On January 21st Interno 14, (Italian Association of Architecture and Criticismai??? s Gallery), together with qwatz artist in residence programme, Rome, hosted the talk ai???Sketch on the roman neighborhood Eur: daily space and community transformationsai??? supported by Danish Embassy and sponsored by Danish Art Agency for Culture with the artist and curator Maj Hasager, Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi and Lorenzo Romito, independent researcher on urban changes from Stalker collective.
It was a depth analysis about Maj Hasager s residence at qwatz in which the artist, Prestinenza and Romito focused on EUR s social and architectural history, looking in particular at the failure of the utopian vision of the city planning from a rationalist architectural point of view. They also debated on the notions of power structures, identities, memories and their architectural, cultural and spatial interpretation.
During the roman residence, Hasager will conduct some researchs for her project ai???We will meet in the blind spotai??? (2013-2015, research in progress), focusing on the invisible stories from migrant perspectives and on the urban and social fabric in the EUR district and Laurentino 38, mapping the complexity of the area through interviews and use of archival materials to give equal importance to both ai???official documents and personal stories.
Continuing her previous research on memory and identity connected to socio-political issues, the artist is exploring how migrant communities are related to the city, comparing the image of the migrant to the current reality. Hasager s working methodology is close to documentary, she works predominantly with text, sound, video and photography.
In the other rooms of Interno 14 the projections of two Hasager s previous work, On Site (2010) and Decembers (2012), were helpful to understand Hasager s working methodology and artistic process.
On Site, supported by the Danish Arts Council, shows Palestinian villages that existed before 1948 and now all located in Israel. The film, consisting of interviews and images from the surroundings, is divided into ai???locationsai???, with spontaneous interviews with by-passers at each of the sites.
Decembers is a round table conversation with a group of women – who participated in literary workshops at the University of the Third Age in Gdansk, Poland – seated around a scaled down version of the round table, which was used for negotiations between the head of Solidarinosc Lech Walesa and the communist government in 1989. This event was very important because led to the first democratic election in Poland since the WWII.
The second part of the project has the subtitle Decembers ai???narrating historyai??? and is a black and white montage film made of images from the archive of the European Center for Solidarity in Gdansk and presents a fictional female activist who follows the development of the Solidarinosc movement beginning from 1970, while being in the periphery of the events. The off screen narration re-writes the history of these periods based on a consolidation of voices developed using interview material and recollections from a large group of women.
Hasager s work is interested in how history is written and rewritten depending on the case, ideology or political agenda it endorses. By investigating how sites and our perceptions of them are affected by construction and reconstruction of history, she shows how socio-political and architectonic structures can be revealed through an artistic processing.
Maj Hasager has exhibited her work internationally both in galleries and in the public realm including Future Movements Liverpool Biennial (2010), Between Here and Somewhere Else, al-Hoash, al-Kahf gallery and Sakakini Cultural Centre, Jerusalem, Bethlehem & Ramallah (2010) The Other Shadow of the City, al-Hoash, Jerusalem (2009); Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art (2009), Copenhagen; A farewell to postcolonialism The Third Guangzhou Triennial, China (2008; A Public Affair Gallery 21, Malm (2008; LOOP Film festival, Barcelona (2008; EMERGED Space, Glasgow (2007); KargArt festival in Istanbul (2007).
