"Andre Amtoft: Vernacular Mobilities"
2003-07-25 until 2003-08-10
Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art
Malmo, , SE

Andre Amtoft will be presenting his project Vernacular Mobilities [mapping cultural capital] at the Critical Studies Test Site, located on the upper floor of Rooseum. Amtoft is interested in how surveillance technologies can be used to communicate and critique social phenomena. This time he has chosen to use GPS (Global Positioning System), a satellite based surveillance system originally developed by the US Department of Defense to guide missiles and troops to their target. The project, which is a fusion sociology and art, reveals how social inequality in modernity has increasingly become a struggle of mobility.

Moreover, Vernacular Mobilies [mapping cultural capital] creatively positions surveillance technology within current debate by using the GPS system to track the itinerary and whereabouts of 54 cultural workers originating from the contemporary art scenes in Copenhagen and Malmo.

By tracking the mobility of 54 cultural workers the project aims to visually test how change in cultural funding carries with it a change in the mobility of the innovative arts (e.g. regional brain drain).

As such, the project is an attempt to gain insight into the mobility of the regional art scene before the Danish Ministry of Culture effects its much anticipated and dreaded overhaul of an otherwise functional policy system; an overhaul that is feared will put an end to international exchange programs for the young and experimental practitioners of the field. Vernacular Mobilities explores the political decisions of today by asking what they hold in store tomorrow.

Vernacular Mobilities [mapping cultural capital] is supported by Center for Dansk Billedkunst - Lund University - Rooseum - Kobenhavns Kommunes Billedkunstudvalg.

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for Sweden

Other Important Exhibitions in Sweden