[spectre] Drabble+Sachs News (Modified by Geert Lovink)

[Drabble+Sachs]

Dear friends and colleagues,

Since October 2004 Drabble+Sachs have been working with the students of 
the Art Academy in Umea, Northern Sweden. We are happy to report that  
prompted by our teaching project ‘the ownership of culture’, four 
students: Aldis Ellertsdöttir, John Huntington, Mikael Näsström and 
Fanny Carinasdotter have produced the work 'Nordic Light', which 
culminated with a public event on the 3rd of March.

Following presentations and discussions about public and private space, 
and fieldwork around the city of Umea, the group decided to focus on a 
much-hyped development proposal by Umea's most powerful entrepreneur, 
Krister Olsson, as part of which he proposes a new high-rise hotel and 
conference center on the city's waterfront. Rather than openly attack 
this vision of an exclusive, executive Umea, they decided to dwarf it 
with a proposal of their own, which entertained and amplified the 
development logic and revealed some of the more extreme and problematic 
strategies inherent within the discourse of development at present.

The students formed a fictional institute called Ny Stad (New City) and 
held a press-conference heralding a new development in which the whole 
of the centre of the city was to be turned into an ibiza-style party 
zone for 18-25 year olds. Under the tag-line 'the city that never 
sleeps' they produced a densely worded press-communique and 
commissioned actors to play the part of development specialists. The 
conference proposed the building of an enormous snowboard ramp down the 
central boulevard, the historic town-hall was to be removed to the 
museum district and replaced with a huge entertainment block in the 
shape of a water-molecule, complete with state of the art clubbing 
facilities, a 300 seat sauna and an Ice-Bar (refrigerated all 
year-round).

Their research into the language of development, meant that for the 
most part, the press believed the theatre they were presented with was 
authentic, and Olsson (who  was also at the press conference) embraced 
the idea as 'a great opportunity to integrate the students into the 
center of the city'. The actors (amongst them Hinrich Sachs playing the 
part of fictional architect Urs Klein) found themselves on local tv and 
radio and in the newspapers.

A day later the students went public, explaining that the whole thing 
was a carefully crafted fiction aimed at raising debate about who has 
the right to decide the future of urban space, and on what terms the 
media report speculative imaging as fact. Press interest since the 
revelation has been intense, with the students asked to defend their 
intervention on television, in the newspapers and on radio.

Our warmest regards

Barnaby and Hinrich


Drabble + Sachs
cultural research and action

www.drabblesachs.org
office at drabblesachs.org

Drabble + Sachs
cultural research and action

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