Sara Jordenö: This project begins where my life did: a small locality in northern Sweden called Robertsfors. Like any factory town, Robertsfors has been – and still is – heavily defined by the dominant industry, in this case a company that makes synthetic diamonds. This company, housed in an old factory building from the beginning of the 20th century, was the first place I ever worked. My father, who is an engineer, spent a large part of his career working here. He actually invented – as part of a team, he would interject – one of the high pressure technology presses. The company offered the children of their employees work during the summers, and this was how I ended up working – at 16 or 17 – in the payroll office. I remember how I one day found myself preparing the paychecks for mailing. Before me lay the names of everyone at the plant and the numbers that determined their livelihood; I felt like I had been given a blueprint to the socioeconomic structure of my community.

When I initiated this project in 2005, I aimed to draw a larger map. I wanted to investigate the history and present of the town and also its relationship to two other towns that are connected to it through the synthetic diamond industry: Springs, a town located in an industrial area east of Johannesburg, South Africa and Suzhou Industrial Park, one of China’s largest technological and economic development zones (ETDZ). During the five years I have been working on the project I have visited these places, and tried to understand how these three ‘diamond communities,’ as I call them, are both intimately intertwined and immutably distant.

Johan Lundh: As I see it, your project spans multiple continents over several decades while maintaining focus on the diamond industry. As a result, it traces our increasingly globalizing world through a specific material. The diamonds constitute a magnifying glass which has allowed you to investigate how your personal history is intertwined with the world at large.

Sara Jordenö: I think that is a very apt description! But I want to note that I have different roles even within that personal history. You can maybe say that I – since I haven’t lived there since the age of 18 – am both an insider and an outsider in Robertsfors. In Springs and Suzhou my perspective was limited in a way similar to that of a tourist. I have stategically attempted to shift between and acknowledge these positions. There is also an  “outsiderness” in my position as an artist. My work is documentary in the sense that I am inserting myself into a “real” place, and intend to create an image (textual or visual) that says something about real events. The relation between me as “the documenter” and “the documented” is further complicated by my personal connection to the subject. When beginning a new documentary project, the poet C.D wright admits: I already feel guilty./I haven’t done anything./but I allow the mental pull in both directions.

She defines an area, an unstable space to work, that I am very interested in as an artist. I have a unique position to make this project because of my personal connection, but only if I allow that “pull” between between insider/outsider, observer/observed, narrator/narrated.

Attention: What you see here is only an excerpt of a longer article. The full text appears in printed copies of Sara Jordenö’s book The Strange Case of Carbon.

The history of El Taco begins when a farmer discovers it in 1962 when plowing in his field. The finding instigated a shared expedition between Argentina and the United States of America who transported the meteorite rock to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC in for various tests. Soon thereafter, it was decided that El Taco should be divided, so it was shipped to the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, where it was cut into two main segments. One half was shipped back to Buenos Aires and the other to Washington. The show at Portikus marks the first reunification of El Taco since its division, and the first public presentation of this elaborate artistic endeavor.

Johan Lundh: It would like to begin our conversation by asking about how you became interested in the crater field called Campo del Cielo – Field of the Sky – in Argentina.  Why did you start working together, and what drew you to Campo del Cielo?

Nicolás Goldberg: We met in Argentina through a dear friend of ours and bonded very quickly through our interests. We had only known each other for less than year when we started working together on this project. Having a background in visual arts, sharing interest in the cosmos, looking at pictures from NASA’s telescopes…. it really just took off from there. At one point, Guillermo mentioned Campo del Cielo to me, which I had never heard about. He told me that he was interested in going there and seeing this meteorite. As a photographer, I immediately got interested in this site’s history and the specificity of what had happened there. I guess that’s how Campo del Cielo became appealing to me at first.

Attention: What you see here is only an excerpt of a longer article. The full text appears in printed copies of issue 26 of Mousse.

As a writer on art, Lind has not achieved the same influence, even though she began her career as an art critic in Sweden. The newly published anthology Selected Maria Lind Writing should garner her a much-deserved wider readership. The volume, compiled by Brian Kuan Wood, an editor of e-flux journal, features essays, interviews, statements and research notes written in English between 1997 and 2010. In a nod to her curatorial methodology, in which she works closely with artists, often on projects that challenge the programming or organization of the institution for which she works, Lind, together with Kuan Wood, invited a handful of colleagues to select and comment on a few of her texts. Rather than feeling contrived, these responses, from curators Beatrice von Bismarck and Ana Paula Cohen, critic Tirdad Zolghadr and artist Liam Gillick—designer of the book’s repellently bright yellow cover—reveal Lind’s open and trustful relationship with her collaborators.

