Rejmyre Art LAB’s Center for Peripheral Studies is a long-term, place-based, artistic research project, co-founded by artists Daniel Peltz and Sissi Westerberg in 2009. They come together to explore issues of vital concern through and with our varied artistic practices. They utilize an ensemble residency model to conduct this research, coming together to collectively think about aspects of the complex existence in this place and time. As an artist-run organisation, the purpose of their work together in Rejmyre has been to create a post-institutional teaching and learning space for ourselves, and others, to continue to grow, engage in sustained critique and explore topics of collective interest. Their research strands have emerged from time together and thus follow a loose, associative line from one to the other. Rejmyre Art Lab’s programming is born of a long-term engagement with and commitment to the village of Rejmyre in the Östergötland region of Sweden.

Rejmyre Art Lab’s residency program is run and constructed by artists in response to our own needs and changing modes of production. Their residencies often consist of a mix of dedicated time for developing ideas and work, collaborative exercises, intensive peer critique, and co-hosting the group through cooking and caring for each other. In an effort to explore alternatives to the pervasive ideology of individualism in contemporary art practice, Rejmyre Art Lab has adopted a model they refer to as ensemble residencies, borrowing the notion of the ensemble that is far more common in performance practices. Within this model, they commit to explore topics together in a small group, at least at the outset of an investigation, and to welcome the members of the ensemble into the development process of the work. In this spirit, each member, of the selected refuging ensemble, will be asked to design an exercise, based on their own artistic practice, that engages the other members in their interests within the theme.

One of the organisation’s primary research themes has, since 2018, been refuging: an exploration of how giving/taking refuge, as an act and practice, can be developed and facilitated through multiple artistic interactions and interventions. The theme has been developed by the project’s research leader Daniel Peltz, who, together with artistic director Sissi Westerberg, will introduce the theme and projects developed thus far during the ensemble residency week.

Refuging is a call to action for artists to develop the practice of giving/taking refuge. The initiator of this project, the U.S./Swedish artist Daniel Peltz, asks us to reconsider the notion of refuge, not as a noun (a refuge, a refugee, etc.) but as a verb, as a vital, inherently reciprocal set of actions. He asks us “how might we, as artists, use this thin sliver of time, while the worst impacts of climate change are still in the future, to develop our capacity as a society to give and to take refuge?” Refuging takes the form of a series of productions-in-residence, that will result in a broadly distributed refuging toolkit, a set of artist-shaped models for how to do this complicated work of refuging. Peltz writes, “perhaps in the not-too-distant future, people facing the need to refuge will pick up this toolkit and say, ‘I heard they tried it this way in Rejmyre.’”

Their activities include a post-MFA fellowship program, an international artist residency program, a platform for experimental and conceptual glass projects in the Reijmyre Glass Factory, public seminars, our pedagogical program Konstlabbet, exhibitions in Konsthallen Engelska Magasinet and a program of installations in and around the town of Rejmyre. Their installation program attempts to re-radicalize the notion of site-specificity through a commitment to a philosophy of embedded installation in which there is an element of co-inhabitation and inseparable dependence at play in the relationship between an artwork and our site.