Framed deliberately against the performative productivity of academic and cultural gatherings, the Anti-Symposium proposed an alternative mode of collective intelligence: one grounded in dwelling, duration, and shared suspension. Rather than presenting ideas, participants inhabited a situation. The artwork was neither object nor event, but a lived condition unfolding through proximity, conversation, and the conscious slowing down of time. In this sense, Uddebo operated less as a site than as a medium, where the distinction between doing and not doing collapsed into a single field of practice. Arriving from the southern edge of Europe—after weeks walking along the Atlantic light of Cádiz—the journey north to Uddebo introduced a radical climatic, spatial, and temporal shift. The village, once marked by industrial decline and social precarity, had undergone a slow transformation driven by collective labour and long-term commitment. What emerged was not a polished cultural destination, but a fragile, highly social ecosystem. The Anti-Symposium embedded itself within this condition, neither intervening nor extracting, but coexisting. Meals were shared daily in a communal house, swims in the river punctuated the afternoons, and conversations unfolded without schedules or panels. Time was not managed; it was inhabited. This refusal of urgency was itself the core gesture of the work.
Within contemporary relational art, the Anti-Symposium can be understood as a precise critique of overproduction—of discourse, visibility, and cultural capital. Here, the absence of formal presentation was not a lack, but a method. As Lloveras’ socioplastic framework suggests, meaning emerges not from accumulation but from calibration. Talking, listening, walking, cooking, and resting became infrastructural acts, shaping an invisible architecture of relations. The village absorbed the temporary presence of artists, curators, and historians as an unstable ingredient, while the visitors, in turn, were reconfigured by the rhythms and stories of the local community. The artwork existed in this mutual exposure. The notion of “doing and not doing as doing” finds its lineage in conceptual art and land art practices that privileged intention over material output. Smithson’s entropic thinking resonates strongly here, as does the legacy of post-minimal and situationist practices. Yet Uddebo extends these genealogies by situating them within a living social fabric rather than a symbolic landscape. The idea was not staged against nature or society, but with them. The forest paths, wooden bridges, riverbanks, and communal interiors formed a distributed scenography where no single action dominated. The work resisted documentation, spectacle, and closure, aligning instead with what could be described as weak signals and soft traces.
Crucially, the Anti-Symposium foregrounded care as an epistemic condition. Conversations gravitated toward cross-pollination, pedagogical forms, global touristic pressure, gender tensions, and the politics of visibility, yet none of these topics sought resolution. The emphasis was on staying with complexity rather than mastering it. This approach resonates with the broader socioplastic agenda, where the city, the body, and the landscape are treated as palimpsests of memory and friction. Uddebo became a living diagram of this logic: a place where social capital was not extracted but temporarily shared, where vulnerability was not instrumentalised but acknowledged. From an urban perspective, the Anti-Symposium can be read as a micro-model of the Fifth City logic: a relational layer infiltrating an existing settlement without altering its form. No new infrastructure was built; instead, existing spaces were reactivated through use and attention. The village functioned as a low-resolution commons, where intensity emerged from repetition and presence rather than novelty. In this sense, Uddebo exemplified how urban and rural contexts alike can host forms of cultural production that are non-spectacular yet deeply transformative. The artwork did not aim to leave a mark, but to add a layer—one more sediment of lived experience within an already complex terrain. Memory plays a central role in this process. As with other positional essays within the Lloveras’ practice, the Anti-Symposium did not end with departure. It persisted as an internal archive, feeding into ongoing series concerned with raw identity, unstable documentation, and chromatic fixers. Images, notes, and bodily recollections became material for future works, extending Uddebo across geographies and times. This delayed productivity stands in sharp contrast to the immediate outputs demanded by institutional culture. Here, value lies in latency, not immediacy.
Ultimately, the Anti-Symposium affirmed a fundamental proposition: that living together can itself be an artistic act, and that restraint can generate intensity. In an era dominated by acceleration and visibility, Uddebo offered a counter-model grounded in trust, slowness, and shared vulnerability. The situation did not seek to solve anything; it allowed something to happen. As part of a broader socioplastic investigation, this work reinforces the idea that the most relevant cultural practices today may be those that know when not to act, when to listen, and when to simply remain. Doing, in this context, is inseparable from not doing—and both are forms of care.
Lloveras, A. (2018) Iron Water / Anti-Symposium, Uddebo, Sweden 2018. Blog post. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2018/07/iron-wateranti-symposium-by-bobrikova.html
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