refuging in Rejmyre
2017 - present
refuging in Rejmyre is a continuation of a long-term, multi-decade investigation of the glass factory town of Rejmyre, Sweden that Peltz began in 2007. Refuging in Rejmyre attempts to reconsider the value of the town of Rejmyre and those who inhabit it, according to logics other than the extractive economic ones that dominate factory towns.
Rejmyre can be seen as a ruin, made by capitalism’s exploitation and abandonment of asset fields. The assets to be extracted have changed over the years (trees, quartz, glass, the idea of craft as a tourist spectacle) but the cycle of extraction, depletion and abandonment have not. And it is this cycle that connects Rejmyre to many other places and people.
What to do when a place has been abandoned by the logics of extraction?
How to be in a place that has been abandoned by these logics?
How to be a place that has been abandoned by these logics?
Peltz’ work engages these questions of valuation and revaluation through a proposal to construct a refuge in Rejmyre for a small group of unemployed elephants previously employed in the teak harvesting. industry in Myanmar. The architectural proposal for this refuge was developed with the Danish architect Kristoffer Tejlgaard. Peltz first encountered Kristoffer’s architecture while working as a visiting professor at Stockholm University of the Arts. He was invited to make an event inside of a pavilion he had built there, outside the KTH campus, called the Dome of Visions. The dome project connected two urban centers of global capital, Stockholm and Copenhagen, in an effort to create a platform for envisioning sustainable futures. As he approached the spectacular geodesic building, he was drawn to the logics that made this elaborate structure, built to stand on the site for just two years, thoroughly acceptable, reasonable even, in this thriving urban/academic context. He wondered how the meaning of this structure would change if we were to move it to Rejmyre, to transpose these futurist logics onto our site, with its much more questionable relationship to the future.
Peltz began a long dialog with Tejlgaard, that took place over the course of several visits to Rejmyre, and resulted in a proposal for a 5000-square-meter tensile structure, to be built by the community in Rejmyre. The structure was designed in consultation with an expert on elephant habitats to meet some of the needs of this small group of unemployed logging elephants from Myanmar. It is built on top of the factory’s historic waste site and positions itself as a complete solution to the problem of the waste, incorporating a dam that filters the water before it gets downstream into the refuge and eventually into the source of our drinking water. Instead of 1% for art, you could say this proposal makes a claim for 99% for art. The suggestion is that the municipality allocate the entirety of the clean up budget to building this refuge, or rather to enabling the community to build this refuge together.
Building together is an important component of the work, it is experimenting with refuge from the perspective of buddhist philosophy, not as a place but as a set of actions. I am attempting to develop a practice of refuging. The refuge in Rejmyre is thus not a physical structure, it is an inversion of the principles of architecture (in which normally a building’s existence is justified by its program, i.e. what it will be used for). Inside this project, the program or the purpose of this building is for it to be built, by the community, as an act of refuging. It is inside this act of building anew, an intentionally unnecessary and financially out of scale structure, that we might experience an undoing of this systematic devaluation caused by the cycle of extraction, depletion and abandonment.
Building a refuge in Rejmyre requires a large expenditure of resources but the scale of this expenditure pales in comparison to the accumulated expenditures of extraction. It strikes me as, oddly, a thoroughly appropriate use of public funds (far more so than paving the site over) to invest in the possibility of revaluing life and lives in this place. If we are going to use public money to perform this act of cleaning up this contaminated site, it should be the damage done to the publics that inhabit this asset field that we attempt to clean up. We should be left with something more than a void, a hole in the ground, or a parking lot.
The refuging work began during my previous project in Rejmyre, as an attempt to embed these elephants from Myanmar into the history of our site in Rejmyre. It occurred to me that one way to practice this thing called refuging, would be to create a pre-history for the one who is seeking refuge, such that when they arrived at the site, offering itself as a refuge, they would discover that they had already been there. It is a kind of temporal twisting that is important to me in thinking the act of refuging and its received temporal logics.
While working on creating this pre-history for the elephants as a way of practicing refuging, I was grappling with a major transformation to the community in Rejmyre. During one of the waves of refugees arriving in Sweden, the government turned to our town, rich with cheap housing, and deemed us temporarily valuable again; valuable for the purpose of refuging. Housing was adapted to accommodate a group of unaccompanied young people, who came to live in Rejmyre, while more desirable housing was built for them in nearby cities. My work takes this re-valuation of those who inhabit our site on its word. I operate on the assumption that those who made the choice, to consider Rejmyre a suitable site for refuging, had thought it through, and that it was not based on the extraction and abandonment logics that preceded the thinking of this place. We were deemed valuable as a place to practice refuging. I am carrying on that work, in good faith. It seems entirely possible that we are a valuable site, to further develop this practice. Perhaps, precisely because we are ourselves in need of refuge from this history of extraction, depletion and abandonment.
Why the elephants? First, it is important to understand that these are unemployed elephants. They were broken into service in an industry of extraction that used them up, so they are a kind of ruin left to navigate the vagaries of their own value. They are also facing a difficult situation, as one of the primary employment options for them is in the tourist industry, similar in this way to the options available to glass workers in wealthy countries where industrial labor has mostly been outsourced to cheaper bodies. Unfortunately, studies have shown that elephants employed in the logging industry live approximately the same life span as those in the wild, 52 years, whereas elephants in the tourism industry live only 26 years; half a life lost in shifting labor conditions. Elephants in zoos in comparison live approximately 12 years. I was drawn to the challenging, if not impossible, situation of these unemployed animals, as a vehicle, not to carry tourists, but to allow us to think, imagine and practice the challenging if not impossible act of refuging in Rejmyre.