Sara Brolund de Carvalho
Studio grant holder in Stockholm 1 October 2019 – 31 March 2020
Sara Brolund de Carvalho. Born 1974 in Gothenburg. Grew up in Sweden, Angola and Portugal. Lives and works in Stockholm.
My practice in recent years has consisted mainly of exhibitions, publications and events with the group Aktion Arkiv, which is run by Helena Mattsson, Meike Schalk and myself. Our collaboration began in 2014, in connection with the exhibition Tensta Museum: Rapporter från nya Sverige at Tensta Konsthall, in which we explored participatory processes in housing regeneration projects in the 1980s in Tensta and their effect on today’s activist movements in the suburbs.
Photo: Sara Brolund de Carvalho
In the exhibition, we applied methods that enable collective research and include the audience through witness seminars, guided tours and enactments of historic events in Swedish housing policy. We want to promote participatory history writing through actions that bring together different players (the city, organisations, associations, etc) and audiences (residents, users, visitors and others) in urban, cultural, historical and political issues. Information is collected during the actions, through interaction between these players and the audience. Aktion Arkiv is an outreach project and seeks to penetrate places beyond the usual catchment area of history writing. In 2017, as part of the Architecture Biennale in Vienna, we embarked on a study of the concepts of Care+Repair in the Nordbahnhof area in Vienna and completed the project in September this year. In 2018/19, I was a visiting research fellow at ArkDes, where I initiated an exploration together with Aktion Arkiv of the group BiG (Bo i Gemenskap). We organised a witness seminar with BiG at ArkDes, raising exciting new questions relating to the concepts of community and collectivity.
At Iaspis, I want to pursue our study of BiG together with Aktion Arkiv, along with the themes that emerged in our witness seminar. We will attempt to reconstruct historic objects, using large-scale time mappings and film in the process.
MA in Architecture from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology + MA in Art from the Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design.
Exhibitions and other projects with Aktion Arkiv in 2018/2019:
“Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet” at Architekturzentrum Wien; Caring for Communities, Forum theatre in Nordbahnhof, Vienna, plus one publication with the same title; “Tensta Museum” (autumn 2018) at Public Luxury, ArkDes.