Index Residents
For three years Index ran a major learning program called Index Residents. Functioning as an open-ended platform for collaboration and dialogue, over 300 students from across Stockholm and Uppsala took up residency within Index for a one year period. The residency took a long-term approach, allowing topics to evolve and develop in relation to the interests of the participants. Over the year, these groups of young people were supported to; reclaim the city centre, democratise art and to participate in art making. The Residents participated in workshops and specialised visits to artists studios, art schools, film screenings and the like, providing a platform for young people to meet art and artists face to face.
Participating schools for 2017/2018 are Fryshuset, Husby; St.Eriks Gymnasium, Kungsholmen; Järfälla Gymnasiet, Järfälla; Globala Gymnasiet, Zinkensdamn; Internationella Engelska Skolan Järfälla; Internationella Gymnasiet, Uppsala; Rönninge skola, Salem and Torsviks skola, Lidingö.
Supported by Allmänna Arvsfonden and Stockholms län landsting
Blog
Index Residents at the learning seminar
November 2018
Index Residents presented video works and gave a talk about the workshops they have been doing in connection to And Tomorrow And as part of Index’ first learning seminar, THE URGE, THE ECHO: Reverberations of Learning Practices. 8–10 November 2018. More information on the seminar here.
‘Another story’ exhibition with Index Residents and Uppsala Konstmusuem
October 2018
Uppsala Konstmuseum invited Index Residents in Uppsala to be part of the curatorial process and making of the exhibition Another Story. The exhibition was a selection of works from the Uppsala Konstmuseum archive chosen by teenagers from the local high school who have participated in Index Residents for the past three years. The students visited the Konstmuseum on multiple occasions and worked with Index to discuss curatorial strategies.
Rumours of the future workshops with Index Residents
November 2018
In connection to the exhibition And Tomorrow And.
Predictions workshops with St Eriks Gymnasium
October 2018
At Index and at the school, held in collaboration with artists Sara Wolfert and Nathlie Wuerth.
Seeing with other eyes
October 2018
A group from Häggviks Gymnasium visit Index and sees the exhibition And Tomorrow And through layers of film, curtains and histories. Re-arranging the room, the group decided to look at the text in another way, attaching the curtains to each other and placing the reader down at the floor, watching a ceiling of words and worlds. Also spotting insects in the films and flying around the gallery the determination is that the future is: insiktsfull.
Future is
October 2018
Flowing in from Solna is another new group of SPRINT (newly-arrived) students, joining us at Index.
Together we talk about uncertainties, blue floors and make demands for the future to be: good, what we want it to be, hard and safe.
Häggviks Gymnasium
October 2018
Emmeli takes an afternoon visiting different classes at Häggviks Gymnasium, our first Index Resident school dedicated to young people with learning variations. Meeting the students in small groups, we spent time talking about art, life and the interests and curiosities that keeps them together. As part of the class “art and society” the students had prepared interview questions about the condition for artists today. Can you survive on only making art? What kind of art is Index interested in? Can you have other jobs as an artist? Together we will spend this autumn looking into different forms of art and what art could be in the future.
New students, new futures, new images
October 2018
New students, new relationships, and new thoughts are entering And Tomorrow And. Forming across different classes of Solna Gymnasium, these students come together in the discussion about what a future and what an image is. Using the filmprogram as a starting point, we try to question the reproduction and repetition images describing and imagining the future. After writing, reading and performing a collective manifesto the group re-arranges the show to offer a new kind of reading, a new kind of image of the room.
New Collaborations: UnCUT
September 2018
During our years running Index Residents we have got the chance to look into the ecology of artistic and pedagogical initiative all around Stockholm. Long standing collaboration with LAVA Kulturhuset, Konstfack, Moderna Museets: Museum Museum, and Kungliga Konsthögskolan keep on strengthening our ability to reach out and connect different groups that want to think with contemporary art. Finding a common ground but also recognising each others weaknesses and strength is a vital component in collaborating for a better infrastructure of young art in Stockholm.
