In April 2025 the first year students and staff of the MFA programme undertook a three day, 400 kilometers journey north. With the chartered bus as both means of travel and pedagogical space the group travelled to four destinations along the E20/RV50 highway: Ljurhallafabrikerna, the Varberga neighborhood in Örebro, Ställbergs gruva and Folkets Hus Kopparberg. Here the group engaged with places and practices where design and artistic practice organises and situate itself in relations to specific local places and conditions.
In relation to the course Social Transformation the journey offered the more peripheral view, acknowledging the specificities of each visit:
In Ljurhalla, designers Nathan Clydesdale and artist Rachel Barron have established a space for art, design and creative education. Located in an old factory from the 1930s Nathan and Rachel run residency programs, host exhibitions and actively work with the local community, with the ambition to support a diversity of creative processes and cross-disciplinary exchange.
In Varberga, Örebro, municipal bureaucrat Anna-Maria Hellner has worked with how artistic and design practice can come into the planning process of spaces to challenge current processes of urban development and enable alternative place-making processes.
In Ställberg the group The non-existent Center runs a transdisciplinary place for art, thought and work in a closed down iron ore mine, revolving together with invited collaborators and participants around existential, economical and environmental issues of our time, reflected in the local place’s history and contemporary situation.
Folket Hus Kopparberg (“Kopparberg’s Peoples’ House”) is an organisation that recently managed to buy the old Folkets Hus building and re-establish the Folkets Hus as a place for social organisation, education and culture activities in Ljusnarsberg, one of Sweden’s smallest municipalities, badly affected by depopulation, child poverty and lack of cultural infrastructure.