CIRCLE #1: A Storytelling Infrastructure
Artist: Valentina Karga
Dimensions and material: 6 engraved stones, approximately 40x3020 cm each
Placement: Piprensarvägen 15
Date: Created in 2020. Made permanent in 2022.
Instructions for use
- Once 3 or 6 people are seated in the circle, the storytelling begins.
- Your stone is your role in the process of building the story. For example, if your role is WHO, then you have to develop the character/s of the story. If your role is WHERE, you have to elaborate on the place/area/location where the story takes place. If your role is WHAT, then you are responsible for the plot and get to decide what happens in the story (If there are 3 participants, then each person takes on 2 stones.)
Create the part of the story that your role dictates, making sure to add enough detail. At this stage, you should work on your own, either on paper or on your phone or other device.
- Share what you have written with the rest of the group. Everybody adds something different. Start discussing how to combine all these different ingredients together.
Context
Reality starts with stories. There is a great deal of truth in even the most fictional tales, because through them we reflect on who we are and what our relation to others might be.
CIRCLE #1 provides an infrastructure for storytelling, promoting it as something that contemporary people might engage in. It suggests a communitarian use of the exhibition space based on the collaborative creation of stories. The stories are oral and are created when 3 or 6 visitors declare their wish to participate.
CIRCLE #1 was originally a site-specific work for the group exhibition Performing the Fringe (Konsthall C March–June 2020), curated by Jussi Koitela and Inga Lâce. It has been donated by the artist to remain at Konsthall C and be used by its visitors and others passing by.
Artist biography
Artist Valentina Karga was born in Chalkidiki, a peninsula in Northern Greece. She lives in Berlin and she is a professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK) in Hamburg.
Currently she is working on challenging the notion of “self” by proposing non-anthropocentric future narratives. Valentina Karga work operates between art, design, research, and architecture. It draws together elements of socially engaged practices and speculative experiments that question the existing social and physical infrastructures within the realms of energy, economy, and sustainability.
A large part of her projects encourage engagement and participation, facilitate practices of commoning and are concerned with sustainability. She works across different media, often inviting a public or a community to literally complete the work. Sometimes, through dialogue and building prototypes in a DIY manner, they end up imagining alternatives for infrastructures and institutions that structure our reality. This is what she calls ‘Art as Simulation’.
She is a founding member of Collective Disaster, an interdisciplinary group that works in the interstices of architecture and the social realm.
Graduated as an architect, she has been a fellow at the Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Science/Graduate school, University of the Arts Berlin, a Saari Fellow in Finland, an NTU-CCA resident in Singapore and she has been awarded the Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research. Among others, her work has been shown at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, the transmediale festival, the Athens Biennial, the 1st Thailand Biennial, the Moscow Biennial for Young Arts, the Kiasma museum, Konsthall C, Hippolyte Gallery in Helsinki and a major exhibition curated by Whitechapel Gallery.
