The Repairers are coming!
Participatory Art Project
Art Dissemination
Project management
Visual Identity
The Repairers are Coming! is a participatory art project that explores repair processes as a tool for fostering human interaction and engagement in urban environments. The project emerged from artistic research conducted in collaboration with an elementary school in Oslo and Oslo Metropolitan University, where discarded materials from the city were collected and transformed into new objects, primarily chairs.
As the project’s creator, I developed it into a participatory experience, allowing children to take part in the transformation process. Through creative workshops, I guided and communicated the project’s artistic concepts to participants. I also crafted visual narratives to promote these ideas and engage diverse audiences throughout the creative process, including developing the project’s visual identity, designing maps, and managing social media. Additionally, I led the project from concept to execution, overseeing participant coordination and workshop facilitation.
The final exhibition presented a selection of these chairs, each having undergone a repair process during workshops. Accompanying the chairs is a map that indicates when and where the materials were found. These found objects are called treasures in the project.
These chairs represent not only the children’s exploration of the city and their involvement in the repair process, but also a web of stories, experiences, and interactions connected to the chairs’ previous owners, and the new encounters they will inspire.
List of materials used in the reparation procesess.
The project focuses on the situations that arise during the act of repair, using the chairs as a platform to foster dialogue and encourage collaboration among participants. These situations challenge and expand our understanding of public space while also demonstrating how art can play an active role in transforming and enriching these shared environments.
Here are some of the chairs that were created during the planning phase of the project, before starting the workshops with the school class in Oslo.
Treasures used to create Tesla Magnus
«Rullende tronen» (The Rolling Throne) and «Konge stolen Bert» (The King Chair Bert) are some of the chairs created during the workshop period at the school.
How would you look like if you were a chair?
During the project, the relationship between people and objects, and how these connections influence one another, was explored as an artistic process.
Each participant created their own chair-portrait, enabling them to view themselves and each other from a new perspective. This allowed us to examine how participants perceived themselves and their peers, and how this influenced their interactions and level of involvement in the repair processes.
