Me and my studio partner Li Hao made maps and drawings to document the passage of time around the fascinating area of Långgatorna here in Gothenburg. We used a collage kind of technique to juxtapose all kinds of information and narratives on top of each other: historic maps, photogrammetric meshes, archival images and not least collected stories or testimonies.
All my attempt at forcing a curated narrative upon this diverse and sometimes contradictory neighbourhood felt reductive, so I thougt: why not let the shards and splinters of language I’ve come across tell their own stories? We cast a wide net and searched for desciptions and quippings about this area, from the 1600s to today, and decontextualized them. Who say’s what about who is up for the reader to guess, but the totality renders a kind of portrait.
In the same spirit, the “patchwork” grid of the drawings are to display how any “crop” of a piece of context, is arbitrary and crude. The rough cutoffs produced by the grid serve to highlight this crudeness rather than hiding it using graphical tricks.
Full resolution:
Enjoy!