The place is demarcated by a highway, a large new development and some rocky hills with a grove of trees,¹⁾A new biomass power plant is being built. Fortum is investing five billion kronor, which is the largest industrial investment in Sweden, it will be fueled using byproducts from the logging industry.
“Tillsammans skapar vi en grönare stad”. Accessed July 26, 2016, www.fortum.com/countries/se/kampanjer/biobransle-vartan/pages/default.aspx. above are elevated subway tracks. It is lowered in the midst of the urban landscape, not particularly visible to passers by, the surrounding borders create a triangle where a sort of state of exception seems to be in effect – at least for some of those who live there. It’s a place in central Stockholm where a few hundred people live, work, and circulate, they’ve come from various countries in and outside Europe, some are Swedish citizens. They’ve come here for different reasons, what they all have in common is the hope of a more successful life. Some are doing short-term work in accordance with free movement, others are just sleeping here temporarily. It’s a place in transition. There are many similar places in Europe, they’re becoming increasingly common. But it’s also a place we’ve seen at previous points in Swedish history during large waves of migration. That is why my thesis touches down in a place like this, in this place. It ends by opening up a new inquiry where my questions can be put in play in new ways and a new work can begin to take shape.

The location is secluded and they can sleep there relatively unbothered, a few security guards on patrol are the only people with a view of their open bedroom, and the guards appear to accept their presence. I’ve seen many similarly furnished, organized sleeping places in central Stockholm. There are about ten sections under the loading dock and I can glimpse rolled-up mattresses, clothes, and blankets under most of them. In one of these encampments several shoes are lined up. In the five-story building next to the loading dock there are about thirty rooms on each floor. In here, as well as outside, artists AKAY and KPE (KlisterPeter) [Glue Peter] and others have created a series of pieces. If they’d wanted and tried to get in, the homeless people might have found the ladder that the artists had hidden and seen that the window on the second floor can be opened. But they don’t seem to think along those lines. The begging people I’ve previously spoken with say that they don’t want to bother anyone, they want to live an orderly life, they don’t want to break rules and ordinances they want a home and a job. And the same is probably true of most of those who come here looking for work. They don’t want to be out there, but they don’t want to be in there either.

How is this art connected to the (transmission of) meaning and content?¹⁰⁾Art critic Fredrik Svensk expresses the importance of constantly trying to understand in the face of what images art is made and can be made: “Because aren’t mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion that take place mainly on a sensual basis far more important to understand today than those that happen through a conventional politics of selection and representation?” A review of the Nordic pavilion in Venice 2015. Frederik Svensk, “Paviljongen som exklusiv symfoniorkester”, Kunstkritikk, May 14, 2015. Accessed July 26, 2016, www.kunstkritikk.se/kritikk/paviljongen-som-exklusiv-symfoniorkester/?d=se. For whom, for what, is this art made? When the two artists, AKAY and KlisterPeter, talk about their art they claim to give without expecting anything in return. It seems to me that their idea of what art is unites them; with friendship, trust, they make art alone and together with other artists that come there. But what do they mean by giving? To whom or what do they give? Can one give if there’s no one there to receive? What kind of giving is this?

