Artist-educator Jordi Ferreiro (ES) investigates organisational structures through participatory performance, play and learning experiments. During his residency, he works with Unge Kunstkjennere, the youth art group of Bergen Kunsthall.

In a series of exploratory meetings and activities, together they explore how an arts organisation can accommodate self-directed areas that give space to different voices and actions, and reflect the perspectives and needs of young people. The results of the workshops materialize in one-day takeover by Unge Kunstkjennere applying a process of ‘acupuncture’ to the Bergen Kunsthall building. A series of architectural actions that led the Kunsthall’s users, visitors and inhabitants to question: Who is the institution for? Who can have access to culture? And above all, in our programmes of inclusivity and hospitality, who is still excluded?

These modifications led to closing the main door of the Kunsthall and inviting visitors to use only the accessible ramp entrance on the side of the building, altering the galleries into research spaces, and constructing structures and ramps in order to rethink how, and for whom, the access routes throughout the building are constructed.

Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) also supports this residency and commission at Bergen Kunsthall through the Programme for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture (PICE), in the framework of the Mobility grants.

Part of ‘Who’s doing the washing up?’ – a programme of live commissions in 2018 at Bergen Kunsthall exploring feminist organisational practices and modes of communication – and the structures that support these. The title of the series is used to address questions that often go unmentioned when thinking of possible futures: Who has a voice in these futures? Who’s doing the work to sustain them? What types of work are valued? And what happens when imagining new ways of organising begins with these questions?

Photo: Thea Haug