The LTH Fountain and the anti-normal condition

PDF download. "Arguably the Fountain has defied cultural custodian norms; it is unashamedly refusing to die. Here lies a necrotic object, without a vital (blood) water supply it exists perpetually with one steel foot in the grave, a zombie..."…

Thomasson on campus?

PDF download. In this text, some similarities, but also differences, are introduced between the LTH Fountain and the urban objects known as 'Hyperart Thomasson'.…

Att hämta vatten / to fetch water

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…

Life-affirming strangeness

Curator Jes Fernie describes her Archive of Destruction 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, fear, boredom…

The Fountain Gate

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…

The fountain Fontänen (Heartbreaker)

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 at HDK-Valand Academy of Art & Design. Earlier in the week Maddie spoke as part of a panel focused on…

Early June: A visit to LTH-fontänen

[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…