The Future of Art in Perpetually Restructuring Cities symposium

In October 2019, Household was invited to contribute to the Valand Academy Future of Art in Perpetually Restructuring Cities symposium in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Organised by Dr. Daniel Jewesbury, Jason Bowman and Kjell Caminha at Göteborgs Universitet, the symposium drew together a European network of researchers in public art and urban studies, as well as artists, policymakers and public commissioners.

The symposium aimed to find viable strategies for sustaining critical public cultural practices, and in the longer term, to define and apply best practice models in public commissioning. It acknowledged that the neoliberal European city is a challenging environment for artists, public art commissioners, and heritage professionals and that many cities have experienced over 40 years of post- industrial decline and economic restructuring. Local governments rely on urban brands to compete for tourist income, offering subsidies to redevelop formerly productive brownfield sites for leisure and consumption. Developers leverage these with investment from global debt markets, and cities become complex financial instruments for the generation of corporate profit. It could be said that these novel ways of extracting profit are the only really healthy forms of urban creativity. In turn, they produce demand for further rezoning and restructuring. The practices and discourses of art and heritage are routinely appropriated in these reinventions. Indistinguishable public artworks help market nearly identical urban brands, often relying on simplified heritage narratives from which histories of urban struggle are entirely erased. It’s not currently clear how critical heritage and public art practices challenging this new status quo can be supported or sustained. Event

The programme, held from 16-18 October 2019, included discussions, screenings, workshops, performances, and the opportunity to experience artworks installed in public spaces across the city such as Next to You by Marika Hedemyr, and Eric Magassa’s work, Walking With Shadows, which part of the Goteborg Biennial 2019 and installed in the docks.

The symposium included contributions from Donald Mitchell (Uppsala University); Feras Hammami (Gothenburg University); Gavin Murphy (Centre for Creative Arts & Media, Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology); Sara Brorström, Handelshögskolan (Gothenburg University); Caroline Cowley (Public Arts Officer, Fingal County Council); Benj Gerdes (Artist, Gothenburg); Sol Archer; Oli Mould (Royal Holloway, University of London); Theo Tegelaers (Curator, TAAK, Amsterdam) and Marika Hedemyr (Artist, Gothenburg) and others.