Welcome to this first conversation in a series of sessions investigating the role of art in neighbourhood development.

Many cities are growing rapidly. This urbanization is associated with both environmental and social challenges, and the quality of neighbourhoods and public spaces in the city is under pressure. How can we challenge this process? And what role can art play in such a perspective? In which manner can art investigate the neighbourhood as a place as well as a horizon that enables us to rethink how we create communal spaces in our cities?

The project will be introduced by Gjertrud Steinsvåg (ROM), Christian Pagh (Oslo Architecture Triennale) and Merete Røstad (MAPS, Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo). As a starting point for the conversation, artists Alessandro Marchi (IT) and Lexie Owen (CA) will present their respective projects “Critical walks” and “MURA”:

Alessandro Marchi: Critical walks

Critical Walks looks at ways to witness a city on foot, translating statistics into walkable paths. The central theme is the relationship between the body and hard facts in dialogue with urban texture. It is about the consolidation of objective data with subjective observations. It aims at understanding and questioning critical aspects within the city of Oslo, such as immigration and inequality through walking experiments and conversations. It is site-based, but it develops a method of investigation that can be re-contextualised in any other city, at any other time.

Alessandro Marchi is an Italian artist based in Oslo, Norway. Marchi’s artist practice revolves around human modified landscape, identity, inequality, chaos and public space, especially on how humans constantly negotiate and modify the space they live in. He works experimentally and site specific to create installations, events, artist books, walks, sculptures, carpets, paintings, maps, texts and audio pieces. Marchi holds an MFA at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2020) and an MSC in Mechanical Engineering at the Universitá degli Studi di Bologna (2002). His works have been shown internationally in exhibitions and museums in Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Portugal, Croatia, Norway, Netherland and UK.

www.alessandromarchi.com

Lexie Owen: MURA

The Mall Users Research Association (MURA) is an ongoing participatory research project that gathers information about shopping mall use. Interested in both the specificities of individual malls, and the mall as a global institution, MURA approaches the shopping mall as a social space that is shaped by how it is used, from the position that usership is a form of ownership. The association creates publications, performances and interventions based on its research.

In May of 2021 MURA installed its first research platform at Nitja senter for samtidskunst in Lillestrøm, gathering research about the usership of Lillestrøm Torv and Strømmen Storsenter.

Lexie Owen (b 1982, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores notions of the collective, structures of support and networks of care. Using artistic, curatorial and textual methods her projects seek to create space for intimacies in unexpected ways, investigate the material conditions that surround collective acts, and find unconventional expressions of agency within the gestures and social forms that make up everyday life. Past projects have explored the complexities of selfcare in times of crisis, maintenance labour as a catalyst for community engagement, neighbourhood- developed economic infrastructures and embodied archives of knowledge. Owen holds a MA (Art and Public Space) from Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo.

www.lexieowen.com

The conversation is organized in collaboration by the Master programmet Art and Public Space at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, ROM and Oslo Architecture Triennale as part of a series of sessions in relation to the upcoming Triennale “Mission Neighbourhood” opening in the fall of 2022.