Borderland: Attending to the cracks in search of openings
—Madeleine Tunbjer, artistic researcher, Industrial Poet, founder of Syrup Line
Holding space for what is fractured is an act of non-resistance. Making time for discontinuance is an act of openness. Classical logic wants to solve contradiction and doesn’t recognise it as a multi referential source of knowing. No level of reality, anywhere/anytime, is complete on it’s own. I found a space I call Syrup Line for my next inquiry, where formal history, informal history, disruptions, representations, transformations are in tangible but fearless layers of incompleteness and non-resistance. The lines between them are of a different kind. I conceive the territory as a pedagogical space with capacity to bridge the abyss between differentiating layers, without reduction, as a source of dimensionality and transition. Facing divides between territory, people and politics as in my embodied conceptions is an act of empirical subjectivity. Employing myself and others in bridging them is an act of poetic objectivity and might strangely enough rebuild social ties, or so I hope.
The quest could be called art beyond art or curating gaze. Curating sources of reflexivity, within the dynamics of several layers of reality, all at once.
Johan Rockström and his team of international scientists at Stockholm Resilience Center have managed to pinpoint the nine planetary boundaries within which we can maintain ”a safe operating space”. Two have already been largely exceeded. One is nitrogen levels, which have been altered by humankind more than any other basic element cycle. Reactive nitrogen is being injected into the environment from both emissions and fertilizers causing a chain of events. Feeding more people in one end, but causing grave impacts such as global warming, acidification of the oceans, ozone depletion, biodiversity loss and loss of livelihoods in the other. Biodiversity is the second already crossed boundary, balancing our ecosystems and providing us with ecosystem services on which the biosphere depends, such as supporting the entire food chain, the fresh water cycle, medicinal resources, biomass, raw materials and biomimicking capacity. It is also balancing our climate by neutralising carbon into oxygen. Extensive disruptions on both local and terrestrial levels can cause food scarcity, conflict, land and fresh water depletion beyond repair.
Another boundary within dangerous levels of irreversibility is that of climate change. Due to the interconnectedness between all the nine boundaries, severe self acceleration and tipping points will occur when not being sustained within safe borders. Already, 60 percent of the Earth’s capacity to buffer the effects of human activity and to support our population are lost. We already know the injustice of who has to bear most of its consequences, so far. By 2050 we will be 9 billion people on this planet, 6.5 will be living in cities. Affluence of middle incomes with increased levels of consumption, and huge migrations due to knock-outs in the biosphere when the inbuilt resilience of planetary systems are being destroyed, are parallel aspects of daily life to come. The planetary situation demands transition on a multitude of levels.
Where is resonance, where is evidence of acceptance and resilient alterations?
I have become particularly interested in the concept of ”lost” as a transitional capacity, a place of study, whereas having things to lose seem to prevent people, places and practices from generating that very same capacity. It might sound obvious but we tend to regard such cracks as drawbacks rather than openings for renegotiation. All aspects of a fracture are disrupting a continuum; it hurts, but resilience is the capacity to adapt and develop during disturbance or even shock. Many of Earth’s inhabitants have already had to adapt. Some, as we know, have an amazing expertise. Here (in the West/North), most of us would need training.
My practice is about the archaeology of cracks (in emotional and radical landscapes). I use long-term presence and deep ”listening” as method to detect transitional evidence, particularly in un-planned movement, or passage from one position, state, stage, subject, concept to another. And in that movement, on that edge between something and something else, lays the potential of autonomy, of open-endedness, of agency, of change. Intentionally or unintentionally. When attending to the layers, the cracks, the openings, or directing potential readers to the source, an edge-effect occurs. When the unintentional writings are made readable—intellectually and/or bodily—conflicting paradigms challenge personal boundaries. Although sometimes, as in my previous six-year-long research, the archive of my attention had to stay in the ground, covered, secret and sacred.
