how space shapes culture and provides gravity to social life:
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Pass-The-Aux
The dominant story of music culture today is one of unprecedented access: anyone can produce, anyone can distribute, anyone can reach an audience. What that story obscures is the simultaneous erosion of the conditions under which musical communities have historically formed—new relationships between people and places, and shared…
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LYSSNA
Certain aesthetic traditions are offered a lot of grace. Others are not. LYSSNA starts from a structural observation: Swedish media does not give rappers, beatmakers and music producers enough room to speak at length about their work. The LYSSNA format gives artists and producers working within an aesthetic…
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Gallery.wav
Music production is one of the fastest growing cultural practices in Europe. However, the way we congregate around music is not diversifying accordingly. Dominant policy responses have been based around the advocacy for nightlife and live venues: spaces that play a significant role in the development of contemporary…
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DIY Cultural Diplomacy
Cultural diplomacy is typically understood as a professional field concerned with the institutional management of cultural representation: the ways states construct national identity and conduct international exchange through officially sanctioned cultural forms. Yet in practice, many of the relational functions associated with diplomacy – mediation across difference, the…
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Caroli Park
Cities accumulate spaces that institutions no longer know what to do with. The former Caroli Church in Malmö – one of a growing number of desacralized churches in Sweden – presented exactly this kind of problem: a building of significant architectural and cultural weight, withdrawn from public use.…
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Appropriating the Colonial City
Asmara was built to exclude the people who now define it. Designed under Italian fascism as an experiment in modernist urban planning – a city meant to produce new Italians and demonstrate a refined European modernity – it was organized through strict spatial segregation: Eritreans confined to the…