Architect and artist Gordon Matta-Clark is central to their practice, as is his “anarchitecture”, “recycling pieces and spaces”, and “building cuts”. Gordon Matta-Clark’s art has been shown and can be discussed since he documented it on photo and film, so too the site-specific performances. Architecture and its compatibility with the urban life of the space was a central concern. Matta-Clark explains that he spent months in Guatemala, and that after he got back he wandered about New York City to find a space to stage The Making of Pier 52.¹¹⁾“And so, after coming back from places where architecture and architecture disintegration is in an incredible state of colossus in Guatemala, I was just determined to start something.” Gordon Matta-Clark; Gloria Moure, Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings, (Barcelona: Polı́grafa; New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2006), 180. He did not apply for a permit for this, or many of his other works, but he wasn’t interested in himself – when he created the works – or the viewer feeling uncomfortable. It wasn’t the forbidden, the transgression, or the crime that he was after, even though his works often included those things, Matta-Clark says in an interview that the work doesn’t need that, if anything it’s a burden. What he wanted to show couldn’t be done in another place or in a different way. “Well sneaking in may be attractive to some people, but I’m not interested in that. That’s maybe a flaw, as far as I’m concerned. Because I think the space and the situation is perfectly valid on it’s own.” The interviewer, Liza Bear asks: “Presumably you spent a fair amount of time working on it, I imagine…”¹²⁾Ibid., 180. GM-C: “Oh, well that aspect is something else. LB: Considerable expense. GM-C: Well, I mean, whether or not the piece will have a public life of any kind. Of course at the moment, it remains a confiscated work.”¹³⁾Ibid., 180.

Gordon Matta-Clark’s practice introduced new and radical forms of art. Some of his most famous projects involved laboriously cutting holes in the floors of abandoned buildings: “Well, originally it had to do with cutting out slices or wedges of […] the imperial New York waterfront.”¹⁴⁾Ibid., 178. Or in the case of Splitting (1974); dividing a suburban home in two. “Dealing with nothing more complex than the limits of human scale.” Rooms, houses, or a space where a particular human activity has taken place at a certain point in history, are opened and restructured for new activity for the future. For AKAY and KlisterPeter the choice of building is less about architecture. They’re wanderers in the city, they find a place where they practice for a while. Is it a studio? No, because this art can’t be moved to an exhibition space. Is it an exhibition space? No, viewers don’t come here. This building has an alarm on the first two floors; AKAY and KlisterPeter might not get in tomorrow.

Art mediates meaning, which meaning are we talking about? The words DAMAGE, BEAUTY, and BRICK are carved out in different ways and in different materials. This isn’t about embodying sculptures, this is the opposite – the artists have cut out the word BEAUTY in a sliding wall, the word unfolds as one pulls the wall out. Why did they choose that word? Beauty is an aesthetic term. In an interview Louise Bourgeois says: “Beauty? It seems to me that beauty is an example of what the philosophers call reification, to regard an abstraction as a thing. Beauty is a series of experiences. It is not a noun. People have experiences. If they feel an intense aesthetic pleasure they take that experience and project it into the object. They experience the idea of beauty, but beauty in and of itself does not exist. […] In fact, beauty is not only a mystified expression of our own emotion.”¹⁵⁾Louise, Bourgeois, Deconstruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father, (London: Violette Editions, 1998), 358. The word BEAUTY is cut out of the viewer’s projection surface – the viewers in this case are the artists themselves – they create and are also spectators within their community, and they tell me other artists come here, they’re part of a cluster, it’s a self-organized activity – the hollow word is folded up with the sliding door and can unfurled. They de-objectify the idea with a void and leave it open. Beauty is left open, to be filled with meaning.¹⁶⁾For me it’s a clear idea and act. Since my work in South Africa and Palestine/Israel I’ve expressed beauty as that which opens. For instance I say about the film A Heart From Jenin that the gift of the heart opens the wall and when it’s received by the family in Israel this opening is actually a hole in the language – and the images – that uphold the wall. As an Israeli friend put it: the wall was in the language before it was built. BRICK, BEAUTY, and DAMAGE – the words have been cut out of the walls and become openings in the structure of the building. They open the question – who and what is to fill these open terms, in this place waiting for transformation, with meaning?

