Vårgårda 2018

2019
Video and sound installation, 11 min 50 sec
Variable dimensions

Initially a sound artwork, Vårgårda 2018 was put together from snippets of conversations, online chats, and other digital fragments from the daily interactions of young people living in the town of that name. Andersson describes Vårgårda as a place of desperation, creativity, and resilience, a rural place that is seldom if ever represented in Swedish artistic and cultural conversations. Mixing daily random observations with tense, triggering accounts of aggression and pain, the video and sound installation presented in Comforting the machine offers the viewer a glimpse into what existing and persevering can mean for local teenagers today.

“In young people’s conversation tradition, there is a straightforward and playful darkness that cuts through the banalities of everyday life, and the pedestrian tunnel becomes a
meaning-laden public place where their stories can be heard in raw form. Life comes to a head and yet remains unreal as they are forced to grapple with life’s greatest existential
questions despite having the least possible experience.”
(Klara Andersson)

Sound artist Klara Andersson examines previously unexplored digital materials and human stories as archeological artifacts of her generation – online chatting, web camera videos, and forgotten websites that convey stories of contemporary life. In Andersson’s work, this volatile cultural refuse is given space in the contemporary writing of history, its unsorted meaninglessness providing a vessel for our most fundamental human questions. 

Structured around the theme of the city as a machinery of the present time, Comforting the machine synthesised and gave its audience a tight and poignant grasp of truths in the raw. In preparation for the exhibition, the ten artists were also invited to submit something the curators called “Provocations”. The provocation to each artist was a task to expand themselves beyond the walls of the gallery by mapping traces of their work in the region, in history and the future, and to collate them as a string of continuations.

Kulturellt avfall är material som skapas genom och i våra sociala och kulturella samhällen men saknar ett marknads- eller användarvärde och därmed blir ett avfall. Det är avslagen i flinta som ger ett hum om hur flintyxan såg ut.

Coronapandemin är en kris vi tvingats hantera på avstånd från varandra och där den digitala kommunikationen som redan varit tillgänglig blivit livsviktig.

Klara samlar för närvarande in kulturellt avfall i form av konversationer från pandemin för ett framtida verk.

Skicka in en konversation du haft med någon under pandemin på mail, sms, chat eller något annat digitalt textformat. Det kan vara något vardagligt, dramatiskt, oansenligt, ovanligt eller en blandning.

Om du har möjlighet, ta bort namn, platser och annan personlig information. Annars kommer det göras av konstnären efter att det tagits emot. Behåll däremot gärna datum och tid.

Genom att bidra med din konversation ger du konstnären tillåtelse att använda den i anonymiserad form i ett framtida verk.

Ladda upp din konversation här:

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eller maila till klaramariasofia@gmail.com