Social sculpture, dreams and gender issues

My preconceived view about the men was wrong and what amazed me most was that men in different positions and ages were talking freely about themselves. They enjoyed working with their personal dream stories and pictured it in grey paper boxes. I can not imagine Swedish police officers in the same role, it might be a part of a cultural diversity, both concerning my own beliefs but also about the closed criminal sector of Sweden.

Ali Demi prison is in a reformative process, old communists are thrown out and now the prison management consists of well-educated young women in their early thirties. I truly felt the new-awakening taste for freedom among the participants and the energy of a society in change. One of the problems in today’s European society is that the citizens are so completely locked inside their boxes of expertise that they are effectively excluded from open public debate. This was not the fact in Tirana and the outcome of the project gave me more than I could hope for. There was a matter of course in the dialogue with the employees and also in the interaction with people on a local level.

One of the best moments was when we collected the whole amount of the 27 dream-boxes and left the prison in an ambulance. The ambulance stopped at TICA art centers artist in residence where we held a final presentation of the dream-boxes with all the participants. The ambulance journey became a metaphor for rescue, salvation, and regeneration.

The art project “Social sculpture, dreams and gender issues” is a collaboration with Lott Alfreds.