Sculptural Pavilion, Korsnäståget, Vasa, Finland

 

Public artwork - public space at Korsnäståget

Video-stills from the video work in Sculptural Pavilion

Workshop as Research

Sculptural Pavilion is an art project, looking for dreams, thoughts and visions of the future with children and youth.

In Korsnäståget/Ristinummi Local A. were working with the Youth Centre Ristikka and held a sculpture workshop indoor as well as a video workshop. In the video workshop, the children showed the artists from Local A. different spaces in Ristinummi, where a Sculptural Pavilion could be placed. The children were wearing headlights and marked the spots together, creating clusters of light in the spaces where there was a need or possibility for change. Local A. also worked in an art class with the Variska School in Ristinummi with a sculpture workshop to get more material and input for the sculptural shapes. During the latter phase of producing the final large sculpture at Ristinummi Youth Center, the use of chewing gum as an instant sculptural addition to the Sculptural Pavilion in Ristinummi arose. The use of xylitol sweetener in chewing gum is a Finnish innovation, protecting teeth against caries. The small sculptures shaped by collaborator's mouths, could be seen as a local differentiator and also a small additional manifestation of participation and symbol of preservation and preventive care - the xylitol. Sculptural Pavilion is about things that lie in between; about feelings, dreams and shapes. Matters of location, expression, relation to society and seeing yourself as part of the developments taking place where you live, have been the starting points. To create something that has never been visible before, daring to abstract for the scope of generating new ideas and to have the courage to take place in the public space. Sculptural Pavilion can be seen as a vision to create a meeting place but also an experiment, a change that can include everyone. In the meeting through the work process, we opened up our vision and other stories suddenly began to live their lives in the work. It is these untold stories, which are experienced individually by all through the work.

Children are the people who will live in our communities for the longest time. Should they also have opportunity to participate in the aesthetic design of the society they live in? The expressions of the enlarged sculptural forms of Sculptural Pavilion, contrast with the architecture's functional bodies, its square or rounded forms.

With support from

PLATFORM

Centret för konstfrämjandet (Jimmy Pulli) and MOT+TAGNING Triennalen

AND staff and youth at RISTIKKA and VARISKA