Starting this fall we are proud to present a collaboration with Solna based UnCUT; offering young unestablished creatives an opportunity to freely explore film as a medium and using professional equipment. As a part of the exhibition And Tomorrow And Index Residents collaborate with UnCut to make filmic proposals for how to look at the future as a collaborative space.
Back to School Visits
September 2018
To kick off the new Index Residents year Emmeli visit all the school groups in their own classrooms, travelling to Uppsala, Solna, Sollentuna and around Stockholm. Getting to know the students, find common ground, using art making and art histories as a way of sharing, learning together. It was also a great chance to meet with the exceptional teachers who work at these schools. The connection with the teachers and discussion of learning strategies is a major element of the Residents program.
Summer Course: And Forever And
August 2018
Index’ first summer school, And Forever And, took place in August 2018. The ten day course was initiated and taught by the Index learning team, and was based around developing collective methods for collective futures.
Drawing on the legacy of the artistic manifesto as a means of making demands of the future, participants in the summer course Saga Flodman, Viola Flø Brøther, Miriam Gustavsson, Leonora Haag, Evelina Jacobson Potenciano, Moa Elvira Lundborg, Leo Silkeberg W-O and Mathilda Tönseth, unpacked possible futures with guest teachers Roxy Farhat, Iris Smeds, Ulla-Britta Westergren and Ellen Söderhult. With text as a central focus of the course, the students developed collective performative and text based pieces that draw on the philosopher Isabelle Stengers model of the ‘reciprocal capture’, which presents a state of reciprocity, where entities enter a process of encounter and transformation, and in this state, find ways of coming together. The state of ‘reciprocal capture’ is central to the modes of working present in this course the Index Learning Program.
The course led into the production of the autumn exhibition, AND TOMORROW AND, opening at Index on August 24, 2018.
Extending the Powers of the Alter Ego
June 2018
Index Residents Solna take over the office for a full day flowing into the summerfestival Letting The Days Go By. Presenting a slice of the processes formed during this year, the Index audience are invited to come and sense the rubber hand, try out some new looks, and get a copy of the brand new Zine: The Alternative Ego – Cogito Ergo Sum.
Index’ summer festival Letting the Days Go By presented six consecutive summer evenings celebrating the season in a spirit of ease and experimentation. Featuring a series of events, workshops, performances, collaborations and works-in-progress, the festival takes place both in and around the Index premises on Kungsbro strand featuring Stockholm based and international artists and collectives. Letting the Days Go By is a celebration of the groups and communities, both old and new, that exist within Index’ network and its neighbourhood.
Using Index’ space and its surrounding area with its existing networks and artistic communities to bring people together, Letting the Days Go By experiments with new ways of strengthening and broadening dialogues, meeting and sharing with different audiences. The festival opens up questions around the notion of community – what it does, what it might mean to us today and what it may become in the future.
Zine Publication: The Alternative Ego – Cogito Ergo Sum.
June 2018
Accumulating thoughts, processes and experiments that has taken place inside and outside our alternative bodies – Index Residents Solna wrap up the year with a Zine Publication named: The Alternative Ego- Cogito Ergo Sum. Thank you to all of the amazing students and teachers from Solna Gymnasium for engaging your thoughts, hands, dreams and formulations in this process that started with Ada Lovelace, and became so much more.
Visit Index or email emmeli@indexfoundation.se to get your very own copy.
Empathy: Are you a body with a mind or a mind with a body?
May 2018
Inside Sidsel Meineche Hansens exhibition OVER, where de-humanised technological ideologies echo both in physical and mental states, Solna Gymnasium SPRINT continue to follow in Ada Lovelaces path. Connecting to her unrealised mathematical model that would “map how the brain creates thoughts and how the nerves produces feelings” we ask ourselves if you need a body to think? Does emotions come from bacterial interplay behind our veins or are they produced by flashes of electricity or managed by a greater power?
Together we conduct the “Rubber Hand Illusion”, and prove the theory true.
