The Garden Grieves my Heart - Afrang Nordlöf Malekian & Åse Richard

For many years, residents of Gränby and Kvärngärdet in Uppsala have fought against sharp rent increases and renovictions*. This is also the case in the work “The Garden Grieves my Heart”, where flowers, juniper bushes and other vegetation in the city break the silence to depict tenants’ urban living conditions.

Afrang Nordlöf Malekian presents a performative revision of his work and discusses its creative and social background with researcher Åse Richard.

*To significantly raise rents, by renovating rental properties, resulting in forced relocation.

Activation: 16 November 2024 at Köttinspektionen, Uppsala

(EN)

During the performance at Köttinspektionen, Afrang Nordlöf Malekian holds a dramatic reading of three fiction stories that he wrote inspired by Åse Richard’s research on renovictions in Uppsala and by the style of Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad. The stories use personification of bushes and garden elements to connect with the struggles of Gränby’s residents. Both fiction and research are combined in this work.

The subsequent discussion between Åse and Afrang analysed the artistic methods that were used for the creation of this sound work and how academic research and art can help each other in connecting critical research with a wider public.

Afrang Nordlöf Malekian (b. 1995) is an Iranian-Swedish artist, and in his practice he listens to the dreams and aspirations of silenced, muted, or unnoticed creators, actors, and makers of history. Nordlöf Malekian’s work seeks to explore how the language of these unrealized utopias reappears, returns, and transforms into an evasive, flexible, and scattered force that advances collective endeavors. Through performances and installations grounded in archival research, he creates works that provide a space for these quiet dreams to be heard, expanded, and, ideally, realized. The border between fiction and history blurs as Nordlöf Malekian strives to create documents and performances that he wishes had existed in a specific historical context, and through which he aims to generate alternative futures. Afrang Nordlöf Malekian is represented by Moderna Museet, the Public Art Agency Sweden, Botkyrka municipality, Uppsala Art Museum, and the Arab Image Foundation Library. He has previously conducted artistic research at the Arab Image Foundation and was artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris.

Åse Richard currently holds a position as a PhD candidate in Human Geography at Uppsala University. In her dissertation, she engages with the ongoing renovation of the Swedish so-called Million Program. Based on quantitative and deep ethnographic material collected throughout the renovation of the multifamily rental housing neighbourhood of Gränby in Uppsala, where she also lives, her work engages in the gap between lived experiences of large-scale renovations of rental housing and its representations in Swedish policy and debate. In her thesis, she argues that to attain a just housing renewal, the active inclusion of the knowledge and experiences of people directly affected by housing policies, or the lack of housing policies as it is in the processes of housing renewal, are required. Based on her research, Åse frequently arranges city walks with interested groups. She is a co-publisher of the handbook Renovräkt! and is part of the research collective Fundament, which recently published the book Kris i Bostadsfrågan (Verbal 2023).

More information here.

More information about the activation and the collaboration with Köttinspektionen Dans here.