Community Matters

All catering is included in the ticket price.

The two artistic directors of Hägerstens Kulturhus, Elof Hellström and Sebastian Dahlqvist, have both rethought and lived through the concept of the community center—the Nordic tradition of civic and cultural centers. Inspired by the community center culture that emerged in the 20th century, they explore what such a space can mean today. How can we build and maintain local communities in a late capitalist Nordic context? What forms of participation, what kind of shared ownership and collective creativity become possible when we revisit and renew this model for community engagement?

Their presentation is based on their research project “1000 Kulturhus” (1000 Cultural Centers), which includes a one-year post-master’s program at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, several symposia, radio programs, exhibitions, and publications. By examining the history and current conditions of assembly halls, cultural centers, and community centers, the presentation explores the artistic and organizational strategies that can be used to democratize art, artistic production, and everyday life. What might a cultural center that corresponds to today’s social, political, and technological conditions look like?

All catering is included in the ticket price.

All catering is included in the ticket price.

This performance grows out of a long, unfinished attempt to live with theater—not as a discipline, but as a circumstance.

Theatre director Sankar Venkateswaran and architect Kavita Srinivasan share the story behind Sahyande Theatre – a theatre in the Indian jungle in the Attappadi province in southern India. They recount it as a series of encounters: with the earth, with people, with rejection, with care.

The work moves between personal memory, myth, ritual, and contemporary experience, bringing three theaters face to face:

– a half-finished theater in a jungle
– a backyard theater in Tokyo
– an ancient ritual theater from Kerala known as Koothu

Together, each theater poses simple but difficult questions: What happens when theater refuses to be a product and insists on being a way of living and meeting?

This is not a lecture.
It is not a demonstration.
It is an offer.
You are invited to listen, stay, and witness theater
as a continuous state

All catering is included in the ticket price.

The performance “Zona Franca” forms the artistic and thematic starting point for the entire symposium. We therefore recommend that you see the performance on either March 20 or March 21 to get the most out of the symposium. Please note: The tickets for the performance are not included in the symposium price and must be purchased separately.

All catering is included in the ticket price.

American philosopher Todd May argues that social relations under neoliberalism are often reduced to the question of what benefits we can derive from each other—as if co-creators or artistic collectives were commodities that could be bought or sold. In reality, artistic alliances and communities have a special rhythm, a rhythm that can function as a form of resistance against a society that imposes an instrumental market logic on relationships.

Stijn Van Opstal is artistic co-director of Toneelhuis in Antwerp (Belgium) and co-founder of the renowned theater collective Olympique Dramatique. Together with the management duo at Betty Nansen Teatret, Elisa Kragerup and Eva Præstiin, they will discuss the potential of co-creation and strategies for creating with others in the arts.

All catering is included in the ticket price.

I Have No Name is an art installation that explores the relationship between technology and nature. In this work, El Conde de Torrefiel places the audience in a “natural” outdoor setting — an environment created for reflecting on the landscape. An LED screen frames the scene, a “subtitle” that conveys the landscape’s thoughts, questions, perspectives, and revelations. It gives voice to what nature might say to humanity today. Here, the landscape itself becomes all the elements of the performance: set design, lighting, and sound—at once narrator and protagonist—reminding us of the surrounding nature of which we are inevitably always a part.

El Conde de Torrefiel is an internationally recognized theater company that works with the goal of expanding the language of theater. They are often invited to international festivals, most recently with La luz de un lago (The Light of a Lake) at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, a work in which they explored what it means to be spectators. Since the COVID pandemic, the company has turned its attention to us and our surroundings, using the landscape itself as both stage and backdrop.