To experience the rubber hand illusion, you’ll need a fake hand of some kind – in our case, homemade replicas – a piece of cardboard and two paintbrushes. Place the hand on a table in front of you and conceal your real hand behind the cardboard. Now get somebody to stroke and tap the fake hand and real hand using identical movements of the paintbrushes. When the rubber hand is hit, your real hand will automatically retract, believing it was your own.
“Emotions move sound and matter. They leak out in gestures, morph the body and its color.
Artificial intelligence will learn to understand the gestures linked to emotions, but how can it learn to feel emotions without a body?
How do I relate to my own body and imagine the bodies of others?”
The alter-lingo
Maj 2018
Every language has a specific code that is used to document communications. They can be called letters, symbols, charachters, a system of different visual representations, coming together to make words. In the aftermath of Ada Lovelaces invention of the computer program we rarely see the actual code that is being used behind the interface in our daily device-held communications.
For their growing alter-egos, Index Residents Solna Gymnasium SPRINT make new alphabets, translating the secret wishes of their robotic selves into code. At the same time, shells of bodies are evolving, extending the powers of the alter-ego into uniforms.
Path of here and there
April 2018
In Taus Makhachevas film Tightrope a fifth generation linedancer is balancing between two cliffs, carrying with him painting from the local museum of art in Dagestan. Together with the Index Residents Folkuniversitetet Uppsala SPRINT, we watch the film at Uppsala Konstmuseum. The balancing act also carries stories, stories that we then bring with us into the collection. Drawing lines of our own we link together two works connects in a narrative, leaving the museum floor in a web of told and ontold connections.
The alter-ego
April 2018
Ada Lovelace famously contested the possibility of machines having any agency of their own.
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.” If machines are purely servants for human agency, unable to extend their abilities further than the wish of their masters, we need to look closer at which desires, needs and abilities we are commissioning them to extend.
Using video chat we guide Index Resident group from Solna Gymnasiym SPRINT though the exhibition OVER, and look closer at the machine who is narrating the show; BINA48. Modeled after the consciousness of a real person, BINA48 is a sentient humanoid robot, engineered with neural architecture. BINA48 and her human predecessor Bina Rothblatt follow us into the task of making new versions of ourselves, formulating and creating alter-egos to help extend our abilities, desires and needs.
Lines made for walking
April 2018
The path of least resistance is the physical or metaphorical pathway that provides the least resistance to forward motion by a given object or entity, among a set of alternative paths. The concept is often used to describe why an object or entity takes a given path.
In todays workshop with the SPRINT group at Uppsala Internationella Gymnasiet, we start by looking at lines that people have walked in a landscape. Maybe in an effort to make art, as in the case of Richard Long, or in the effort of efficiency. We then search the school to identify a place where lines can disrupt and challenge the normal paths taken within this building. The weaving of the common-room and the entrance stirs up a lot of engagement with the rest of the students as well as the teachers, and encourages navigation to find the new path of least resistance to go ahead.
Using a map of Uppsala we also map the roads of a place we have in our memory, placing one place on top of the other, tying them together in one big web.
The Tongue
April 2018
“Sometimes when I am alone in the gallery I think about what it would be like to be human. To run with my arms, jump with my fingers, scratch my hair with with toes, breath inside a chewing gum.”
In the company-on of a robotic voice narrating the workshop, young children join forces to introduce new faces to the gallery space, whispering friendly remarks to the walls and sharing the knowledge of what its like to have a tongue with the mute sculptures on the walls.
Nothing is emotional (12OVER)
Emotional is nothing (OVER12)
Is nothing emotional (2OVER1)
April 2018
In a looping gallery students from Engelska Skolan Järfälla continue with the proposition Nothing Is Emotional. Starting with the state of emotion in the exhibition OVER by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, the students work together to make speeches for emoticons and collectively reverbe the written materials handed by the artist, to make a new Zine OVER on OVER on UBER. Continuing with the collective practice the students develop looped, cyclical and collective methods for borrowing and making together.
The Ada Lovelace Model
Mars 2018
In 1844, Ada Lovelace, the woman who wrote the first computer program, had an idea about a new mathematical model that would map how the brain creates thoughts and how the nerves produces feelings. A calculus of the nervous system that was never realized.
