The Hephaestus exhibition at the Röhsska Museum will open with an inaugural speech by Elke Krasny, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, who will focus on the role of craft in public space.
Elke Krasny, PhD, Professor for Art and Education and Head of the Art and Education Program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author. Her scholarship and her international lectures address ecological and social justice at the global present with a focus on caring practices in architecture, urbanism, curatorial work, and contemporary art.
The opening is divided into a lecture and a panel discussion and the agenda is as follows:
At 15.30-16.30: Crafting Public Space, med Elky Krasny. In English
Public space is the space we share with each other. Spheres of highly divergent interests define the potentials and boundaries, limitations and access. The interests of capital are different from the interests of democracy. The interests of ordinary and everyday use differ from public protests and different forms of public celebrations or mourning.
While ways of using public space are highly divergent and ways of sharing public space can lead to the affirmation of togetherness, but also to manifestations of power and deadly violence, the political imaginaries of public space are firmly linked to very specific urban spaces, most prominently the street and the square.
The political idea of public space as the space of public appearance is tied to the material presence of stone, marble, and asphalt. The elements, water, air, wind, fire, were excluded from the imaginaries of public space. Other sites including the forest, the meadow, rivers, lakes or wetlands were excluded from the commonly held understanding of what counts as relevant to the political imaginaries of public space.
Diagnosing a poverty of understanding and imagining public space, this lecture turns to feminist epistemologies, queer ecologies, elemental thinking, and multi-species ethics, to work toward understanding and imagining public space otherwise. Crafting public space thinks public space through material and immaterial inter-dependencies, inter-vulnerability, and porosities and suggests that we need to collectively practice how to imagine and relate to what public space is and what public space does differently.
At 16.30-17.30: Panel discussion
In this panel discussion, we will discuss different processes for developing the craft economy, i.e. working on strengthening the craft economy as well as understanding the broader role of craft in the economy and society at large. Following Elke Krasny's keynote on "Crafting Public Space", we will delve into experiences and experiments to renew craft and bring it beyond the boundaries of the craft sectors at the local level in West Sweden and at the European level.
Participating in the exhibition: Lukas Arons, Jenna Basso Pietrobon, Bianca Bonaldi, Leonardo Collanega, Rob Curran, Linnea Dalstrand, Heidi Hentze, Sara Jeffries, Alice Kettle, Jokum Lind Jensen, Lova Öberg, Pol Polloniato, Elena Rause, Nynne Rosenkrantz Christiansen.
Exhibition is curated by Alice Kettle, Rob Curran and Jokum Lind Jensen with support of Samantha Hookway (senior lecturer at HDK-Valand) and Elena Raviola (Torsten and Wanja Söderberg Professor in Design Management, HDK-Valand, and Director of Business and Design Lab).
Elena Raviola will introduce speakers and panel.
