HLP-er Brett was interviewed by Lise Skou and Andrea Kreutz who work together as Swop Network. The interview was recently published in a book that is free to download here: http://www.swopnetwork.dk/swop_book.pdf
More about the book:
Swop Book
The objective of this book is to present Swop Projects and some of the initiatives and projects we conducted within this framework. Apart from the material, documentation and concrete output, the book also includes three texts commissioned from authors to give an idea of the contexts in which the various projects operated. As a backdrop, we chose to include a text by writer and researcher Kolya Abramsky, which outlines the political and economical climate. We asked Emily Pethick, director of CASCO at the time, to contribute a text on how to build relationships around an art institution by collaborating with artists. We also asked freelance curator Katarina Stenbeck to contextualize the project from a contemporary art perspective.
To us, the work of developing alternative strategies and micro-models is a collective effort involving individuals from various groups and local communities. In order to understand local contexts and, not least, to be able to imagine alternative goals, we have operated within an international network. We started in Copenhagen and around Denmark. The project then brought us further afield to cities in Europe and beyond. We met people and visited local communities whose relationship to contemporary culture is based on ideas of co-operation, collectivism and social diversity in the local environment.
During the years we spent on Swop Projects we learned a lot, both personally and professionally, through meeting people who inspired us, presented us with ideas and who generously shared their knowledge and experience. We hope that we, through this book, can communicate the views of a political and artistic sphere as well as share some of the critical and diverse ideas that we have had the privilege to come across during the course of our work. We hope to inspire others and to arouse the readers’ curiosity in the same way as our own curiosity was kindled.
Andrea Creutz, Stockholm and Lise Skou, Aarhus, November 2010.
