Masu - Art Inside Out

In the residency Artistic work in progress, the artist duo MASU (Mattias Gunnarsson & Susanne Westerberg) worked together with Halmstad’s residents to create a temporary wooden structure at the Bastionen, one of Halmstad’s well-known public places. By inviting visitors and passers-by to write down their favorite place on the wooden lath, which was the artist duo’s building material, the structure became a living memory of the city and all those who populate it.

The first part of the project was presented as an exhibition at Halmstad Konsthall. There, MASU created a mycelium-like wooden structure of 1,500 narrow wooden sticks that together formed a form of nest that stretched out over walls, floors and columns. In the art hall, they had also collected MDF boards and 3000 wooden laths on which visitors were invited to write an answer to the question What/where is your best place?

This work created a bridge to the second part of the project, which was built up over a three-week period at the Bastionen, which was originally a defense facility and part of the city wall around Halmstad. Here they built a large-scale undulating installation of wooden laths where passers-by and visitors were invited to write directly on the structure or on the laths which their best place is. Together with scribbled names of teen lovers, messages and tags, the spatial and textual installation formed a symphony of voices. Consisting of a swarm of individual units of text and material, the structure formed both a body and a swarm, representing both the entity and the many, the collective and the individual at the same time.