Their art can’t be moved or sold, it can’t be part of economic transactions. The artists give their time, their energy, their desire, without demands for reciprocation. Neither their work inside the House or the spray-painted images and messages outside it can “participate in the circulation of representations of representations.”¹⁷⁾I’ve borrowed this expression from Peggy Phelan. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. (New York: Routledge, 1993). See also chapter 1.2, “Notes on the Text”, about performance. So why is this (art) interesting? The method is performative.¹⁸⁾“Thus while performance can be understood as a deliberate ‘act’ such as in theatre production, performance art or painting by a subject or subjects, performativity must be understood as the iterative and citational practice that brings into being that what it names.” writes Barbara Bolt, on page 134, referring to Judith Butler. “Butler is very clear that performativity involves repetition rather than singularity. Performativity is ‘not a singular act for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norm, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition.’”
Barbara Bolt, “Artistic Research: A performative paradigm?” PARSE, No. 3 (2016). Accessed August 6, 2016, http://www.parsejournal.com/article/artistic-research-a-performative-paradigm/. “Performance resists the balanced calculations of finance. It saves nothing, it only spends,”¹⁹⁾Phelan, 148. writes Peggy Phelan. But this isn’t a wasteful resistance, not consumption with the ulterior motive of accumulation, but a lusty transgression.²⁰⁾Michael Richardson writes, in his interpretation of philosopher George Bataille:
“If we stick to facts capitalism doesn’t escape the dialectical logic of Bataille: It consumes, and consumes just as meaninglessly, just as wastefully as any other society. What capitalism is lacking isn’t the consumption but every kind of lusty transgression. When we waste we do it grudgingly, all the time and with an ulterior motive of ultimately accumulating.” Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 79. Another thing that makes this art interesting is that the artists don’t work alone, other artists are active here, nor do they work as a group. “Individual genius is not the origin of culture,” as Rasmus Fleischer and Samira Ariadad write in their essay “Att göra gemensamma rum” [Creating common spaces].²¹⁾“Individual genius is not the origin of culture, as the tenacious myth of the originator without communities would have it. These communities too need to happen, especially in the gray areas, like rehearsal spaces. According to a liberal view on culture, ‘culture’ is something free floating – culture doesn’t need to happen and it doesn’t need community.”
Samira Ariadad and Rasmus Fleischer, “Att göra gemensamma rum”, Brand, No. 1 (2010), 44–6. Accessed July 7, 2016, www.samhallsentreprenor.glokala.se/wp-content/uploads/Att_gora_gemensamma_rum.pdf. They describe a system that has embraced the liberal idea that the private and the public are opposites, and that income for sustenance is won and communities found through a dialectical struggle. But what’s in between, in the act of giving without getting anything in return; these artists are well aware that they won’t make a livelihood off their work. The art will be torn down with the House. Could they be investigating if art can hold this kind of giving? Perhaps it’s exactly this kind of giving that makes art interesting and important, a certain kind of art, at any rate. And here, in this kind of place, there is the possibility of developing the kind of giving that isn’t about creating artifacts that are a part of the economy of reproduction.²²⁾Banksy is another artist who activates urban spaces, who visually questions demarcations through his art, but also as reproduction and transaction. Sales of his paintings in Gaza and on the Israeli wall have been attempted on the art market. “Now I think that even if [Banksy] drew something very small – even a dot – people might cut down their walls and try to sell it.” Says Ayed Arafah from the Dheisha refugee camp in Bethlehem. Yolande Knell, “Gaza Family ‘Tricked’ into Selling Banksy Painting for $175”, BBC News, April 1, 2015. Accessed July 26, 2016, www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-32139657. The artists found this place and began. What they get in return is something beyond that – space, meaning, content, freedom? It’s not limitless giving. “As described by anthropologist Marcel Mauss in his classic work The Gift transactions of gifts – and counter gifts […] contribute to social cohesion.”²³⁾Full quote: “As the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss argues in his classical work The Gift from 1925, transactions of gifts and gifts in return – in welfare state terms, the taxation of work in exchange for risk spreading and social protection – contribute to social cohesion.” Hanna Bäckström, Johan Örestig, Erik Persson, “The EU Migrant Debate as Ideology”, Eurozine, June 15, 2016, 2. Accessed April 26, 2016, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2016-06-15-orestig-en.html. When this is put into practice self-organized communities can be created. They have no political agenda but the political is constantly present – they work according to a system of their own, create a social script of their own and make their art. Perhaps this is the meaning they want to pour into the empty word BEAUTY – in itself an inexhaustible term. The collective practices of the House create a certain kind of artistic expression. There is a sort of “undetermined openness, when aesthetic experience is connected to freedom,” when communities emerge and are formed, according to philosopher Sven-Olof Wallenstein. “On another level, this floating dimension, between ideas and things, subjective and objective, frame and non-frame, depends on desire not being private or internal, but coming directly from our ability to communicate, from that which opens on intersubjective community – because this, Kant says in the important §9, is ‘the key to the critique of taste,’”²⁴⁾Sven-Olof Wallenstein, “Kant, det sköna och det sublima”, Paletten, No. 4 (2015): 59. according to Wallenstein. Desire is also associated with a temptation beyond the moral, beyond the known, with an attraction to the foreign, and to the non-doable. If the limit is transgressed the sublime can be reached, transgression is part of the method. It’s not just walls, surveillance, it is also the beautiful or the ugly – and images of what’s beautiful or ugly – that is transgressed when communication is opened (the spray-painted messages outside and inside, the cut-out words in the walls). Desire is associated with communicability. Not through the usual channels of communication – but through prohibited communication by aerosol can. “The aesthetic economy is always dependent on a border between the internal and the external (the frame as an on the side of, outer-work, parergon) that neither belongs to the internal nor the external, and that can be understood as a framing effect that always remains unstable: the frame is always about to crack, at the same time as it can never completely fall away, and de-framing and framing are like two vectors, the interplay of which constitutes the dynamics of the aesthetic field, and where one will always refer to the other,”²⁵⁾Ibid., 59. as Sven-Olof Wallenstein puts it.

