December 10th, 2022–March 17th, 2023
Between 2018 and 2020 Rejmyre Art Lab’s Center for Peripheral Studies conducted the research projektet Detox - Clean it up!. This three-year project engaged an ensemble of artists to produce expert testimony reflecting on the contamination from the historic glass production in Rejmyre.
In Rejmyre, the waste from the local glassworks has literally been thrown out the back door for over two hundred years. The capitalist logic of profit – economic but also social – from glass production threatened to turn into its opposite: the costs of managing the pollution far exceeded the profits. As a result, not even new investors wanted to take responsibility for the environmental remediation. Instead, the costs and the responsibility were assumed by the public sector. In this way, they became our common heritage.
Contributing artists: Hasti Radpour (SE/IR), Mattias Hofvendahl (SE), Frida Hållander (SE), Harrie Liveart - Meri Linna & Saija Kassinen (FI), Cecilia Jonsson (SE/NO), Erna E Skúladóttir (IS) & Karin Blomgren (NO/SE), Stine Bidstrup (DK), Tilda Dalunde (SE), Nicolas Cheng (SE/HK), Ulla Ridderberg (SE), Saad Hajou (SE/SY), BOOM! (SE), Ammy Olofsson (SE), Sissi Westerberg & Kerstin Ribers (SE), Daniel Peltz (SE/US).
Rejmyre Art Lab’s research director Daniel Peltz formulated the conceptual framework for the project, which asserts that the artist’s own expertise and artistic knowledge are equivalent to that of the geologists and hydrologists involved in exploring how the site should be remediated. Rejmyre Art Lab took on the task of investigating this complex situation, together with invited artist colleagues. What responsibilities are embedded in the history of the glassworks? How could the waste have been ignored for so long? And how should we deal with our toxic heritage today?
Through a careful negotiation process, Rejmyre Art Lab, in 2018, became an official part of the municipal working group in Finspång, addressing the issues of remediation. This gave us direct access to information from relevant authorities and companies. We exchanged ideas with environmental strategists, soil specialists, geologists, historians, and archaeologists. We invited artists into the project DeTox – Clean it up! who examined the site through their different approaches and collective processes. The result is a series of artworks and an artistic feasibility study, in the form of a book, co-edited by Hanna Lundborg, which highlights uncomfortable aspects and difficult challenges. Cleaning up is not easy. And it concerns us all.
Rejmyre Art Lab’s Center for Peripheral Studies is a long-term, site-based, artistic research project in Rejmyre, Östergötland, founded in 2009 by Sissi Westerberg and Daniel Peltz.
The exhibition is on view 10 December 2022–17 March 2023 at Östergötlands Museum, Westmanhallen, Raoul Wallenbergs plats, 582 20 Linköping.
For more information on how to get there and for opening hours, please visit their website: https://ostergotlandsmuseum.se