Marching on Visborg, 2020-2021

Imaginary procession for Visborg, Gotland

Marching on Visborg is an open ended process within Art in Urban Development Visborg, a project part of Swedish Arts Council’s Kunskapsnav offentlig konst curated by Baltic Art Center (BAC) for Region Gotland.

It aligns with different flows in Visborg and how the living can be described as an abstract motion that also transcends the body. Through basic choreography, costume/sculpture and voice/sound I wanted to work towards a quiet procession, constantly in motion.

My work did not not primarily address the people who will live or work in a future Visborg, but the people who are planning it today. Throughout the project I met the staff at Region Gotland and took part in their plans, thoughts and perspectives. In parallel with this, my work generated images, objects, sound and text.

The characters in the imagined show: black water/grey water, the fig and the oil bird can all be said to have a connection to underground or bodily fluids. On Visborg there is water as in “water shortage” and “separated waste-water pipes”. The body’s black and yellow fluids are historical ways of referring to what we today call mental illness, fatigue and anxiety. The oil bird’s oil, which humans extract and use for oil lamps, bring to mind both human violence and the idea of the soul as a light. The fig character who can split says something about the experience of loss or what it means to make an incision through a (house) body to imagine an inner space or cavity.

In the autumn of 2020 I did a sound workshop with the artist and composer Anna Haglund and my collaborator Frida Peterson. We also carried out a test performance in the region’s City Hall in Visby wearing the black/grey-water costumes, blowing tunes in bottles, singing and splitting the fig.

My ambition has been to create something itinerant and ghostlike that reaches out to people. These aims contain an amount of criticism against the lack of planning of cultural infrastructure on Visborg, but also a constructive solution to the problem.

Visit the project’s web site including video and sound documentation at visborg.balticartcenter.com