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 drama. It…

Life-affirming strangeness

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,…

The fountain Fontänen (Heartbreaker)

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…

Videohälsning

The Swedish Public Art Agency (Statens konstråd) asked us to record a short video introducing and describing The fountain Fontänen project.  Maddie speaks about it from her studio in Gothenburg. Here is the result. Statens konstråd bad oss att spela in en kort video för att introducera och beskriva The…

A sorry site

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…

Jan Torsten (1938–2020)

[Swedish text follows English] I have a file on my laptop with 23 emails from Jan Torsten Ahlstrand. I received the first one on February 23 this year. It begins: "Dear Maddie Leach from Down Under!". The last three came in a flurry on November 20 and are variously signed:…