THE ROAMING INSTITUTE, Session 1: Minna Miettilä

As part of the program for the exhibition The Promise at Index, participants of the course Modernist Legacies and Constructions of Whiteness (Kungl. Konsthögskolan, 2016–2017) present a project titled The Roaming Institute.

The Roaming Institute consists of a series of walks through the city which continue the research of the course, reflecting on the traces of modernist architecture and urban planning in Stockholm, and its entanglement with normative concepts of subjectivity. The walks invite the audience to discover new perspectives of the city and its surroundings and opening discussions about some of the unfulfilled promises of modernism.

Each of the 6 sessions is conceived around a specific topic and led by different participants from the course, or in conversation with invited guests. The walks will take place on weekly, every Saturday from 29 July to 2 September. Start of the walks is, unless otherwise mentioned, at Index, Kungsbro Strand 19.

Session 1: Minna Miettilä, Anxious, not Bored

With Eugene Sundelius von Rosen and Vishnu Vardhani

Meeting point: Index, Kungsbro Strand 19
Duration: 1,5 hours

The walk is an arrangement for the text “Six Theses on Anxiety and Why It Is Effectively Preventing Militancy, and One Possible Strategy for Overcoming It” by The Institute for Precarious Consciousness (2014), and some additional notes. The walk visits places along the shore of Klara Sjö that in one way or another connect with the theses in the text.

The central idea in the text is that each phase of capitalism has a dominant affect, the current one being anxiety. The nature of the affect is a “public secret” and thus, in public discussion, it’s usually regarded as an individual issue. In order to confront its social impact politically, it is necessary to start addressing them as collective phenomenon and to investigate its structural roots.

The text – and the walk – address the need to rethink strategies of resistance, from those inherited from modernism to new ones that are facing new forms of repression and injustice. How do modernist ideas of politics affect our current approach to the personal, the political and possibilities of resistance?

Minna Miettilä is an artist currently based between Helsinki and Stockholm. She studies in the master program at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.

Further dates

Sat 5 August 2017, 16:00
Session 2: Louise Stiernström and Hiroko Tsuchimoto

Sat 12 August 2017, 16:00
Session 3: Malin Ståhl

Sat 19 August 2017, 16:00
Session 4: Roberto N Peyre and Det gror i betongen

Sat 26 August 2017, 16:00
Session 5: Natalia Rebelo

Sat 2 September 2017, 16:00
Session 6: Mourad Kouri and Ola Andersson

Coordinators:
Alba Baeza, Jasmine Hinks

The course Modernist Legacies and Constructions of Whiteness took place in autumn 2016/17 at Kungl. Konsthögskolan in collaboration with Index, with Samira Ariadad, Donatella Bernardi, Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Tobias Hübinette.