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Invitation to a dinner with "Friends of the Court Jester" (October 2024)
I've had an interest in the role of the court jester for years and invited others (researchers, artists, whistleblowers and more) with whom I have discussed this ("friends of the court jester") to a dinner in October last year. Someone gave me a tip to check out this artist, Lars Noväng, and I found his website "Frihetsförmedlingen" ("Swedish Public Freedom Service"), which is a hilarious upside-down inside-out version of "Arbetsförmedlingen" ("Swedish Public Employment Service", see image below).
"The Swedish Public Freedom Service provides an interactive internet platform as well as temporary offices, where ritualistic and bureaucratic behavior in pursuit of freedom can be performed.
In this way the Freedom Service offers Swedish citizens a useful alternative to the mandatory search for non-existent or imaginary jobs on today’s shrinking labour market they otherwise are required to perform.
Besides supplying and mediating freedom, the Freedom Service runs a R&D Program and also has an obligation to influence the public opinion.
From 2019 the Swedish Public Freedom Service also has the mandate to oversee and control the level of freedom in Swedish companies and organisations, as well as in public places"
So I invited Lars to join the dinner and he graciously accepted despite knowing basically nothing about who I am and what the dinner was about (he was in fact the only guest that I had not met beforehand). We didn't really have time to talk at the dinner and decided to meet up later (and this belatedly happened only a month ago) and have met twice more since then - including this past week. Lars and I have so many shared interests, but we also inhabit/play different roles in our daily lives (researcher vs artist) and at times also have different perspectives on the same phenomenon. Even when we both want to explore the same phenomenon, we might have very different start points and fall back on different methods.
Lars has however recently started a new project (together with fellow artist Johan Forsman), "Ritkontoret" (Rite Agency), with a focus on making institutionalized behaviors (that can be seen/framed as rites and rituals) visible, understand how they affect and limit us, develop ways of seeing the world from new perspectives, and explore other ways of living (by inventing new rites and rituals). The Rite Agency is an artistic initiative that examines how art can drive societal change through rites and rituals (both unveiling those that exist around us but that aren't recognised as such) and by inventing new rites and rituals that make us think and question that which is taken for granted.
So after a very stimulating meeting at a café a month ago, I got a lot of new ideas and sent over a list with half a dozen concrete suggestions for how we could cooperate. Since me and my colleague Elina now have a platform (a research group, SF Lab (homepage, blog that will migrate elsewhere soon), a master's programme and several different courses), we have several things we can bring to the table, including collaborating in some form around a course. We have just started to explore how we could cooperate, and the discussions themselves are very stimulating - so I'm personally totally content already as-is!
One possibility would be to recruit one or more students who would do their master's thesis with the Rite Agency as client a year from now (equivalent to how many KTH students have companies as clients for their master's theses). Exactly what such a thesis would investigate remains to be seen/specified (and it could be that we can't figure it out and nothing will come of it). But that's just one of several ideas and I'm pretty sure something will be realised this year. What's great with a thesis is that (from my perspective) the Rite Agency would be a client and a site where a student could write a very interesting thesis. The fact that a student would do a thesis with the Rite Agency and whatever comes out of it would be folded into their art project and be presented as "results", so it's a win-win for both us and them.
So this blog post is basically just a teaser for thing to come - since we are currently exploring different ideas and trying to figure out if/how they could be realised and how each party could benefit from such a cooperation. The great thing here is that the Rite Agency (Lars and Johan) have funding from a call, "Creativity, fantasy and imagination", that allows them to (as far as I understand), do pretty much whatever they deem to be interesting to their project without having specified it in advance. This allows them a large degree of freedom to decide how and where to explore rites and rituals (for example at KTH and in cooperation with us). It also seems to be totally ok for them to take risks and to fail when they explore something - as long as they fail in interesting (unexpected, unpredictable) ways - and make something out of it. Like documenting the failure and tying the outcome back into their artistic work, or using failure as input to explore whatever it was that was revealed in the process - which then perhaps turns out not to have been a failure at all, but the only thing that could have happened...
Lars often creates something that doesn't exist - except he pretends it does and then makes it happen (like creating the Swedish Public Freedom Service or like me announcing a new strategic partnership with the Rite Agency). When something that has been magicked-into-existence (for example an agency) meets, interacts or possibly collides with people, their ideas, their feelings and with various structures in society, the artistic explorations start. How do people react, what do they think and what do they make out of it? Instead of asking for permission or trying to get a permit, you just make it so and observes what happens (which bears similarities to a Research through Design approach). Or something like that - that's just my interpretation and I have surely misunderstood or misrepresented something since this all doesn't come to me intuitively because I might be too much of a researcher, craving more structure even when I think/fantasise/innovate. This is also why it's interesting to continue to work with and try to understand artistic practices in general and Lars' ideas and methods in particular.
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