The question of what kind of place this is remains. The fact that the House and the surrounding area are under surveillance means that the area is a place in some sense. It’s not an obvious non-place, since the surveillance makes it a place in some sense. Those I’ll speak to half a year later – the cleaning firm that participates in evictions – calls places like this X-places, but the people who work at the shelters don’t like that, the situation here is their existence, their reality. That’s also why it isn’t a “non-place” in anthropologist Marc Agué’s sense where the place is contracted and the person becomes anonymous through the nature of the place.²⁶⁾Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Anthropology of Supermodernity, (New York: Verso, 1995), 101. Accessed July 26, 2016, www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jread2/Auge%20Non%20places.pdf. This place is also populated by people, the shelters, the encampments; people who use it in various ways, the workers’ locker- and break-rooms. Thomas and Samuel have lived under the loading dock for two and a half years. It’s something between a place and a non-place. It’s a liminal space that could be described as “vague terrain” – a designation for unproductive, undefined places that have been abandoned, often placed between exploited productive places in a city.²⁷⁾Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Catalan architect, historian and philosopher, coined the term terrain vague, applied to abandoned, obsolete and unproductive areas, with no clear definitions and limits.
——“Ignasi de Solà-Morales”, Wikipedia. Accessed July 26, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignasi_de_Solà-Morales.
——“With the coining of the term Terrain Vague, Ignasi de Solà-Morales is interested in the form of absence in the contemporary metropolis. This interest focuses on abandoned areas, on obsolete and unproductive spaces and buildings, often undefined and without specific limits, places to which he applies the French term terrain vague. Regarding the generalized tendency to ‘reincorporate’ these places to the productive logic of the city by transforming them into reconstructed spaces, Solà-Morales insists on the value of their state of ruin and lack of productivity. Only in this way can these strange urban spaces manifest themselves as spaces of freedom that are an alternative to the lucrative reality prevailing in the late capitalist city. They represent an anonymous reality.” “Terrain Vague”, Atributos Urbanos. Accessed July 26, 2016, http://atributosurbanos.es/en/terms/terrain-vague. But that’s not quite right either, this area isn’t abandoned and will be populated, it is populated and activated. It’s not a place in transition but a place that is waiting – a waiting place – the condition of the place creates the conditions for art because perhaps this is exactly what makes it attractive for artists to claim. They encroach on such places.²⁸⁾“A gradual advance beyond usual or acceptable limits: urban encroachment of habitat.” “Encroachment”, Oxford Dictionaries. Accessed July 26, 2016, www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/encroachment. The artists ponder the House and the place while they create – with their images they reflect upon what’s going on here and in that way they also indirectly relate to the migrants and guest workers that populate the place. (And perhaps the condition of the place even dictates the practice of an [unknown] number of artists.) I too encroach on it. But my work emerges in a different way, I have a different method, but I plug into the art of the other artists since it will appear in my images and recordings. I too create activity in this place, which demands that I connect to the people who live and work here, and negotiate which images should be made visible. In this sense the place is a space for negotiation. When different realities meet negotiations arise between different parties that inhabit a place, the homeless, artists, workers, guards, property owners, when abandoned or soon to be demolished houses are used in ways other than those planned or expected. The place as political form poses questions of when and between which logics and parties negotiations will be initiated, how and over what. Which parties will participate? It’s a place waiting to be made visible.