Working with a new Resident group from Solna Gymnasium, consisting of only girls from the language introduction course (SPRINT), we try to follow in Adas footsteps, creating mappings and sensory connections, models of the model that never came to be.
Nothing Is Original (123)
Original Is Nothing (321)
Is Nothing Original (213)
March 2018
In a looping classroom students from Engelska Skolan Järfälla begin with the proposition Nothing Is Original. With the help of collectively made poems, letters and drawings, the group work to remodel the artist as singular. Through a collective practice of viewing two film clips from Manifesto (Julian Rosefeldt, 2015) and The Was (Soda Jerk + The Avalanches, 2016), the students develop looped, cyclical and collective methods for borrowing and making together
Object Translations
Co-authored objects by Index Residents
This small publication is a sample of forms frozen in the moment of formulation. These temporary forms – everyday objects interpreted through several minds onto shapes on paper – linger here as drawings before they return back into objects. Made with students of the Index Residents program within the exhibition Provisorium by Beth Laurin, the Object translation workshops followed the abstracting gestures of Laurin’s sculptures. This exercise in abstraction highlighted the moment where an object is separated from its quotidian use. In the gap between object, meaning and utility, the students responded to the proposition: How do you translate an object into an object? What qualities will be distorted, transformed or sustained in a communicative process that takes several different steps: object to word to text to drawing to object.
Index Residents: FRÅN OCH TILL
December 2017
As a member of Index Residents, S:t Eriks gymnasium bild and animation students have been working on projects inspired by Beth Laurin’s practice for an entire semester. Students presented their works today at Index for an exhibition as the final part of this collaboration. The works include painting, water colour, sculpture and animation. Through workshops and visits to Index and vice versa the students have led the process of sharing of their work within the gallery context.
Special thankyou to teachers Annica Adsenius and Matilda Evertsson from S:t Eriks gymnasium for their generous support of this process and to all the students for their hard work and passion in engaging with Laurin’s work and presenting their own artworks.
Mini Residents: Shoes and sounds
November 2017
The concrete floor that holds Beth Laurins big sculptures is collaborating with our feet – making echoes and sounds. Index Mini Residents use the exhibition and find new ways of relating to their feet, shoes and voices, arranging them and testing how they echo Beths work.
Index Residents: Life and Death in Print
November 2017
Index Residents Torsviks Skola, Lidingö, visited Index twice during November. The first workshop focused on Beth Laurin’s use of collage. The students experimented with found material, juxtaposing image and text to look at themes of life and death in printed media.
Index Residents: Tracings with Torsviksskolan
November 2017Tracing the dualities in Beth Laurins ‘Provisorium’ in the second workshop for November students from Torsviks Skola entangled the gallery with their own connections. The students also participated in the object translation workshop. The archive of these ‘tactile tracings’ is currently being produced by the Index learning team.
Mini Residents: Accidents and coincidences
November 2017
Starting from the gaps opened by the previous group, the Mini Residents continue with finding accidental similarities and coincidences in and around Beth Laurins exhibition Provisorium; connecting works to the infrastructure of the gallery.
Index Residents: Making an Exhibition with S:t Eriks gymnasium
November 2017
Preparations are underway for S:t Eriks gymnasium’s upcoming exhibition at Index, inspired by the artistic practice of artist Beth Laurin. Index learning team worked with the students to form exhibition committees, such as vernissage, transport, marketing and installation groups.
Index Residents: Red Threads with Internationella Gymnasiet, Uppsala
October 2017
Working with forty students from the Sprint (intensive language class for newly arrived young people) program from Internationella Gymnasiet Uppsala, Index learning team hosted an afternoon of workshops and investigations of the ongoing exhibition Provisorium, Beth Laurin. Forty students in three groups and three workshops circulated in and outside Index premises, mapping opposites and similarities using red thread and pebbles in the gallery, zooming in and enlarging patterns out at the courtyard and making collage and juxtapositions using words and images in the office.
Mini Residents: What is repeated?
