Gothenburg fragments

Gothenburg fragments

Between the 3d and 5 September 2021. 12 artist, thinkers, workers and strikers met in former hotel Volrat Tham in Gothenburg. This is the exact location where the fifth situationist conference took place in 1961 from which the legendary and disputed split in the movement occurred.

The anniversary impulse derives perhaps from the notion that the unconsciouis, as psychogeography teaches us not only structured as a language but also in time and even as a space. Therefore, a conference on a conference in the same room and 60 years after the event took place is maybe not such a bad idea. As it would turn out, it is not clear which of the conferences, in a historical meaning could be categorized as tragedy and which as farce.

But dealing with Situationism could if you believe Asger Jorn be a quite risky affair, as he himself described it as the most dangerous of all -isms from the moment you start believing in it. This self-collapsing reasoning might be one of the conflicting affects that the fifth conference legacy’s leaves us with. The contradiction impacts also on the way the events can be historicized, there seem to be a conflict in looking back on someone who is looking to the future. It might feel as is if they are looking at us with an injunction. Perhaps there is an inherent guilt in a prophecy that have failed. But what if it did not fail, what if it is still in the making? From an anachronistic view the absence can be transformed into latency of presence which would be Jorns comparative-vandalist approach towards history. 

When the fifth conference dispersed into a traveling derive in 1961, it meant that some members of the SI ended up in Hamburg where they continued their discussions. They came to formulate the mythic Hamburg Theses which effectively ended the first phase om the movement, meaning that a stronger position against art within its modern context was established. 

The works in this books can be read as fragments of the conference aftermath where the actual gorge in movements ideology is the focal point.

Did the conference in 2021 put something to its final rest or was it a resurrection? Neither probably. In the haunted house of Volrat Tham there was no corps or ghost but rater something not living, not dead, the undead.

The contributions in this publication can be read as a response to immanent divergence in art, value, labor and capital that has somatized into situations. Recuperation is still unfolding but we are looking at new symptoms on which the participants of the book are scouting.

Ambrosius Fjord