Angelica

You are still allowed to handle everything I do

A green, round and fluffy carpet is lying on the floor. The room is too small, so a part of the carpert has to be rolled up by the wall. By walking over the carpet you get access to a story, that is placed on the wall. In the room there is also a snapshot documentation from an action.

I made a study visit at the City Hall in Malmö where I met a community democracy development officer. She showed me the room where the Municipality most important decisions are made. She told me an anecdote about a group of youths, sleep and stapple wars. Later on, I asked for permission to borrow the carpet.

My desire was to get access to the center of power. I wanted to bring it out to the public and by that, add new stories to it. I felt a need to make it tangible, physical and tactile. I aimed to ask how we look at these kind of rooms, how can they be represented and how is the representation in itself excluding?

This might be one way to adress excess of space

Clearly marked by a pile of folded fabrics, is the position from where to watch and enter the piece. Beside it lies a cobblestone with a spywatch on top. It is an installation with various pastel colored soft textiles and hard glossy objects, like porsline birds, a plastic globe, and a fictional logo printed on a towel. Everything is placed on the floor and relates to domestic enviroments. Table lamps are on even if the light from the ceiling is bright enough. The space rest in silence. I would like you to consider it as a stage and a field for negotiation.

Through the organisation Mellanrum, who is unlocking vacant property for non-commerisal interests, I got access to a closed down mall. I made a selection of everydaylife commodities based on my own parameters for pinky girliness. I decomposed the round table by foldning fabrics so they look like they just have been thrown and left on the ground, like an unmade bed. But still familiar enough too be read as a place for discussion. The hard glossy objects were arranged so they were facing each other, like a group of talking bodies. The installation was at first sight not too unfamiliar to a display normally seen in a shopping window.

I have been interested in the term soft power, which is the ability to shape the preferences of others through appeal and attraction rather than coerce, use force or give money as a means of persuasion. It’s also relates to my interest of the abstraction of power and the unseen acts of decision making. I believe that language and materiality form how we move, behave, see and talk. I wanted to make a setting where the soft, mute and quiet materials where the main voices and actors within what is commonly considered to be verbal political arenas.