49 days after.

A Carl Palm introduction to the project at Grev Turegatan 8b.

My apartment was emptied and I invited students from KKH in Stockholm to use the space with me in an open structured collaborative workshop. Four students signed up for the project.

At this time I thought of the project as a way to start working. To put up a problem, a situation as a starting point for me and the others to handle. I saw the project as an inside research, learning by doing and experience the practice from the inside. And I like the strategic way of including others in a project which makes it accumulate and harder to give up and quite.

We would all be connected to the apartment and the group for seven days, and decide our selves how much we wanted to participate and in which ways we wanted to interact. I tried to keep the project as open as possible before we got together, to let the group decide the structure of the week on the first meeting. That would then work as a foundation and the common ground for the group.

As we had our first meeting, I was still the owner of the apartment and the inviter with responsibility and I had to open up the project in some way. My personal thoughts on the project were at this point clear and I felt comfortable in my role, and I knew what I had to do. Share the responsibility of the project with the group. I opened up with a welcome and some basic thoughts about the project and formalities such as, time limits, keys, facilities, and proposed to use the web- page as one form of documentation. We organized a formal handshake and I gave the apartment keys over to the group.

Everybody seemed equal to the project and the discussion began. We were a small and interested group of people, and the first meeting was intimate, direct and productive. We organized and found ourselves in new roles, synchronized our calendars and discussed ideas for the week. Every idea was welcomed, as the project was an experiment with no pre set content.

The web- page that I produced before we started would work as a form of documentation and a way to show the public what was going on. Especially the live web- cam transmission worked well as an open window that allot of people were using during the week. The web- cam produced two pictures on the web- page every third second.

I think that it was hard to say no to the web- page proposal at the first meeting. Which could be a problem of pushing the project in certain directions. But I thought that it would be god to have something to show and also as a back up plan if everything would collapse into problems of meeting each other face to face.
One thing that I thought and hoped would work better and used more was the web- site as a self-reflecting space were our thoughts during the week could be posted towards our selves.

It was still a problem that everybody had to go thru me to publish something on the web- page. A better solution would be that the participants publish directly on the web and that we could use computers located on other places.

Different people joined the project from time to time, discussing, hanged out, eat and drank, watched movies and I think the apartment worked well as an open space and that people felt comfortable to just pop by.

After three days of working we decided to invite a new group of people and host a dinner. We chose persons with knowledge and personal experience of different forms of collaborations such as the family, the orchestra, genitors, artists and students from different schools around Stockholm.

We thought of arranging a special welcome and a small speech about the project and the dinner, and moderating the conversations in a specific way, but we decided to let things happened, in the same way as the project was constructed. We organized a nice atmosphere and made some really good soup. I thought of this situation as a way of opening the project up to a wider audience, as a sample of the project. And to see, in an informal discussion were the project was and were it was going.

The dinner situation was quite boring in terms of questions, it was no struggle, nothing really to do except being nice and talk about "nothing". It was nice and social and turned out for me as a question concerning the "nice" art- project in terms of, production and values in and out side the field of art.

But I think that in these kind of project is more about the subject that the "nice" action is concerning. And in this case the subject was undefined, which made the dinner questionable. Not as a social happening but as part of the project and to contribute with more than to be just "nice".

I also think allot about cowardliness in a project like this. And how close the coward is to the brave one that dares to experiment. But still I have problems with the openness and free form of working was everything is accepted and nothing could be wrong.

In the end I think that it was a good week, and that we in the worst case got to know each other little bit better.