Otok Prvic 2025
Lag 34 2025
Drywall 2024
Land Use and Artistic Practice
Eftersom jag är ett träd som en gång skall huggas ned–
Tillverka inga gärdsgårdar av mig,
Hugg inte upp mig till ved.
Gör mig till en spång över floden,
Till en dörr eller en tröskel,
Där man hälsar på varandra.
H. Radauskas, ‘Jag är ett träd’
This research project addresses the distribution of artistic agency within the public organisations that govern land, and how this impacts the understanding and use of landscapes. It explores, and attempts to bridge, tensions and asymmetries between urban design strategies and material conditions produced by practices situated in near-urban environments and green space. Informed by existing activities in the forests of Gothenburg City Municipality, the project centres on workers and practitioners who have developed knowledges, crafts and ways that shape the landscape. The project seeks to build upon these activities and their potential by designing an approach that would further enable, embody and make visible the principles they demonstrate.
The research explores and tests how artistic practice within woodland governance can bring to the fore how resources such as lumber and other forest products can be extracted in ways that serve purposes beyond economic revenue within the municipality. In this context, the research takes a holistic approach to exploring the aesthetic consequences and possibilities of green space labour in shaping landscapes and material realities.
The conditions for governing nature in close to urban areas, where social and ecological values are overshooting economic ones, are drastically different from those in rural areas, where revenue from forestry and land is often a driving factor. While aestheticisation through an emphasis on social and ecological values near densely populated areas could act as a barrier or a facade obscuring large-scale extraction, clear-cuts, and the degeneration of nature in rural areas beyond, the research explores how addressing aesthetics in municipal forestry could shed light on ways to combine resource extraction with a multitude of values, using municipal woodlands as an area for experimentation. Moreover, it focuses on how artistic interventions, developed through knowledge produced in green space labour, can address issues and concerns associated with the harvesting and use of forest resources.
On the one hand, I examine how centralised artistic practices within municipal organisations, such as architecture and design, affect how landscapes, labour and resources in these geographies are valued. The research asks what neglect and abandonment, as well as what space for experimentation and self-governance, exist in administrative blind spots. On the other hand, it asks if and how situated knowledge, skill and expertise in woodland management and maintenance can contribute to new ways of ascribing value and act transformatively in how the municipal forest is understood and used, not as an urban expansion zone but on the basis of a living environment and working landscape.