows and the act of knowing, the one who teaches and the one who learns, the making body and the environment it inhabits. Rather than pre-formulating outcomes, the aim was to facilitate a context in which an open-ended set of questions could be asked — and where the strange, the unresolved, and the unexpected could take form in the gaps.
The work moved through three phases. Mapping was a cartographic phase: we asked what water can be, how it moves through us and through the site, and who we are and want to be in this place. Through drawing, material experiments, cyanotype printing, and collective watercolour maps, we began to read the site through 22 eyes, 110 fingertips, wet feet and cold hands — and through the ten or twenty languages present in the group. Dreaming expanded outward, building installations that shifted perception and position: rope installations, hammock-sewing circles, a sound concert performed alongside the water and the trees. Flowing brought everything together in movement and celebration, culminating in Vattenfesten — a water festival drawing on the Buddhist and Thai tradition of Loi Kratong, through which we gave thanks to water for its existence, showed it reverence and respect, and asked forgiveness for polluting it.
Central to the pedagogical vision was the question of position. Rather than directing participants toward a predetermined result, or asking them to assist an artist’s vision, the process began from a different premise: who do we want to be in this space? What knowledge do we each bring? And what can emerge from the encounter between those knowledges? Working from a diffractive rather than reflective model — attending to entanglement, difference, and the productive collision of perspectives rather than their consolidation — the process was structured so that leadership itself could shift. Participants gradually assumed more and more of the directorial role, for each other, for us, and for passers-by who joined in as they wished.
The group’s boundaries were intentionally porous. Residents and people moving through the area were invited into the making whenever they chose. The group leaked into the site; the site and its people leaked into the group.
Together we built installations, spaces for rest and play, and temporary transformations that activated the area across the three weeks: an outdoor hammock-sewing circle, a fountain about leaking, one-minute sculptures from found debris, frottage of a very small egg, rope nets woven through trees.
The process generated a rich body of experience, form, and ideas now forming the basis for two permanent public artworks on the site, to be completed in autumn 2027.
In collaboration with Hanna Wildow, commissioned by Göteborg Konst for Familjebostäder and Stadsmiljöförvaltningen i Göteborg.