Artists: Space Popular, Lundahl & Seitl, Oscar Häggström, Åsa Cederqvist, Untold Garden, Pastelae, Eric Magassa, James Webb, Adam James, SONG (Choterina Freer, Anna Kinbom och Rut Karin Zettergren i samarbete med Paola Torres Núñez del Prado och Rosalie Yu). Curator: Ulrika Flink.

By downloading the app Vävda Rum, visitors can experience and interact with ten brand new virtual artworks located in public spaces in Hökarängen. For example, you can jog together with a virtual companion, be chased by a reindeer along the streets, connect with a poetic underworld, create a shared word cloud, or build a sculpture together with others. Konsthall C finds it especially exciting that residents and the art audience can discover new aspects of Hökarängen through the exhibition.

Vävda Rum is a unique exhibition where ten artists working with public art and augmented reality (AR) have created artworks adapted for public spaces found in most municipalities in the country. It can be a square, a fountain, a grassy area, or an empty lot. The exhibition takes place simultaneously in 130 locations across the country.

Previously, public spaces with squares and parks were important meeting places for people. Today, many of our meetings and debates take place in virtual forums instead. In some places, squares and other public spaces may therefore feel empty and unsafe. With Vävda Rum, we want to use art to repopulate our shared spaces and connect the virtual and physical realms, creating new meeting places.

Vävda Rum also demonstrates that contemporary art, with the help of new technology, can be playful, imaginative, and create exciting experiences regardless of geography and time of day, beyond the walls of the art gallery. It is an exhibition that encourages you to claim Hökarängen's public spaces and extends a hand to new encounters and conversations with its residents and visitors.

SONG (Choterina Freer, Anna Kinbom, and Rut Karin Zettergren in collaboration with Paola Torres Núñez del Prado, Jonas Pajari, and Rosalie Yu), Interweave, 2023

"Interweave" shows how oral stories be remembered and live on through us in our everyday lives. The project pays homage to early mythology and vernacular storytelling from Nordic, British, Celtic, Chinese, Swedish, and ancient Greek traditions.

The Norns were goddesses who spun the thread of life and shaped human destiny; Arachne was challenged to a weaving competition and transformed into a spider; Cailleachen was a divine hag associated with the creation of landscapes and weather, and the white snake is a legend about a romance between a man and a snake. The work pays tribute to these myths of ancient and often underestimated women by returning to them collectively.

Scyllas Opulent Noise Generator (SONG) is a collective of neurodivergent artists operating in different time zones. For over ten years, Rut Karin Zettergren, Choterina Freer and Anna Kinbom have worked together, regularly inviting artists to participate in dialogue. SONG's multidisciplinary art practice includes collective drawing, writing, video installations, game development, performances, seminars, and rituals. Often, the works begin with online dialogues that evolve over time into something virtual or physical. In the work on this piece, SONG has invited three collaborators: Rosalie Yu - artistic production and Artificial Ingenuity (Paola Torres Núñez del Prado and Jonas Pajari) - the technical aspects of the artwork.

In the work on this piece, SONG has invited three collaborators: Rosalie Yu - artistic production, and Artificial Ingenuity (Paola Torres Núñez del Prado and Jonas Pajari) - the technical aspects of the artwork.
More about SONG: https://rutkarinzettergren.se, http://annakinbom.com,
https://choterinafreer.net,
https://rosalieyu.com/,
https://www.singingtextiles.com/ 

Åsa Cederqvist, Giga-annum, 2023

By engaging the viewer in dialogue with an enchanted world that reminds us that we humans are also nature, Åsa Cederqvist lets nature speak for itself. In the artwork she explores the parallel between an increasingly exhausted humanity and a depleted planet: Have we forgotten that we too are nature? What happens to us when we no longer have access to our creativity and playfulness, and when our planet is no longer livable? In Giga-annum, we get a glimpse of nature's own voice and the power of the uncontrollable force that exists both in nature and within us. We are water, we are all the water that exists. Join us.

Giga-annum is connected to open APIs for water data that are used to adapt the experience and change the artwork based on local weather in the location of the visitor.

Åsa Cederqvist's artistic practice operates at the intersection of visual art, film, and choreography. Her work is deeply rooted in an interest in humanism and the construction of community. She creates humorous and disturbing universes that navigate between the subconscious and the rational, the physical and the ephemeral. Cederqvist is interested in cycles and transformations, both in content and material, in the body as well as in nature.

More about Åsa Cederqvist: https://asacederqvist.com/

Pastelae, Berget, 2023

A reindeer stands on the edge of a cliff, proudly looking out over its herd moving around a central square. The horns are metallic, rocks and hooves shine with a pink chrome techno glow. The herd is made up of those who visit the artwork, each visitor gets a reindeer that follows them around.