I continue coming here during the spring of 2016 with filmmaker Erik Pauser. I’ve received a project grant to film the area and I want to develop a choreography with the dancer Anna Westberg. I speak to among others Thomas, 45, who has a residency permit and two jobs but is homeless and living under loading dock of the House. Samuel, 35, does too. He is homeless and undocumented from Ghana/Togo. And Albert, from Nigeria who has a residency permit and a job. Leonas from Lithuania has lost his passport and his cellphone and is living in the yard. Mohamed is from Libya and has had a residency permit for eight years, he can only find temporary work, usually off the books and lives in one of the shacks under the freeway. Said, 38, from Morocco, who’s just gotten his personal identification number and begun taking Swedish classes for immigrants lives in the shack across the way. Nina from Finland, the director at Convictus. Maria, a begging person from Romania who sleeps at the shelter sometimes. We speak with Arne who has had homes and been homeless and now manages daytime activities at Convictus and with Michaela from Romania who works with the women’s night operations. We also speak to a few workers from Poland and from Ireland, and one foreman from Sweden. But neither the management company for the House, the cleaning company, nor the owners of the alarm company – all established businesses in Sweden want to talk to us.

An afternoon in June a truck, dumpsters, the cleaning company, the alarm company, the house management, and the police arrive. They clear all encampments on the property, including those under the loading dock behind the House and Leonas’ home under the bike shack. But not the other shacks around, because they’re on land that belongs to the transportation authorities and the City of Stockholm. Those who tear out and throw away other people’s personal effects don’t want to be filmed and try to stop me, but since I’m standing on ground owned by the City of Stockholm I can film what’s going on. Those who are doing the cleaning especially don’t like me filming, even after I’ve explained that I’m not focusing on faces, but what they’re doing. They react strongly and emotionally. Two policemen are emotional too and want to stop me, while another policeman comes up and asks why and wants to listen. The homeless whose temporary homes are being put in the dumpster want me to film and they tell their stories in front of the camera.²⁹⁾A synopsis of the project “A Place in Europe” can be found at www.ceciliaparsberg.com. From these stories and events I want to develop a filmic choreography that builds on my work with different forms of images of the gestures of begging and giving in the urban space.

The short introductory story about my non-encounter with a begging person on the street contains everything that this dissertation is about and has developed. I’ve wanted to show how the situation on the street is a multi-dimensional experience, what layers the interaction between the begging person and me might contain. By beginning with that story I’ve wanted to show how a seemingly commonplace action and reaction to another person can be revealed aesthetically with an ethical argument. And vice versa. I devote myself to interactions, gaps: the ethics of place, the sphere between one and another. To me respect is a question of how we should handle this atmosphere where there also must be room for the third.

