1. being paid the same wage as the other factory workers

2. working the same hours as the other workers 6:45am-4pm 

3. being subject to/part of the tourist spectacle being produced as a secondary output of the factory

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I wrote the note below to Heinrich Hermann, the archtect and critic, in response to his questions trying to understand the Any Thing, the refuge project and the notion of Adaptive Pre-Use that I am developing within it. I include the note here as I think it provides a good introduction to the work, entering a bit more from the side than any notion of an origin:

Dear Heinrich,

I’m hoping the notes below are helpful in response to your request for clarification on the Adaptive Pre-Use model and an overview of the project.

First, to clear up a misunderstanding, the model of Adaptive Pre-Use is that of a new structure designed and built, by a specific community, for a very specific purpose that it will NEVER serve. So it is, at its core, a way of operating on the logic of adaptive-reuse, disarming its comfortable ethical and political positions and leaving us in a much murkier place, as architects, artists, residents and builders. If the logic of adaptive re-use is that re-use is ethically/ecologically preferable to ruin, or constructing with new materials, then the logic of adaptive pre-use is that building itself is, in and of itself, worthwhile, if engaged in by a specific community, in an attempt to consider the needs on an other. And perhaps the proposition is even more pointed, designing and building inhabitable physical structures, as a process of deeply considering the needs of a life, human or other-than-human, is perhaps the only way we can access some of the more subtle complexities of the contemporary human condition. By committing ourselves to this seemingly illogical project, of sincerely considering an other, and building a habitation for them, that they will never inhabit, we open a space of simultaneous possibility and impossibility that functions as a critical lens on the present and perhaps future of the human condition.

This practice is particularly resonant in Rejmyre. A factory town born in the early 1800s in response to Sweden losing its glass industry in Finland to Russia. Rejmyre became a place where people made their lives because trees, as fuel for the furnaces, and quartz, as raw material for making glass, were abundant. Like all factory towns, the needs of human lives were secondary and what was built to satisfy those needs was rarely more than a functional attempt to think a human life. 

Fast forward two hundred years, Sweden is facing an influx of newly arrived people, seeking refuge from wars in their home countries. Those charged with providing ‘refuge’ to those deemed ‘refugees' encounter a housing problem, as the availability of cheap money at near zero interest rates and an existing shortage of housing stock has driven a massive increase in urban real estate values. The bureaucrats charged with solving this problem look to largely abandoned post-industrial countryside towns as a solution. In this period, a former hostel in the center of Rejmyre, a village with few opportunities for work and even fewer cultural resources, is converted into a ‘refuge' for newly arrived, unaccompanied men, many from Syria. Places like Rejmyre, that the anthropogist Anna L. Tsing refers to as capitalism’s ‘abandoned asset fields’, suddenly become temporarily valuable, precisely because the houses they contain are valueless. There was a highly circulated story in the Swedish news media, at the peak of the so called refugee crisis, of a group of newly arrived people being taken by bus to one of these rural towns that the government was reconstituting as a refuge. The story tells of the refugees refusing to get off the bus. It was a moment of concentrated disconnect between the ways in which refuge was being constituted, as an abstraction by government officials, looking to solve a problem and to simultaneously extract further value from what had been deemed a capitalist ruin, and the way refuge was being constituted and imagined by the people inhabiting this category. What was offered as a refuge was refused by the intended recipient, thus calling into question what it means to give and to take refuge? Can a refuge refused be any kind of refuge and what of those who already inhabit this place? Do they in turn become refugees? If we are going to think the complexity of this act, what it means to give and to take refuge, perhaps we need to experiment with new logics of being, Adaptive Pre-Use enters into this space.

Then you add into the mix the transformation of labour in this town built around industrial craft production that eventually turned to a hybrid version of this labour: part functional craft, part tourist spectacle. Recently, neither has been a particularly successful economic enterprise. Despite a large influx of EU money invested in remaking Rejmyre and the disused buildings of the former factory into a contemporary craft village, the spectacle of glass making in Rejmyre is losing out to other more popular destinations for consuming the image of craft production. One after another the businesses in the craft village close down: Ann’s Cafe, the bakery, the ceramic studio, the knife shop. This economic failure is accompanied by another unsuccessful attempt to construct industrial glass manufacturing as viable within the current global economy, as the high end Swedish homegoods brand Svensk Tenn attempts to extract value from the idea of the Swedish hand[made] by having their products manufactured in Rejmyre. Even this further abstraction of the glass workers' labour cannot offer a refuge from the ruthless economic logic of global manufacturing. Rejmyre is an abandoned asset field and, as Anna Tsing reminds us, there is still life here but it cannot be understood as a valuable life unless we deploy other logics.

