MASU
everyone wishes
Notes from a spatial planning process
We met a boy who lived nearby and he was a little shy at first, but after a while he had many thoughts about life in Varberga and he would soon go on holiday and fly for the first time and he was quite nervous about it. He would like there to be things to climb on.
What does it mean for art to be part of a development project? In traditional spatial development, art usually comes in late in the process, as a kind of a crowning touch. One could imagine that it is about an idea of art as beautifying and beautiful, an act where material is processed and work is created that adds to, and enhances a place or a context.
If so, art risks to become primarily reactive and mostly relating to a series of decisions that has already been made by those who have a mandate to shape the space; for example, the client, architects of buildings and landscapes, housing companies, construction companies and the municipality. This in itself is nothing strange, they are all professionals within their guilds and trained to make all these decisions.
The role that art is given, and possibly maintains itself, through forms of procurement, expectations of results, identity and training makes it potentially difficult for actors on both sides to break the format where art comes in last and at best reacts to the place. One could imagine that art produced within this framework responds to a notion of what art in public space is rather than examining the context in which it operates.
What happens then when a client asks art to enter at the very beginning of a process, like a small stream that is allowed to meander throughout the work and whose main task is to ask other types of questions, materialize thoughts in new ways and be allowed to maintain a different view than the more linear project perspective? How can the client know what they are getting? How do you formulate an artistic commission that is not intended to result in permanent work in a predetermined location?
In Varberga, Örebro, we were part of such a new formulation for Örebrobostäder. It is probably not the first in history, but as an artist it is relatively unusual to be invited so early in a process where the outcome is not yet determined and where the commission focuses on dialogue and ideas rather than sketch presentation and implementation. For us, this allowed a wider scope to approach the site and to work together to create social and material contexts where many voices could be expressed. The commission was formulated more as a conversation than as a commission, with a desire to connect a new square formation with a small forest. There was something about a district in transformation and a hope for new meetings and new ways of moving through a built space. There was a desire to open up and do things differently to enable safer spaces for more people to stay in. The concrete plan, the first question, was fairly clear: to open a green strip with visual contact between the new square and the forest. To create a situation for playfulness and movement for young people and at the same time increase presence on the site to avoid the insecurity that slightly hidden places can cause.
The site
At first, we mostly saw a non-site, an area between the houses, which people pass by. A seemingly randomly placed fence as an extra layer over an earlier idea of another movement. A wooden house (The Green Villa), a former kindergarten, now offices for the nearby pre-school that was experienced as closed and which, with its location, both divided the site in two and at the same time demanded a certain distance. We saw a straight cycle path that was used frequently and a few smaller footpaths that were used less often. We saw no one stopping among the trees, no one in the grass with a lunch sandwich or a book.
Moving in a landscape that is one thing, but is going to become something else, is a journey of discovering unformulated dreams. In Varberga there are many different dreams and stories, there are layers upon layers of lives lived and living, all with their different wishes for the future. There are those who have lived here for thirty years and those who have just moved in, there are those who have grown up here and those who have seen others grow up. There are those who feel safe and those who feel unsafe, those who have children and those who have dogs and here there are those who walk with a cane and those who have just learned to ride a bike. There are many different ages, nationalities and cultural origins here and everyone has dreams. Everyone wishes.
We started by being on site for several days. We did all the things that are part of starting a project: we drew, talked, walked, measured and had lunch at the pizzeria, we talked to residents in the area, met various representatives of Örebrobostäder and took photographs.
The role we had here was elastic and we listened with our whole bodies. We tested and asked, wondered and tried to understand all the layers of thoughts that were gathered and projected on the place we were in. We proposed the Green Villa as a node in a web. A mediocre light-green building becoming an epicenter for many simultaneous stories that intertwine and overlap, entangle and receive. Stories about responsibility, accessibility, meetings and about children and the future and the big world around us.
We move in the stories and dreams and work to give shape to something that could be unifying, an energy that could formulate a place to stay at instead of moving through and past. For us, this was a place where several layers of stories could be given at the same time. Not necessarily in the same hours, but on the same surface, so that many can belong. A place with thousand names. During the process, we returned to this need for a unifying force, a kind of spatial hub that could be visited and used in different ways during changing seasons and various hours of the day. We formulated a place that would be Unprogrammed Programmed for the residents of Varberga to activate for meetings and parties as well as dance performances, rest and bazaars. A space in the commons that could lend itself to different events at different times for different groups.
In a report we wrote:
Against the background that we live in a time that seems increasingly individualized and perhaps even polarized, we think that places for meetings close to where people live are increasingly important. In an environment that appeals to a broad group of people, with a little extra focus on young people, places without demands for consumption become extra important.
Over a weekend, a prototype was built. We were in front of The Green Villa with the place-building method we often return to where we test space and thoughts on a 1:1 scale, as a kind of drawing with wood where it is possible to experience and think about the room with one's body. We built together with others, a floor as a possible stage and a roof as a possible shelter. In the joint work, new conversations were opened, both for the participants and passersby, about the value of gathering people in a place where many different can be present at the same time.
During the second year of the project, we worked more focused on a surface aimed at the older children. A mountain made of wood. A sculpture that can be climbed. The climbing mountain is both a visual node in the new topology and an object to meet at, to cling to, to create new stories around. The mountain is site-built in wood and follows the care and intention of the new park
Throughout the project, we have meandered and moved in the space and the process, seen the place with the ugly fence and the emptiness develop into a living space where many different meetings are possible. We have built, talked, played pétanque on the new gravel, barbecued and carried material. We have seen new surfaces being formed and children and adults taking on the new. It is ready, now it begins.