Matilda Ruta

The Seaside Town (2016)

During my participation in Art Inside Out’s first residency Culture’s Role in Urban Development, 2016 I became interested in the lives being lived in Varberg. In my artistic practice, I often return to children’s agency – or rather, their lack of it – and therefore decided to interview and draw together with around fifty children between the ages of five and seven.

Children’s voices are often filtered and interpreted by adults. In this project I wanted to reverse the perspective. In the initial phase, I subsequently interviewed a group of adults from Varberg asking them to describe an emotion or a memory connected to a particular place. I spoke to them using the same simplified language that children are so often addressed with: “Hi, do you want to tell me about a time when you were really, really happy?” “Was it fun?” and so on.

The children were then invited to my temporary studio at Hamnmagasinet, where they were encouraged to draw and tell stories inspired by the adults’ place-based memories, as well as their own emotions connected to different places in the city. In this way, the children assumed the role of story-tellers, filtering the adults’ experiences through their own language, rather than the other way around. Their watercolors, emerging from the adults’ emotionally charged memories, opened up unexpected and compelling visual worlds. The material was collected on a website, making the stories accessible to the public.

In the second phase of the project, I brought the children’s interviews together in the animated film The Seaside Town. The film intertwines the memories of children and adults with an original music score composed by Lina Nyberg and David Stackenäs. Through the film, I wanted to convey the image of Varberg that had emerged during the process, in a form that spoke directly to the participating children and invited their engagement.

In the third phase, selected quotations from the children’s interviews were transformed into a series of site-specific works in the public spaces of Varberg. I wanted the children’s voices to take their place in the city and become visible within its shared spaces: as metre-high yellow letters on a pier, a neon sign in a tree in Societetsparken, a ten-meter-wide banner covering the scaffolding of the Town Hall, and a mural in the changing rooms of Friskis & Svettis. Each quotation was installed at the very place it described, revealing an alternative way of experiencing and understanding the location.

– Matilda Ruta

Matilda Ruta is an artist who works with visual storytelling in book formats. She frequently collaborates with children through processes of mutual learning—relationships grounded in respect for the children’s own inner worlds. The relationship between words and images in Ruta’s books is inverted: the images drive the narrative forward, while the words serve as illustrations.

http://matildaruta.se/

During the residency Culture´s Role in Urban Development (2016, Varberg Municipality), six artists explored Varberg’s identity as a city from various perspectives and initiated dialogues regarding aspects of its future development. Addressing the concept of a high-quality living environment—one that balances housing, work, leisure, and culture for all ages—the artists sketched proposals for artistic elements to be implemented in Västerport, Varberg’s new urban district.