October 2017
For autumn 2017 Index is hosting workshops with 5-6 year olds, the Index Mini Residents. Over this time they are investigating objects included in Provisorium. Using pebbles and a Fluxus-inspired instruction book, the Mini Residents ask what is repeated? They look for doublettes, tripplets and everyday objects that spark conversation and discovery.
Index Residents: S:t Eriks gymnasium mood boards
October 2017
As a member of Index Residents, S:t Eriks gymnasium has been working on projects inspired by Beth Laurin’s artworks for an entire semester. First, Index went to S:t Eriks gymnasium and gave an introductory lecture, the students came to the exhibition opening at Index, and then returned to the gallery for a guided tour. The students also took the opportunity to present mood boards for their projects, to be presented at the end of the year. Keep tuned for exciting projects!
Index Residents: Translating an Object with Internationella Gymnasium, Uppsala
September 2017
How do you translate an object into an object? What qualities will be distorted, transformed or sustained in a communicative process that takes several different steps: object to word to text to drawing to object.
Taking the artistic process of Beth Laurin as our starting point we go deeper into the action of transforming everyday objects into sculptural objects. Where in the translation does the transformation happen? Together with two SPRINT groups at Uppsala Internationella Gymasium we practice separating an object from it’s everyday utilities and seeing it as a shape; seeing it as a sculpture.
Index Residents: S:t Eriks gymnasium focus on Beth Laurin
September 2017
We had an introductory meeting with S:t Eriks gymnasium and started a new project together with 3rd year Art and Animation students. The students will spend a full term engaging with the works of Beth Laurin and her upcoming exhibition at Index Provisorium. The session with our learning team began with an introduction about Index and our learning programme, followed by a presentation-performance by Emmeli and Isabel reading an extract of Beth Laurin’s texts while images were shown on the projector. Keywords and ideas were written on a white board as the text was read and the students were able to engage with Beth Laurin’s ideas on a different level. The the groups came to Index for the opening and met the artist in situ. In October, the groups will have a private session and workshop with the artist in the gallery and continue doing their work inspired by the artist. Keep tuned!
Index Residents: City Patterns with Fryshuset, Husby
August 2017
Students from Husby’s Fryshuset school are taking part in Index Residents for the first time. The students visited Index exhibition The Promise and took part in a workshop on urban form and patterning. After collecting samples from the surrounding areas they presented their patterns, forms and textures of local environment in the Index office.
Index Residents: Excursion with Fryshuset to Lava, Kulturhuset
Augusti 2017
Kicking of the autumn with a new school in Resident, Fryshuset Husby join us for a workshop on the pattern and languages of the city. Together we take off from the very center of Stockholm, Lava Kulturhuset.
Index Residents excursion to Market Art Fair
March 2017
Index Residents from Järfä Gymnasietlla visited Market Art Fair. The students discussed the roles of commercial galleries and the art market, as well as seeing Scandinavian artists. Index also curated Market Feature where the students saw the works of four Nordic artists working with performance, film and installation.
Index Residents: Anna Kinbom workshop with Torsviks skola
April 2017
In April artist Anna Kinbom led a workshop on poetry for the bild students at Torsviks skola. Investigating the history of words, text and poetry making in surrealist settings.
Residents excursion to the Royal Institute of Art and Moderna Museet
March 2017
40 newly arrived young people from the Sprint program in Uppsala came to Stockholm for an Index Residents excursion. The students spent the day discovering the Royal Institute of Art with tours from current students and professors. At the art school students experimented with live green screen video and the latest virtual reality 3D goggles and artistic tools. At the modern museum the students met Moderna Museet pedagoges and encountered the collection and the video art exhibition ‘The New Human’. After being given descriptive words, the students matched these words with works they found in the collection and presented the art works back to rest of the group in an experimental gallery tour.
Index at SKOLA + MUSEUM = SANT
February 2017
Index has attended the annual cultural fair for learning and pedagogy programs in Stockholm. Along with 46 other cultural institutions Index presented our learning programs to over 500 teachers. The fair was hosted this year by the Armemuseum and was a great opportunity to meet fellow educators in the cultural sector and teachers.
