The Roaming Institute, Session 6: Mourad Kouri and Ola Andersson

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 6: Mourad Kouri and Ola Andersson

Meeting point: Rinkeby subway station
Duration: 1,5 hours

The qualities and disadvantages of modernist urban planning are more or less well known. Stockholm has been unique in its insistent application of the principles of modernist urban planning, causing isolated residential cluster formations along the subway lines and highways in the city’s outskirts.

This site-specific walk with Mourad Kouri and invited guest Ola Andersson will move along the threshold between the two neighboring, though firmly separated, communities of Bromsten and Rinkeby. Rinkeby is an area of apartment building complexes constructed according to an overarching modernist program, while Bromsten is mainly made up of detached single-family houses with varying ages and styles. The average annual income in Bromsten has been twice that of Rinkeby during the last two decades. The polarization in this suburban landscape is delineated by the small “no man’s land” consisting of a small green area separating the two neighborhoods with no connecting streets or constructed paths between.

Ola Andersson is an architecture and urban planning critic as well as author of Vykort från Utopia: Maktens Stockholm och Medborgarnas Stad (2012).

Mourad Kouri (born 1987) is a Stockholm based interdisciplinary artist working with the complexities of living in a multicultural society. In his practice, Kouri attempts to problematize and expand upon the contemporary notions of identity and self-definition in the midst of ever-increasing digitalization, surveillance, and migratory transitions.

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.