The representation of a reindeer as the leader of a herd touches on our collective longing for solidarity and community. Berget illustrates how we as humans always strive to unite, find common ground, and a sense of connection and belonging. It reminds us that we are part of something bigger, something constantly moving and changing, and works like a snapshot of human society. We are also reminded of the power of nature in the north and how important it is to protect our common resources in the digital age.

More about Pastelae: https://pastelae.com/

Lundahl & Seitl, Eye Floaters at Pseudo Mona's Fountain, 2023

This digital superorganism, like an urban circulatory system, is interconnected through portals located at fountains or trees throughout Sweden. It is populated by virtual microbes with properties similar to those of the rain-producing bacterium Pseudomonas syringae. They live high up in the clouds and communicate through quorum sensing, a chemical language that can be seen as the origin of social behavior.

Only when a digital microbe is occupied by a human does it appear to others as a ghostly presence in the artwork. Come closer and meet the digital microbes, take place in one of them and influence the internal meteorology of their interwoven environment. By using movement and the basic communication rules of quorum sensing, you can interact with microbes possessed by other visitors. By following, attacking, moving away from or retreating, we create and relate to a virtual proximity that is measured in muscle movements. How do we know that we are really meeting others and not just our own experience of a digital representation?

The artist duo Lundahl & Seitl reinterpret the exhibition medium as interpersonal processes through choreography, materials, and time. Together they have developed an art form of staging, choreographed movements, instructions, and immersive technologies, a process where material objects and humans' ability to create a world through perception coexist side by side.

Dramaturgi: Rachel Alexander
Procedural Sound: Servando Barreiro
Sound: Hara Alonso

More about Lundahl & Seitl: http://www.lundahl-seitl.com

James Webb, Empathic magic, 2023

Come and spend some time in this place, find a space to sit and linger, let the sounds of the surroundings fascinate you and relax; this is an opportunity to breathe and let the place harmonize with you. Feel the calm and listen to the voice that invokes blessings: observations about age, the transience of time and the journey we are all on. Each new participant who shares the experience will affect the work; new sounds and words are introduced and the presence of others develops and changes the course of the artwork.

James Webb works with site-specific interventions and installations. The works, which often include sound, found objects, and text, refer to literature, film, and a minimalist tradition. In his art, he starts from a complex mixture of the physical and mental, moving around emotional states such as longing, despair, ecstasy, and hopefulness. These are used to create shifts and ask questions about individuality, belonging, community, fragmentation, and recreation. By taking objects, techniques, and forms from their context and placing them in other environments, Webb creates explorative spaces. He allows his own academic background in religion, theater, and marketing to merge into poetic examinations of the economies of faith and communication dynamics in our contemporary world.

Script: Matilda Lilja and James Webb

Translation: Matilda Lilja

Voice: Lina Kinning Recorded at EMS

More about James Webb: https://theotherjameswebb.tumblr.com/

Adam James, The third link, 2023

Inspired by live action role-playing (LARP) and other ways people like to play, Adam James turns the visitor into a player or game master tasked with finding ways to connect art societies from all over Sweden. Everyone is invited to create and capture playful moments in parks and picnic areas around the country. Texts with themes of empathy and collaboration guide players to create human sculptures, living scenes, or mini gatherings that connect municipalities and bring people together. The play takes place among monumental sculptures of objects chosen by his two children and is framed by a virtual layout of the artist's own home.

The core of Adam James' practice is a desire to bring people together and open up new ways of socializing. He uses nonverbal play to encourage dialogue, mediation, and reconsideration of likeness and difference. Based on his involvement in role-playing, James creates sculptural objects, drawings, photographs, videos, and texts. The focus is on the experimental nature of interactive role-playing and the ability to tell a story with many threads. For James, art becomes a tool that allows people to see their reality in a new light, dismantle hierarchies, and create new forms of collaborative democracy.

More about Adam James: https://www.mradamjames.com/

Untold Garden, Interspatial Echoes, 2023

Interspatial Echoes is equal parts social network and public art. It is a virtual communication platform that can only be visited on squares around Sweden, displaying messages in a large flowing cloud above the visitor. You can participate in the artwork by writing your own messages and reading others, thereby influencing the content and form of the word cloud. The artwork connects modern communication technology with the square's historical role as a place for politics and gossip and ties together all of Sweden's squares into one.

