Fear and Adornment in Public Space

Colombia – South Africa – USA – Sweden – India

Fear & Adornment in Public Space – is the title of a larger contemporary art and craft project including workshops, site specific productions and community development conducted by the LAND Contemporary Art Practices (Sissi Westerberg and Veronica Wiman). By talking about Fear and Adornment we want to widen the perspectives of what adornment is and create awareness of the connection between fear and public space. Fear, or ways of conquering fear are put in relation to adornment– art for the body, decoration and ornamentation as well as architecture and art in the public space. What reasons are there for adornment, how are we affected by it and how can we use it? The project is an offspring of Veronica Wiman´s curatorial research and practice - Fear and Gender in Public Space www.genderandpublicspace.org

Other Venues

Nov 2007 Lugar a Dudas - contemporary art center in Cali, Colombia
http://www.lugaradudas.org/

Jan 2008 Witswatersrand School of Arts in Johannesburg, South Africa
http://web.wits.ac.za/

April 2008 University of San Francisco, USA
http://www.usfca.edu/

Jan 2009 Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India
http://srishti.ac.in/

The Assignment

Make a piece of jewellery for a specific site.

Choose a public place in the city where you, or someone else, experience fear or feel unsafe.

Make a proposal for a jewellery piece for the site. The adornment could be for wearing at the site or for adorning the site itself. It could be for a particular situation, person, time of day etc... The piece can be a tool, a solution, a protection or a means to conquer fear, but it could also be something that represents the fear or is a reaction to it.

Falling, falling, escalator subway Östermalmstorg.


Looking down, can see the escalator, steep and sharp. Feeling panic, don´t want to get on, don´t trust myself . Is this one of theese days when I will make it or when it finally goes to hell. Too late, people are already behind me, must get on.
My legs are shaking, try to balance on the narrow step. I could either fall down on my face onto the sharp steel or get too close to the yellow stripe and get stuck and my heels will get squezeed and my clothes will drag me down.
I am in the middle now, my legs are heavy and my stomach is revolving. Am I gonna fall and die this time? Try to not look down, try insteed to look at the people I am meeting, Blank faces. do they see that I am a nutcase, all these people that seem to handle this so easy?
Should I dare to put my hand on the rolling rubber railing? No, stories from my childhood comes back. The one about a boy or a girl that got caught and was strangled.
Almost there, the terryfying step to get off, is this when I will finally get smashed .

For my sister
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