Starting from the Middle— Handshaking in Hökarängen: Art Projects as Working Methods for Producing the City Differently

This text analyses the project Home Works, an art program that took place in 2015–17 in Konsthall C, a contemporary art center in the Stockholm suburb of Hökarängen. The argument of the article is that Home Works can be seen as a socio-material practice of producing the city differently. I thus propose that Home Works provides an example of how art projects hold a potential as methodologies for enacting versions of the city that connect to contem- porary social struggles as well as to the right to the city. The text applies a pragmatist, new materialist methodology and proposes that urban realities are enacted through practices and co-shaped by the spatial and architectural environment. Thereby I seek to discuss with an art discourse that has been preoccupied with defining socially engaged art as communicative (as a layer of reality that can be added or removed) and with a trend in urban studies which views temporary art projects as subservient to urban restructurings driven by gentrification.