VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

For more than two centuries, the small town of Rejmyre has been mainly known as the location of Reijmyre Glasbruk, a glass factory that opened in 1810 and received international recognition after Turin’s Modern Art and Craft exhibition in 1902. Today, Reijmyre Glasbruk’s glory days are behind it. Similarly to most glass factories in Europe, its activity and employee number have shrunk dramatically since the 1980s, and it has faced many bankruptcies. The history and legacy of the factory and its impact on the town have been a significant research interest in the work of Rejmyre Art Lab’s Center for Peripheral Studies (RAL), an artist-run space founded in 2009 by Daniel Peltz and Sissi Westerberg. The organisation, which they call a “long-term, place-based research in, of and with the rural, factory-town of Rejmyre”, has established an unusual relationship with the factory. Artistic interventions where artists are invited to engage with a specific company, industry or heritage site are common in the art world. But in Rejmyre, because of the current economic situation, the artist organisation is the benefactor of the factory, not the other way around. In this paper, I will present examples of artistic projects that take place in the factory and that are initiated by RAL. I will demonstrate that through artistic research, Peltz and Westerberg are preserving the heritage of the factory, while at the same time questioning its ecological impact on the town and its community.