"Violence is Harder than a Stone" (process image), 2026. Photo credit: Runo Lagomarsino
Discussion begins at 18:00.
Discussant: Övül O. Durmuşoğlu, Curator, writer, educator and Director of Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation
Places are limited; food and drinks will be prepared. Please RSVP to asa.andersson@kkh.se by Friday 25 September.
Runo Lagomarsino is a PhD candidate in the research field of Artistic Living Environment at Kungl. Konsthögskolan/Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. His research is based at Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab in Gröndal, Stockholm. Lagomarsino is admitted to the doctoral education in Artistic Practice in Visual, Applied and Spatial Arts at Konstfack.
Runo Lagomarsino’s PhD project investigates the (im)possibilities of a sculptural practice within the public realm. It explores how materiality can function as a narrator, how history and memory are embedded in objects and places and how connections between past and present can be traced. It asks how a material-based sculptural practice might preserve, renegotiate, or reactivate these histories within public space(s), and how different artistic strategies are required depending on the site, its history, its commissioner and its audiences. These strategies may be forms of placement, displacement, friction, fragmentation, and reconfiguration. Lagomarsino’s work seeks to make visible what has been erased, forgotten, ruptured, or rendered ghostly.
In the seminar, Lagomarsino presents three recent projects that explore these questions through different approaches to sculpture and public space: Endless Walks (2026–ongoing), Once upon a time, there was a place (2026), Violence Is Harder Than a Stone (2026). Together, these three works approach the public realm through questions of monument and ruin, material and memory, movement and displacement. They ask what remains, what disappears, and how sculptural practice might reveal traces of extraction, erasure, and transformation embedded within places.
These questions are addressed through the specific conditions of the PhD – a collaboration between the Royal Institute of Art and the Knowledge Foundation, which entails required collaboration with partners from the business and institutional sector, and a material context of the industrial site of Lövholmen. How can an artistic practice critically negotiate these structures rather than simply operate within them? What kind of methods, languages, and forms of knowledge might allow such negotiation to become part of the artistic practice? What kind of city, politics and living environment might allow those as an active part of forming it?
Welcome!