Fotokonst med hålkamera
January 2017
After visiting Index and taking part in the Mad Horizon exhibition workshops, the Jarfalla Gymnasiet residents created a project back at their school, inspired by the work of Jon Skoog. It is featured on their blog here. The students made paper doll versions of themselves and placed themselves in fictional landscapes. They then photographed themselves using homemade cameras. The process related to the questions of fiction and reality in film and media.
Excursion to Kulturhuset
November 2016
Visiting LAVA Bibliotek and Patti Smith exhibition with Index Residents from Rönninge Skola. After participating in the Mad Horizon exhibition workshop and postcard writing session, the Residents embarked on an excursion to visit LAVA and the Patti Smith exhibition at Kulturhuset. The staff from Kulturhuset led workshops with the students, on Patti Smiths photographic works and the LAVA resources including the sound studio, 3D printer and screen printing facilities.
Special thanks to LAVA Bibliotek staff, Helen Karlson and Tove Wiksaas.
Index Residents: Postcards from Places Unvisited
November 2016
As part of Index Residents for young people, students from Jarfalla Gymnasiet, Rönninge Skola and newly arrived students from Botkyrka visited Index to investigate the current exhibition MAD HORIZON and undertake a workshop. Inspired by the exhibitions merging of fiction, landscape and reality, they constructed memories of places they had never visited.
While every postcard depicts Stockholm or Sweden, the students choose to rename them, further merging our understanding of how place intersects with memory. The postcards form a map of fictional and real places, known only through memory and media.
Jarfalla Gymnasiet students also made a project back at their school, inspired by the work of Jon Skoog. It is featured on their blog here. The students made paper doll versions of themselves and placed themselves in fictional landscapes, they then photographed themselves using homemade cameras. The process related to the questions of fiction and reality in film and media.
Media Coverage
October 2016
The usual way to interact with glossy magazines is to flick through, read a little, notice something and move on. Generally it is an exchange where the reader reads and the magazine speaks. Here the Index Residents were encouraged to experiment with paint and its materiality as a way of speaking back to the image on the page. Starting with images from fashion magazines, the 40 students from Sprint Group at Internationella Gymnasiet Uppsala took part in the workshop over two days and re-worked the images, creating some monsters in the process.
Back to School Visits
August and September 2016
To kick off the new Index Residents year Joanna and Bronwyn visited all the school groups in their own classrooms, travelling to Rönninge, Jarfalla, Uppsala and Lidingö. Getting to know each and every student, find common ground, using art making and art histories as a way of sharing, learning together. It was also a great chance to meet with the exceptional teachers who work at these schools. The connection with the teachers and discussion of learning strategies is a major element of the Residents program. Photos here are from the Year 9 students at Torsvikskolan, Lidingö.
Festival: I HIMLEN ÄR ALLA LINJER BLÅ: KONSTFESTIVAL FÖR UNGA
August 2016
I HIMLEN ÄR ALLA LINJER BLÅ was a waterfront festival for and by young people in Stockholm focusing on art, music and performance. The festival invites young people to reclaim the city center as a place for them. Featuring EVOLVER Club with DJ Pitch (Tobago Tracks, UK) and residents Iinatti and M…, readings and workshops with Anna Axfors, Ram Alshibli, Ponton poetry magazine and LAVA. Plus performances on the water with Maretopia and an outdoor cinema. The Index Teen Advisory Board worked with Maretopia floating rafts to build performances and workshops for the festival and the Residents students were in attendance.
Festival information
Index Residents: Assemblage Workshops
May 2016
To finish the school year Joanna and Bronwyn ran a day long assemblage workshop with the 40 Sprint students in Uppsala at the Internationella Gymnasiet. During the workshops we worked in small groups to try out assemblage and object poetry. We questioned the meaning of objects in an art context and how objects behave. We asked the group to make works alone and then as a group, questioning how to tell stories with found objects. We also had an introduction to assemblage and installation artists. This was the second round of workshops we had done together and already the students are starting to feel more comfortable and familiar with discussing and making art. Together they are expressing themselves, taking risks and sharing in the art making process together.
