Malin Pettersson Öberg

Thematic video exhibition held at Galleri Mejan, Exercisplan 3, Stockholm: Site Sensitive Acts 29 June – 3 July 2011. The project was organized by a group of video- and performance based artists whose practices deal with personal, ritualistic or theatrical investments, activations or portrayals of specific sites and places: Hiroko Tsuchimoto, Malin Pettersson Öberg, Marko Bandobranski & Tomas Stark (Gomfilm), Sofia Törnblad and Vygandas Simbelis. Writer and critic Johanne Nordby Wernø has written the exhibition essay, Your place or mine? (scroll down for excerpt, or download Site Sensitive Acts).

« Warning, trivial observation: most actions take place somewhere or other. Some specific place must serve as the site of our being, staying, going, traveling to/from, must we be, stay, go, or travel to/from. Doing anything at all implies a place; without placement, action becomes unthinkable. Now, the opposite is a more complicated condition: places, considered as meaningful realities in these human lives of ours, are unthinkable without us and our actions; they come into existence only when there’s been human interference.

Your place? The dependency, then, is reciprocal. The place in itself (those surfaces and shapes of natural or architectural forms) (if there is such a thing) (i.e. a das Ding an sich) is mute and empty until we charge it – invest it with meaning – either by physical action on the spot, or in the mind. Even more intriguing is the idea that the place will multiply as new individuals establish a relationship with it: since the memories and attitudes that we have invested in it are so different, your place is identical with mine only in such insignificant aspects as its coordinates on the map and its name. The place is not one, but a potentially inevitable number of places, as many as there are humans who think about it, remember it, own it and feel it. A place is neither in the plural nor in the singular; neither owned nor free. Anyone can claim a felt ownership of a nation, an abandoned public pool, or a Paris sidewalk café. »

(Text by Johanne Nordby Wernø)