1000 Villages program: Public Imaginations, with Johanna Gustafsson Fürst + Emma Dominguez Martinez

Johanna Gustafsson Fürst will screen excerpts from a 22-minute film, They had to start redesigning their systems (2011), to document a social practice project she led in the Stockholm suburb of Husby, which is paradigmatic of the Swedish architectural and urban planning initiative the Million Program. She will go on to discuss that relationship between that participatory, relational engagement with urban space and a sculpture project she made in the wake of her project in Husby, Public Green (2013). The green colour—a prominent protagonist in public places in for example Stockholm and Malmö —is a ubiquitous signifier of state-funded infrastructure in Sweden and elsewhere. Gustafsson Fürst reads it as a symbol of a politics that supports the common. In making sculptures for a gallery space using the color, the artist moves this symbol from public space to private space, mirroring a politics that seeks to dismantle that which is held in common and to privatize.

Emma Dominguez Martinez will screen Exile (2018), a short video that explores the aesthetic symmetry between her mother’s skin, scared by fibromyalgia, and the surfaces of buildings in Botkyrka, another Stockholm suburb constructed for the Million Program. Dominguez Martinez will speak about the archictural project as both the site of exile for her parents’ generation and a home for her from which she would eventually feel exiled from. Her questions include: How do you process closeness and longing for a place? What happens to the sadness that arises when we find roots in concrete structures but are forced to leave yet again? The film provides a way into questions about intergenerational trauma and site Dominguez goes on to develop in About place, exile and scars (2019) an installation that renders her interdiscplinary research. Her work has been shown in Botkyrka Konsthall and Konsthallen Blå stället in Angered among other places, and she is represented in the Swedish Arts Council’s collection.

After the presentations, both artists will join Natasha Marie Llorens for a round table discussion about methodological choices each has made in the context of the Million Program, and the stakes of what Llorens has referring to as a ‘poetics of witnessing’.

—
Emma Dominguez Martinez is an artist born in Stockholm. She grew up in the working class area of Alby Botkyrka. She works with photo, video and installations but her work can also take form in collective processes based on the notion of ‘Useful Art’. A central theme for Dominguez Martinez is the swedish Million programme, which is her starting point to question the narratives and bodies empowered by society to occupy space unquestioned. She interrogates those positions that are exposed to violence or made invisible by hegemonic structures. Dominguez Martinez holds an MFA from Konstfack.

Johanna Gustafsson Fürst is an artist based in Stockholm. Her work operates between social systems and individual existence. For example, in the relationships between power and resistance, language and body, linguistic violence and inclusions and exclusions in public spaces. She sees sculpture as an integrative and moving place that opens up the possibility of reorienting dialogues. She is a professor of sculptural processes at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Recent exhibitions include Graft the Words, Whip My Tongue at Accelerator (SE) 2020. She is currently working on a public commission for Göteborg Konst at Masthuggskajen.

This event is part of the program for the exhibition 1000 VILLAGES with Massinisa Selmani. More information about the exhibition here.