| art.description.project | In the Summer of 2014, I was commissioned by ICIA (Institute of Contemporary Ideas and Art, Gothenburg) by the curator Anna van der Vliet, to create an artwork for the exhibition Motbilder (Counterparts) taking place in Gothenburg, starting on 22 August and culminating on 14 September, election day in Sweden.
Motbilder was intended to engage with public space in Gothenburg, seeking to explore how to deepen and challenge the image of what art in public space can be, in the midst of party rhetoric during a fiery election campaign. Through individual artistic practices, the participants (artists, poets and activists) were invited to respond to the worn neoliberal discourse that dominates our time. Motbilder also took form of an advertising insert distributed together with the local newspaper Göteborgs Posten on 22 August to more than 80.000 readers. Motbilder questioned whether it was at all possible to use art to displace the existing stories, provide other perspectives or counterpart images to the dominant discourse in the city of Gothenburg, the most segregated city in Sweden.
My contribution to the project was the artwork At Kjell’s. The work enveloped a constructed situation where through the period of 10 days, with two to three hours of duration each, I opened my 43 square meter two-bedroom apartment in Hisingen (a suburban area in Gothenburg) to people that wanted to eat the Brazilian national dish feijoada. I’d serve more or less 30 portions a day for Motbilder’s visitors in my living room. Dates and hours of visit were announced in the insert we published together with the newspaper, alongside my home address and mobile phone – so visitors could call me to check if food was still being served on the occasion. I also announced the intention for reciprocal invitation. The text describing the work follows “I invite you to come to my home, hoping to be invited back by you someday. I will be serving feijoada for everyone who comes”.
This project sought to advance my artistic research on different political notions and practices of hospitality and to invoke a social experiment in relation to the Motbilder premise of politics and publics.
The project also came about through realizing that through different occasions of friends coming over to my house, I’ve always been the one inviting in but never being invited out. This transactionality was in fact, what I perceived as the artwork’s main idea through the open-ended proposal: ‘I’m inviting you to come eat the best dish my culture could offer and also cooked by me, but I’d like to visit you as well, to be invited back – not as a condition, but nearly so, as a wish’. A wish for me and the guest to be more vulnerable to each other, to open our homes and to increase interest into each other’s culture or different meanings of interpreting hospitality. I share both Brazilian and Swedish heritages, finding myself in this dual dwelling of cultures and cultural differences. From the small number of 14 guests, I still await reciprocal invitation.
I regard At Kjell’s and the process enveloping it as important and necessary within the artistic research field. It relates to a broader debate within hospitality and cultural studies, relating to scholars like Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Judith Still and Tahar Ben Jelloun, to name a few. Constructed situations, as this work produced, may instigate further social experiments and methods within the artistic field to question different practices of hospitality, ideas on absorption of identities, the comprehension of different cultures and its specific behaviors or conventions. Who is allowed to invite? Who is being invited? In what conditions? Does the guest have the right to demand the existing resources as he or she wishes? “I’m afraid I don’t have a vegetarian version of the dish.” What is it accepted while inviting strangers into our homes? How much time is allowed? When is the invitation being returned? Why couldn’t neighbors say hi and engage on what was happening in my apartment during the days they’ve been seeing a visible sign in in the front of the building, but asking instead other guests coming from far to describe what it was? Questions like these, were supported and challenged throughout the project’s execution and were left to be further investigated and explored in the development of my artistic practice. | sv |