Selected Maria Lind Writing is divided into six thematic sections: “Expanded Fields,” “Reflexivity,” “Here and Now,” “Working Together or Not,” “Art and Artists” and “Embeddedness.” The contents, however, are exceptionally difficult to categorize, ranging from essays on individual artists and groups, such as Deimantas Narkevičius, Philippe Parreno, Apolonija Šušteršič and Oda Projesi, to texts about Lind’s own and others’ exhibitions and projects, to reflections on art funding and its place in society. Although sprawling and prismatic, the volume successfully encapsulates Lind’s varied interests (art, politics, critical theory) and different roles (curator, director, educator), providing several parallel threads to follow. Still, a front-to-back reading proves demanding. Rather, it’s a volume to return to, time and again.

The book’s length of over 400 pages might also discourage potential readers, but Lind’s prose, candid without being crude, makes for compelling reading. Her training as a newspaper critic, where direct and pedagogical writing is the rule, and the fact that these texts are written in her second language likely influenced the straightforward tone. Lind’s writing style developed during the thirteen years the volume spans, becoming more precise without becoming academic, but her voice remains her own from the outset.

A critical contemplation of contemporary art and curatorial practice, Selected Maria Lind Writing presents texts that will inspire readers to understand art as a method of engagement. Lind shows that art, by shaping perception, can foster both aesthetic and critical engagement with the world without instrumentalizing or forcing those connections. More than merely providing insight into the mind and actions of one of today’s most influential curators, the book prompts readers to think about their own relationship to social, economic and political concerns without ever questioning the power of art.

The now twenty-five-year-old artist from the rural village of Runik in Kosovo gained the art world’s attention through his inclusion in last year’s Berlin Biennale. For the main space at Kunst-Werke, Halilaj created a replica of the house his family was building just outside of Pristina, increasing its scale by 20 percent. The house in the gallery was inhabited not by the Halilaj family but by chickens who searched for food, built nests and laid eggs throughout the space. These chickens, or ‘bourgeois hens’ as he often calls them, function both as objects for and collaborators in his practice. They also serve as a link back to his rural childhood, and reflect the current exodus from the countryside across former Yugoslavia. These lively feathered characters have previously been a vital part of his practice, like the quirky coop shaped like a space rocket, They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens II (2009).

It was a bold decision by the Berlin Biennale’s curator, Kathrin Rhomberg, to allot one of the main venues for the exhibition to a relatively inexperienced artist. In the end, the ambiguously titled The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them (2010) became one of the most successful projects presented there. Halilaj’s ambition was to build two versions of his home simultaneously in two locations: Kunst-Werke and Runik. However, the one in Kosovo couldn’t be completed due to missing building permits. The doubling of this house forged a connection between the two realities, encouraging us to think of one while we visited the other, thus fostering a space for our projections. The success of the work had less to do with Halilaj’s utopian drive than the overwhelming presence of the structure and its feathered inhabitants; a powerful physical rendering of mythological space.

Rather than being completely subsumed by the art world after his success at the Berlin Biennale, Halilaj returned to his family in Kosovo to follow the construction of their new home. He temporarily escaped the pressure to create a new work in order to concentrate on his next move. After solving legal concerns with the local authorities, the house that should have been built during the biennale was finally under way. During the same visit, he also went to the place where he was born and where he witnessed the horrors of war, including having his first home burnt down. To this day, the ruins of that event can be seen on the hill where his house once stood, which his family still owns.

Around the same time, Chert, the gallery in Berlin that represents his practice, was selected to make a so-called Statement during Art Basel this coming June. Inspired by his visits to the family property, Halilaj proposed that the piece of land itself, with all its symbolic and concrete meaning, be the point of departure for his project. Halilaj wants to bring a piece of land from Kosovo to Art Basel that is the same size of their booth. For an artist from a place where land itself has been so contentious, the project appears to be a logical next step. Initially, If all goes as planned, visitors of Art Basel will literallyy be confronted with a piece of Kosovo. A slice of land. For sale.