Untold Garden is an art and design studio consisting of Max Čelar and Jakob Skote, exploring how technology can catalyze interpersonal relationships and enable alternative human experiences. By creating participatory systems, they encourage visitors to question who controls our online presence and speculate on how we can interact in the future. In their projects, they strive to go beyond the distinction between tools and objects, seeing each object as a potential platform for enabling new ideas. Their practice includes physical installations, virtual sculptures, interactive performances, artificial nature, and experimental social networks.

Interspatial Echoes is realised with funding from Kulturbryggan. Paperbirds has developed the custom physics engine that powers the artwork.

More about Untold Garden: https://www.untold.garden/

Eric Magassa, Parallel Worlds, 2023
Featuring poets: Sandy Harry Ceesay, Nilofar Haghighi, Masoud Vatankhah

In the well, there are beings with stories to tell, compressed in words and poetry. With your voice, a magical portal is activated, opening up to a parallel world. Take a tone, sing a song, or whisper a secret to the enchanted well, opening up a passage to travel to another place.

By working with masks, patterns, and montages, Eric Magassa stages shifts between the visible and the invisible, and between different identities and meanings. The connection to color, the abstract, and the figurative is recurring. In this work, Eric Magassa collaborates with the writing collective Qalam, which is based on the idea that writing and language are important in the process of decolonizing the senses and society. For Qalam, it is essential that their own writing contributes to a collective exploration and learning by allowing unheard voices to write untold stories.

Eric Magassa is a multidisciplinary artist who moves freely between different techniques, materials, and methods. The starting point in his works often revolves around his roots in Sweden, France, and Senegal. He explores what it means to travel between different places and belongings, examining themes of identity, marginalization, belonging, and historiography.

Sound production: Partillo Productions
More about Eric Magassa: http://www.magassa.com/

Space Popular, Rootunda, 2023

Inside the artwork, we encounter a virtual cylindrical textile that, when pulled aside, reveals a room of tapestries with a manifesto. The room is a prototype for a spatial web browser with intertwined layers of virtual experiences, where visitors are represented by threads bearing the name of their current location. Through their explorations, visitors contribute to the fabric of the network. The idea is a virtual portal where the material behavior of textiles becomes a universal way to navigate through the virtual environment.

With their research, which is based on texts like Stephen Graham's "Towards Urban Cyberspace Planning" from the late 1990s, Space Popular aims to contribute to the field they call virtual urbanism. It involves the protocols that enable us to instantly teleport between virtual environments, browse and bookmark them, go back in history, or remove them. Elements like portals, elevators, teleporters, and even menus and buttons serve as the virtual city's roads, sidewalks, and public transportation.

Space Popular has previously presented their research on virtual urbanism in projects such as The Portal Galleries at Sir John Soane's Museum in London 2022, MAK in Vienna 2023, and Search History at MAXXi in Rome 2022. More about Space Popular can be found at http://www.spacepopular.com.

Oscar Häggström, Jogg your mind, 2023

Jogg your mind draws inspiration from ideas of optimization and objectification prevalent in fitness culture like "fitspo" and "fitspiration." In the artwork, you get to meet, train, and interact with a personal trainer. Your training time with your personal trainer is documented and logged, and you can track the results and statistics of others in the app.

Oscar Häggström is interested in the blurred boundary between our emotions and the tools we use to express them. In his works, he raises questions about how we use modern tools to shape our emotions and how they shape us, as well as how we can perceive the blurry line between our emotions and the tools we use to express them.

Through installations of objects, animations, sounds, music, and VR technology, Oscar Häggström creates a visual world where everything exists in an infinite loop, using figures and symbols from popular culture. The loop allows him to intensify the situations he has staged in front of an audience. In moving images, he depicts everyday situations and tells stories to approach, analyze, and understand our present time. By observing and highlighting the technology that surrounds us, he aims to make our era comprehensible. More about Oscar Häggström can be found at https://www.oscarhaggstrom.com/.

Producers of Vävda Rum

National Association of Swedish Art Associations

Project Managers: Linn Hübinette and Alexandra Hvalgren

The National Association of Swedish Art Associations has been working since 1973 to represent the interests of art associations in cultural life. We organize approximately 610 art associations in a national network. Art education is one of our main tasks.

Untold Garden

Untold Garden is an art and design studio consisting of Max Čelar, Jakob Skote, and Michael Brewster. In their work, they explore how technology can create interpersonal relationships and enable new experiences of the world.

Curator Ulrika Flink

Ulrika Flink is a curator based in Stockholm. She holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London. She is currently the artistic director at Konsthall C in Stockholm.

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The project Vävda Rum is initiated by the National Association of Swedish Art Associations in collaboration with the art and design studio Untold Garden. Vävda Rum is funded by the Postkod stiftelsen.