In the 19th of may I was part of the “Earth market” event in Strömparterren, Stockholm orchestrated by Mossutställninngar.

Improvisation of ugliness, clayey guck, weed, vermins and abnormalities.

“I want to initiate a dialogue about how taste and aesthetic judgments can influence which values and environmental nature is worth protecting and what is considered to be included in the concept of sustainability. The fact that there are subjective values like beautiful and ugly, good and bad, nourishing and harmful might be OK when it comes to a flower pot, a piece of clothing or art, but when using them for instance on a natural appearance or even a human it gets more complicated. As it is, it’s hard to assess what in the environmental nature is an affect by human society and to decide where do we want to go from here. What’s worth protecting and what is not, how to judge, on what basis and who makes the descisions?

On my table I will improvise during the event by adding dirt, sculptural organic irregular “ugly” clay shapes, nearby found weeds, deformations (if possible of the table), sticks, stones, maybe city trash.  A corner on the table can be left alone for textual content, claims, questions and interactions with the viewer. On the side a bucket with dirty water for breeding mosquitos, hoping to introduce a colony of mosquitos at strömparterren. I might even makeup myself full of fake mosquito bites, making me too ugly. Visitors may also be encouraged to answer and submit a short questionnaire of what natural appearances to protect, ignore and combat.”

Below is the questionnaire that the visitors were encouraged to answer by making holes in the paper with a stick for the option they chose in each question.