Solo exhibition at Detroit Stockholm Art Space. March 2009. Stockholm, Sweden.
Slussen: an invisible landscape is a video installation which approaches the topic of urban landscape and the experience we have with it; It explores the relationship between people and urban space. Slussen (“the lock” in Swedish) is an area of central Stockholm, named after the locks between Lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea, in Sweden. Slussen is also the name of a Stockholm Metro station, named after the nearby locks and added infrastructural network. Slussen has long been held up as an example of ingenious traffic and urban planning as it combines major intersections of the road, bus and underground networks in a relatively small space and even manages to include train and boat connections.
In recent years, plans for a major redevelopment of Slussen were proposed as many of the original design features were either redundant or unusable due to the physical deterioration of the structure. A vigorous discussion in the media made it apparent that Slussen was widely considered to be an embarrassment by most residents of Stockholm, making it increasingly likely that the existing structure will be completely replaced. Theses facts make this urbanscape particular; it’s a modern ruin, a space that will be replaced and no longer exist the way it is now. The area is full of hidden places or landscapes which one has to, literally, explorer and look for them to encounter them. Thus, they are invisible by a superficial and functional-only use.
Therefore, I asked several people (8 people in total) to explorer Slussen providing them with a video camera in order to do their own trip through the place. While they were doing their walkscape I was drawing the path they were making on a map of the place. The video installation consists of a dual video installation composed with these video walkscapes, one print (50x50 cm) and 8 maps pictures (20x20 cm), one map for each person who has done the video trip through Slussen. This work was shown at Detroit Art Space in Stockholm in March 2009.