Into this space, I begin working with an object. A thing called Any Thing, from an uncertain time, that attempts to forge a link between a group of unemployed elephants in the teak logging forests of Myanmar and this town with its own unemployment problems linked to shifting labour conditions. An article in the NY Times offers this sobering series of statistics on the life expectancy of Asian elephants:

In the wild - 56 years

In the logging industry - 52 years

In the tourist industry - 26 years

In a zoo - 12 years

I begin to think, if we could provide refuge for these elephants, perhaps we could find clues to how to provide refuge for ourselves. How to do this? One place, it occurs to me to look, is in the historical record of Rejmyre. One way to give refuge might be to create a pre-history for the one who will attempt the more difficult task of taking refuge, such that when they arrive, they will have already been there, deep in the arsenic and lead contaminated soil mounds behind the glass factory, deep in the lakes that are fed by the stream that runs through these mounds. I make a glass and metal thing in the glass factory and the blacksmith’s forge next door, a thing called: Any Thing, made to be lost and perhaps later found, perhaps in early spring, perhaps when the ice is still thick and clear. 

Inside the Any Thing, I embed a clear vinyl recording, extracted from an ecotourism video on YouTube of a couple on their honeymoon in Myanmar, visiting the soon to be unemployed elephants. I take this Any Thing and put it into the glass factory’s historical museum, along with a set of objects uncovered in an ice diving excavation of the nearby lake Hunn, objects that had fallen from a cable car that used to run through the region, carrying raw materials from the railway station to the factory and finished glass goods back out for export. The Any Thing sits there in the display case for a period of time. Then, I take it out, and along with a member of the historical society, I throw into the lake at the spot where the other objects in the display were uncovered. 

We wait for the lake to freeze. Then, on a cold day, when the ice is thick and clear, we cut a hole in the ice, dive into the water and find the Any Thing. We open it on the ice and the sounds of the elephants’ last labours in the teak forests of Myanmar pour out over the lake to the forest beyond. This is my attempt to give and to take refuge.

The historical society agrees to acquire the Any Thing, and the video of the dive in which we recovered it, and the Any Thing winds up back in the display case in the factory’s historical museum once again. 

.

Video of the dive: https://vimeo.com/213843809

With the prehistory established, the next phase involves two components that are still in motion. The formation of a new official branch of the regional government, A Bureau of Irrational Affairs, and an Adaptive Pre-use project to build a refuge in Rejmyre for a small herd of these unemployed elephants from Myanmar, to think, to imagine, to design and to build a refuge for them in this site of historic refuge for the craft of glassmaking and a contemporary refuge for a small group of newly arrived peoples.

In describing the bureau I write:

__________________

The first project of the bureau is the building of a refuge in Rejmyre. I contact Kristoffer after being invited to do something inside his Dome of Visions while working as a guest professor in Stockholm. A structure built on the campus of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, designed to be virtually connected to a similar structure in Copenhagen.:

Stockholm Dome of Visions

Copenhagen Dome of Visions

I wondered what would happen if we transposed the logic of connecting existing capitalist power centers like Copenhagen and Stockholm onto an 'abandoned asset field’ like Rejmyre. I invited Kristoffer to come visit me in Rejmyre and we forged a bond that has led him to agree to develop an initial design for the refuge, for a refuge in Rejmyre, to be imagined, redesigned and built by residents as an attempt to ask and perhaps, in the act of building, answer, the question: ‘How might we give and take refuge, for our perilous selves and perilous others, in this abandoned place in which life still resides?'

He begins by consulting with an expert, a woman who wrote her PhD on working elephants and consulted on the development of the Foster and Partners elephant house in Copenhagen. We take what we learn from her and what we learn from exploring the site around the factory and Kristoffer’s initial proposal for a structure, built by local skilled volunteers, to house a small herd of unemployed logging elephants from Myanmar, takes shape. This proposal will be presented at the exhibition in April at the Norrköping Art Museum and serve as a platform to gather residents around, deploying the power of the art institution and the power of the architectural model, to hopefully allow enough people to take this forward to the next stage, to imagine, to redesign and to build this refuge with us.

I thought I would close this text with a poem I wrote to accompany the project in recent presentations and that will appear on the wall in the exhibition in Norrköping:

____________________

Meri Lina’s work Tip Object is unchanged from the Product Catalogue but is installed as a for-sale item in the museum gift shop.

Hoping this helps and looking forward to your questions,

Daniel