Adam Bergholm

In my work I experiment with imagineering and intervening the urban commons, through practices of altering and repurposing existing structures. The work is informal and transgressive in its methodology with the core intention to investigate and participate in the shaping and making of the city. Art and research provides a key to access such a city in the making; a space where we can challenge the preconceptions of what is possible, to take risks and to imagine alternative strategies for the creation of realities. As the concept of imagineering suggests; imagination-engineering possibilities to hypothetically look behind reality and to shape it. Imagination, as the material that reality is made from. The term Imagineering is however unfairly connected to its use in e.g. urban regeneration politics. With the wordplay of de-imagineering I argue that the production of imagination is fundamental for the change of current conditions and should as such be reappropriated. In this sense it's a critical, even anarchist, ethic; one that denounces everything that cuts us off from and diminishes our power to act. Not only imagination is held in the deposit and account holdings of corporate and commercial actors, but so are many of the tactics that are designed to contest this hegemony, Counter culture is continuously being transformed to fit as capitalism's sanitizing tools in "redeveloping" cities, co-opted and instrumentalized in processes of gentrification. Underground and Invisibility are accordingly advocated as key concepts through-out my work, both culturally and geologically. These are promoting a space and practice — real and imagined — whose lines and contours are undecidable and therefore contestable, possibly out of touch for cultural appropriation.

About Adam Bergholm:

• BA Graphic Design (2002)
• MA Fine Art (2004)
• Postgraduate in Architecture (2005) 

Principal supervisor: Catharina Gabrielsson
Assistant supervisor: Martin Avila, Johanna Lewengard
Admitted to: Konstfack, department of Visual Communication
Project period: 2015-2020