Conversation on the exhibition Underneath the Paving Stone

Welcome to an in-depth conversation based on Lund Konsthall’s exhibition Underneath the Pavingstone with Oscar Svanelid and Carla Zaccagnini, which will be held in Lund City Hall on December 10th at 6–8pm. Based on two separate but interconnected entrances, they explore how art can take shape in times of political, social and psychological crises.

Carla Zaccagnini takes as her starting point two claims she has been confronted with on different occasions: first, that political art would have been totally absencent in Brazil, and second, that in times of war and crisis it may not even make sense to create art. In her presentation, she returns to Brazil's neo-concrete movement and the art that emerged during the dictatorship's violent repression.

Oscar Svanelid approaches similar questions through Lygia Clark’s work Estruturas de Caixa de Fósforos (Red Matchbox), 1964 created in the midst of the upheavals of the military coup and the artist’s own battle with illness. Here, Clark stages a metaphorical funeral and returns to the materiality of everyday life – not least the matchboxes linked to her chain smoking – to evoke the state she herself called “complete emptiness”. Svanelid also discusses how contemporary artists today work on societies in psychological and sociopolitical crises, with examples from his ongoing research project and other ongoing artistic initiatives.

Together, Zaccagnini and Svanelid open a conversation about the possibilities and limitations of art when the reality around us is shaking.

Oscar Svanelid

Oscar Svanelid is a postdoctoral researcher in Art History at Södertörn University. His research focuses on the role of art in society, with particular attention to contexts beyond galleries and museums. This includes everything from modern artists working in factories and mental health institutions to municipal initiatives in which public art is employed as a tool in efforts to combat terrorism or crime in disadvantaged areas.

Svanelid earned his PhD in the spring of 2021 with the dissertation Shaping Existence: Constructivism as Artistic Professional Practice in the Work of Geraldo de Barros, Lygia Pape, and Lygia Clark. The overarching research question concerns what ultimately happened to constructivist art’s ambition to transform the human being through artistic labour when this artistic practice was transmitted to South America in the mid-twentieth century.

Carla Zaccagnini

Carla Zaccagnini is an artist, curator, and former professor of conceptual and contextual practice at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

Zaccagnini has held solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions at art institutions around the world. Her works are included in public collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Modern in London, MASP in São Paulo, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

Carla Zaccagnini participates in the exhibition Underneath the Paving Stone with two series of works: Correspondencia (2007–ongoing) and Uro (2024).

Image: Lygia Clark, Estruturas de Caixa de Fósforos (Red Matchbox), 1964. Photo: Helene Toresdotter.