The first part of the dissertation was about investigating and revealing the images that are put into play between begging and giving in the urban landscape. Embodied hegemonic images both separate and connect bodies. That’s why the next step was to try to decode social scripts together with givers and stage new movements. That led to The Chorus of Begging and the Chorus of Giving which doesn’t strive to replicate a social situation, but replaced it with a choreography that reveals a negation – the arrangement of the choruses demonstrates another order that demands other actions with one another, in terms of language, movement, and attitude, and training was needed – it was a social choreography in cultural theorist Andrew Hewitt’s sense of the term: “I use the term social choreography to denote a tradition of thinking about social order that derives its ideal from the aesthetic realm and seeks to instill that order directly at the level of the body.”³⁴⁾Andrew Hewitt, “Choreography as a Way of Thinking about the Relationship of Aesthetics to Politics”, Documenta magazine project (2007). Accessed May 24, 2016, www.old.tkh-generator.net/en/openedsource/andrew-hewitt-choreography-a-way-thinking-about-relationship-aesthetics-politics-0. In the interview he talks about his book. Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). When the installation is shown it doesn’t just make visible the interaction of the two choruses, but also the space between them. The arrangement of the two choirs is a choreographed “co-presence” – that denotes a space for social interaction – and in the installation it becomes a space that necessitates the viewer.³⁵⁾Here choreography is about how bodies dispose of their performativity spatially. They stood across from each other – five meters apart – when they were filmed and the footage is projected the same way in the installation. A space for negotiation is being revealed and a space for action where the viewer is included in the negotiated dialogue on film. The meeting space that was established when they trained and sang together became a political form. As Andrew Hewitt describes: “Choreography is not just another of the things we ‘do’ to bodies, but a reflection on – and enactment of – how bodies ‘do’ things, and on the work that the work of art performs. Social Choreography exists not parallel to the operation of social norms and structures, nor is it entirely subject to those structures. It serves – ‘catachritically’, we might say – to bring them into being.”³⁶⁾Andrew Hewitt who isn’t a practitioner himself, he is Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature, stresses: “In a sense, my training in literary studies puts me at something of a disadvantage in talking about my ‘relation to performance studies’ because that relation, I think, might be better explicated from the other side of the dialogue, from the perspective of performance itself. It is certainly not my aim to offer prescriptions to performers, but to raise possibilities – perhaps in the realm of theory only – that they themselves might then articulate.” Hewitt, “Choreography as a Way of Thinking about the Relationship of Aesthetics to Politics”. The purpose of The Chorus of Begging and the Chorus of Giving is to generate new images and movements, both in the participants and in viewers of the installation and thus also impact social life. I’ve also tried other ways of showing the work, such as screenings on streets or in parks. As a work The Chorus of Begging and the Chorus of Giving can’t be separated from how it was made, together with the production film it constitutes a blueprint for how a space of action can be created between the begging and the giving.³⁷⁾The aesthetic as independent of the ethic, according to previous reasoning about image, see chapter 2 in particular. See also chapter 1.2 “Notes on the Text”, the passage on art activism. That is what my thesis – with my methodological intent – can be said to have led to. If we are to be able to discuss the ethical – which is necessitated by the political – the process needs to be made visible as well as the result, that is to say the method that is developed in the thesis. “Actions – not just representations – are ideological,” Andrew Hewitt writes. By social choreography Hewitt means that ideology becomes visible, becomes embodied, in the shifts between discourse and action as ideology.³⁸⁾Hewitt, Social Choreography, 11. I didn’t make the production film as a documentary to attempt to explain the process – that would only reduce the power of the “work of art,” but as a document the purpose of which isn’t to create an exclusive work, but an inclusive one – though one that can’t be part of circular reproduction. Within artistic research such a practice can be developed, methods can be developed, another form of art be produced. While scientific research is dependent on the result, artistic research can counteract by emphasizing the thesis as the act of receiving the relay baton, continuing the process and accounting for the handover.