PERFORMING THE FRINGE

Curators: Jussi Koitela & Inga Lāce

Performing the Fringe evolved over the artists’ and curators’ collective hikes in three different contexts in the rural–urban fringe areas of the cities of Pori, Stockholm and Vilnius. Hiking unfolded as a common activity that combines walking, observation, talking and engaging with regional specificities while also serving as a tool for researching and understanding local contexts. Experiences in these environments and the artists’ research processes that evolved from the hikes have materialised into artistic commissions.

During the last three decades, the harsh neoliberalisation of economies has impacted Nordic and Baltic societies across different registers and timescales. Those developments have manifested changing relationships between the commons and privately owned lands, resulting in ecological and economical abuse of the environment, and the application of capitalist logics to urban-rural areas. Processes of ongoing natural resource overconsumption coupled with growing income gaps have also caused both melancholia and the incapacity to act collectively in productive ways. It has also crumbled beliefs in democratic decision-making, enabling populist voices to gain popularity. The situation demands speculating about new kinds of agencies that could affect understandings of cohabitation; urban and rural spaces; and who and what could be considered active agents within a region’s societal, political and economic level, as well as within the broader cultural field.

The discursive frame of the exhibition is based on anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s writings on‘pericapitalism’. The term refers to spaces and activities on the fringes of capitalism and the consumer society and to the potential futures formed by them. Pericapitalism can involve all sort of activities from foraging and selling natural products to collecting recyclable bottles, as well as sharing economy.

There seems to be more and more grey-zones that can be called pericapitalist, always shifting, and thus having the potential to reimagine the current system. The areas of pericapitalist activity both constantly contaminate and operate as sets for negotiations and struggles that are developing and reproducing hybrid zones, where non-capitalist change could prosper. The exhibition views Nordic and Baltic urban-rural areas as pericapitalist spaces of emerging new human and non-human agencies and narratives for survival in the current crisis.

The exhibition brings together artistic practices as ways of exposing and embodying nonhuman histories, post-neoliberal urban activities and other small-scale economic and ecological activities. It challenges the normalised divisions of function/non-function, human/ non-human and productive/non-productive, to open up hybrid and merged notions about contemporary rural-urban spaces, and the agencies forming within them.

The exhibition Performing the Fringe at Pori Art Museum is the second presentation of the project. The first was on view at Konsthall C in Stockholm in the spring and summer of 2020.