A paper presented at the public session 'Engaging with Place: Ruin, Memory, Regeneration' for The Curatorial Thing: Audacious Landscapes, Copenhagen, Denmark, 7 October 2022. Organised by the SixtyEight Art Institute. The focus of my contribution to Audacious Landscapes[1] is a research project named The fountain: An art-technological-social drama. It…
We are delighted to announce a call for contributions to a symposium which will be held 28-30 September 2023, in Lund, Sweden. Research and discussion of public art frequently focuses on conditions of emergence and production for public works. This symposium starts at the other end—thinking about the afterlives…
Curator Jes Fernie describes her Archive of Destruction [https://archiveofdestruction.com/] as "a story-telling platform that brings together narratives around destruction and public art...made up of suspect categories, barely believable tales, and life-affirming strangeness. Spanning a hundred years and many continents, it tells cumulative stories of vulnerability, interference, rage,…
Before visiting the university campus at Lund, I had seen LTH-fontänen in the images that Maddie had assembled over the last two years or so, from various sources. Most particularly, I had retained in my mind’s eye those low-resolution images from newspaper clippings that show the fountain in its…
A melancholy dance with The LTH Fountain. Filmed in Summer 2021, edited for two online research presentations in January 2022.We made this video clip to show to audiences in two online events this week. On 27 January, Maddie and Mick presented The Fountain project for the annual Research Day…
[Swedish text follows English] I was in Lund for four days at the beginning of June. I stayed near the LTH campus, in a room at the University Guest House in the student accommodation complex known as "Sparta". It was designed by architect Bengt Edman and completed in 1970, right…
From journalist and art critic Jelena Zetterström's book Offentlig konst i Lund, originally published as a series of articles in Sydsvenska Dagsbladet in 1994. Zetterström writes a loop of sorrow, beginning and ending with the brief words: "It is a sorry sight"; "It is a pity". --------------------------------- Ur journalisten och…
One persistent part of the narrative around LTH-fontänen is that its 'glaslådor' (glass boxes) were subject to several attempts of "sabotage" by sling shot. Åke Holmberg, consulting engineer for the project, repeatedly cited this as the reason for the structure's failure rather than any miscalculation in design. According to civil…