In 2015, I turned my artistic practice back towards the dynamics of place, choosing to work with this site situated on the south-east corner of the Swedish countryside; a place where 30 percent of the people vote for the Sweden Democrats, which is Sweden’s ’polished’ equivalent to the French Front National; a place of ordinary day to day life; a place connected through a short corridor to urban centres; a place with an abandoned industrial sugar plant from 1921–1966. Here I began my next art-based research; not in a building but in the un-used, open air, semi-public, post-industrial site. A reserve: Lost in transition. Recovering from economic trauma. Entirely made of concrete, and yet organic. An evolution of radical nature, and yet neither rural nor urban. Transforming over fifty years of uncertainty, of ambivalence, where during this time an open-ended archive has developed—on its own terms. What is here to read, what is here to learn, hold or face? What is here to curate? Or not?
Using voice, performance and an Augmented Reality (AR) application for smartphones and tablets, I present here a layered provocation that asks of this space and its memories:
Where are the openings? The possible disentanglements? How to move the important porousness of urban centres further outwards, in order to forge deeper connections with different kinds of people? How to share these learning processes? How to unfold the deeper ecologies of matter?
This is an interactive work accompanied by Augmented Reality (AR) tags, through which you can explore additional content. The purpose of this dimension is to share living archives and alternate realities located at a former sugar plant in the rural village of Gärsnäs, Sweden.
Currently there are ten site-specific AR zones—however, the work is constantly developing. Visitors will eventually be able to use these AR elements live onsite, but for now you can explore some examples using a mobile device (Smartphone or iPad) pointed towards your screen at the selection of trigger images presented below.
Instructions
First download Aurasma for free, from the Apple App Store or Google Play.
Then follow these steps:
1. Start the Aurasma app and click the A-shaped icon at the bottom to go to the home screen.
2. On the home screen, tap the magnifying glass icon and carry out a search for the “Syrup Line” channel.
3. Tap on the channel in the search results and then tap the follow icon in the top right.
4. You are now connected to the channel and ready to go.
View the Works
Tap on the viewfinder icon to bring up your Aurasma viewfinder.
Line up the viewfinder with the images below on your screen. This should bring up the auras (additional archival layers) created for different points at the original location.
The space and its archive present us with a different organic matter in which we might find content and courage to prototype new gentle scenarios on social-ecological complexity. How to know what we know? What to do with what we know? How to invite unrelated tribes in co-creative futures?
To be continued …
About the Syrup Line project
Landscape archeology is looking at a landscape as a social construction, responding to and translating different elements embodied at a specific site, such as:
1. historical uses, different ways it has functioned over time
2. contemporary use, disruptions, mythology and response
3. the phenomenological understanding; what is it like to be a body in that place, what are the performing bodies (or when missing) explaining on human measures and other textures?
This provides us with an archive of missing facts. What is here not readable, what is here not anymore. Reflected also through my personal encounter—my body here over time sensing it, becoming aware, creating trust but also responding to the different layers—including incarnated matter beneath the surface, that might become contesting.
Landscape archeology and augmentation creates the first level of readability. The place-based intrusion will, at the next level, be one of response to what is embodied at site. Much is at stake in the current context as already mentioned. Social unrest based on exhausted living conditions or change of rules will increase hierarchies between one locality and another. Current focus on city development creates dangerous zones of people feeling left out of an equation. Dark matter evolve when being undisturbed. Cities on the other hand need to better understand their dependence on rural provision of food, water, carbon neutralisation etc. Syrup stage will discuss and perform a culture of rural/urban continuum. Syrup lab is going to be a container of experimental pedagogy, where young adults now in precarious states of poverty, can create a symbolic and real counterpower, not only on who gets to speak on behalf of institutions and futures, but also what knowledge and what skills do we really need, for a serious adaptation to a situation very different from now. This will be co-created with different holders of the stakes, at site. Agriculture needs to transform in a world when we face peak soil and unprecedented human disruption on planet boundaries. Syrup Farm will rethink, experiment and share reality issues of food, productivity, economy and circularity.
Local presence at Syrup Line, which is the name of the whole endeavor, the entire quest as already mentioned, is an expression of agency and will knit together various movements on related subjects, as a force of connectivity and relevance.
Co-producers documenting the hidden archive are Clea van Berkel (film), Thomas Persson (sound), Helena Olivestedt (behavioural understandings) and Roger Knast (owner). The 10+ zones of augmentations wouldn’t be possible without a kaleidoscopic contribution of people with key insight on specific detected layers.
