Posts with tag Deserted places

Jan Jörnmark looks at his photos projected on the wall and seems still amazed of what happened. Around thirty people are sitting in the room, waiting for him to continue. “I am an Associate Professor in Economic History at Göteborg University, I have written many books during my time, piled in heaps in the caches of the University – no-one reads them” he tells us with a warm Karlstad dialect. And he looks at the photos again and laughs. “And then I started this project….”.

He was interested in deserted places; houses, areas, businesses, places that told a story, that had once been full of activity and was now, due to circumstances and changes in society, deserted. He started photographing these places. The photos show destruction, there is a feeling of abandonment around them, faded glory of once prosperous businesses and activities.

Capitalism is in constant change. Something is destructed, something else created, he tells us. If you don’t add new value to things, they will loose what was once valuable and be destroyed. There is an enormous demand for cultural value and therefore also a potential in adding this to old things to get something new. Jörnmark’s project is a typical project created in the new globalized economy. He started a website where he put all his photos. The interest was enormous. Around 20.000 visitors each month, comments of around 300. It’s the logic described by Chris Anderson, the Editor of Wired that described the new economy in globalized society in the book The Long Tail a few years ago. Internet is free. Money will not be made in traditional ways, instead Internet create new businesses and new products. For Jörnmark the product was the book he produced of all the photos he put on the website (where you find them free of charge). One book has become two books, which have been read and sold in masses. Many lectures and exhibitions have been held. A new book is on its way. Money is made. Sub cultures have been created around the project. It’s a success story that surprises him so much, that he still, even after a few years, is amazed of what happened.

Jan Jörnmark was one of several interesting speakers on the seminar this weekend (20-21 of March) at Jonsered Herrgård outside Göteborg, held by the Foundation for the Future of Cultures (Stiftelsen framtidens kultur) and Lokal Kultur on the topic “Creative Industries and Involuntary Entrepreneurs”. For the programme, look at this post. Nätverkstan is working on a project based on the ideas of the Long Tail, have a look here.

”China!” The representative from the local business sector answers the question with one single word. In the North Italian town Biella, textile has been the major business since 13th century. In the beginning of 19th century they imported technical skills and knowledge from Manchester. Along the rivers in the bottom of the steep valleys manufacturing of textile was industrialised.

But Biella can no longer escape the globalised economy and its undercurrents. China is taking over. In less than ten years, thousands of jobs have disappeared. Twenty-five thousands are still left. A short-time visitor gets the feeling of travelling through a landscape of industrial heritage.

As in so many places in Europe, the authorities are putting their hopes to the cultural and creative sector. Art, creativity and tourism will save the local area. The listeners of today’s seminar are a mixture of business economists, philosophers and artists that take part in the intellectual experiment ”Nurope, the Nomadic University”. One of the initiators is the Italian organisation Cittadellarte.

Cittadellarte is the work of the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto. He bought an old spinning mill in Biella in the beginning of the 1990s. With a fixed purpose he has restored, built and organised what seems very close to a dream of a modern renaissance workshop. This is meant to be a place for reflection, a laboratory for new thoughts that needs to be formed and formulated if our planet is to survive. Pistolettos thoughts of art have been described as a-modern. In his vision of societal changes, art plays the main part.

In the ears of a sceptical Northerner, it sounds a bit bombastic. But if you have been forced to take part of the discussions on culture and business that at the moment is taking place at most parts of the country – and it’s discussed in many places; artistic universities and unemployment offices, at endless seminars and conferences – Pistolettos self-evident belief in the value of art for arts sake is refreshing. It’s far from the moralising undertones that you can find in the Swedish discussions. Artists have difficulties in finding a viable way of living. So they have failed as small-scale businesses. Therefore they should be taught to become entrepreneurs.

Maybe it’s instead as Pistoletto is saying or as the anarchistic business economist Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, one of the initiators of Nurope, has argued in several books: The business sector has a lot to learn from the artists.

The article is written by David Karlsson and was published in the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter at February 13 2007. Find the original Swedish version in PDF here: artikel_dn_070213.pdf. Translation by Lotta Lekvall. Photo 1: Biella, Photo 2: inside Cittadellarte, Photo 3: Art piece by Mr Pistoletto inside Cittadellarte. www.nurope.eu and Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto.