Adam Bergholm is a doctoral student on the KTD programme. This research project is based on Lefebvre's call for "the right to the city," looking at how practices of art, technology and design can be put to use by those excluded from the dominant order. Given the compression of the modern metropolis – through rising rents, co-opted counter cultures and the repression of protests, for instance – the invisible and the fugitive come forth as modes of resistance. The practice-based research on these modes sits at the core of this study along with conceptual investigations of notions of the underground, fugitivity and transgression. Refusing homogenization, fragmentation and hierarchically organized power structures, the project is based on the conviction that space and spatial praxis are preconditions for radical participation and imagination.
Recurrent throughout the three field studies (Paris, Copenhagen and Berlin) is a number of spatialities, tools, methods and architectural elements that support a praxis of transgressivism, such as manufactured keys, trapdoors, dug-out tunnels, bricolaged furniture, cavities, pulleys, hatches and shacks. Besides the social, material and spatial components, the study also looks into the implementations of informal dissemination and radical communication connected to each of the studies, such as pirate radio broadcasts, hacked billboards, freely distributed fanzines in newspaper format, texts on trains, word-of-mouth actions in the subway, letters distributed with postal keys to thousands of households, amongst others.
As abstract (capitalist) space is divided into upper- and lower-status spaces, centers and peripheries, marked by strategies of inclusion and exclusion. The project operates along these axes; central—peripheral, below—above and inside—outside. It is structured as three fugitive motions along which tools, spaces and social compositions which are generated to undermine the hegemonic production of space, assembling the three dualist relations into a jointed figure, forming three dimensions of a real-and-imagined unruly city.
Main supervisor: Catharina Gabrielsson
Co-supervisors: Martín Ávila and Johanna Lewengard
Opponent: Kristine Samson
Dr. Kristine Samson holds a position as Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University. She is an urban ecologist, thinker-activist and transdisciplinary scholar whose research involves themes such as environmental humanities, citizen studies, co-design and performative activism, affect theory and urban studies. Her research often employs arts-based research methods and encompasses different media, such as films, site-specific walks, performance lectures and exhibitions. She is currently involved in the cross-continental project "Performative Urbanism – Situating Critical Performance Design Practices in the City" led by Concordia University.
The seminar will be held in English.
If you wish to have a look at the material, please send an email to adam.bergholm@konstfack.se.