AIO CoLab

During the spring and summer, AIO CoLab will be visiting Årstads mycket tillfälliga konsthall in the village of Årstad in the outskirts of Falkenberg. The art gallery is run by Leif Haglund and Ulla Sundin Beck and is based in the 100-year-old dairy building in the village, with outreach throughout the Halland countryside. Here, for almost a decade, they have invited artists to occupy new spaces for art and activated both the village and its inhabitants.

Åsa Dybwad Norman is a textile artist and lecturer in textile art at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. Based in Arvika, she explores what role the knowledge of the hand and body has in today’s society, often by investigating historical spaces and events through archival work, interviews and design processes.

For AIO CoLab, Dybwad Norman takes the dairy’s labor and women’s historical legacy as a starting point and is interested in the traces left by the development and dismantling of industrialization. Sannarps Dairy, which was later converted into a warehouse for cheese production, is not only a physical space but also an important cultural historical heritage that has left its mark on our time. Around the turn of the last century, there were over forty active dairies in the municipality of Falkenberg. Today, almost all of these farm dairies have been closed down, merged and centralized into large groups. Milking and dairying were traditionally women’s occupations for much of history. During industrialization in the 20th century, this work became more mechanized and formalized, and many tasks that were previously performed by women became a male and mechanical engineering domain. Even today, we are facing major changes in production and work patterns, which reflect the power hierarchies and sociopolitical trends we face. What happens when the embodied knowledge in food production disappears? Can it be resurrected in artistic expression?

The residency runs during the spring and culminates in three weeks of joint work with a group of young people working on summer holidays in June and July. Together, the group will develop new works of art; through textile work, sewing, embroidery, video, sculpture and installation. The works will be shown in an exhibition that opens on July 4th at Årstads konsthall’s premises in the disused dairy.