Stories/ Historieboden

About USF Holiday Colony
During the summer of 2018 the yard at USF will be turned into a holiday colony for the first time.
Constructions of ship containers creates new spaces to house galleries, stage, pop-up shops, outdoor cinema, bar and cafe in shelter of wind and rain, but mostly sun and good vibes. This pop-up culturehouse is a place for the Bergen people in summer-mode and cultural tourists who wants to see another side of Bergen.

USF Holiday Colony opens on the first day of Natt Jazz and will be filled with a broad range of activities all summer.
The intention is to create a social environment with a collective atmosphere in which people do things together.

The people coming to the Colony are random visitors, culturally interested, social and dancy people, musicians and DJs from the flowering culture in Bergen.
This is a place for the people in Bergen who wants a cultural program that is as good as during the rest of the year, and for the cultural tourists from abroad whos looking for the good and ”authentic” experiences.

The shaping of the colony wil vary from year to year and be marked by experimental architecture. The Holiday Colony will be an architectural installation that is an attraction in itself. It will contain facillities such as a stage, gallery, outdoor cinema, food and drinks and projectspaces.

The rebuildt ship containers are the firm part of the construction and will be placed in a yard with a roof-construction for cover.
This model with contIainerinstallatoins is wellknown from places like Oslo’s ”Sukkerbiten”, London’s Pop Brixton and MOMA’s PS1 Courtyard.

https://www.facebook.com/pg/Historieboden/posts/
https://www.facebook.com/events/386654971740427/

https://usf.no/aktuelt/snart-kommer-feriekolonien/ https://www.bt.no/kultur/i/On3zjb/Skal-fylle-uteplassen-pa-Verftet-med-kultur-i-hele- sommer

About Stories

Maria Øy Lojo wil in the context of her artproject Stilleben host an event at USF Holiday Colony for 4 weeks from 4th of June, where she curates videoart in a ship container and facillitates one of the shop-booths from the Colony for modular art exhibitions and various ways of sharing stories.

The booth can be described as a Story-Lab or –Hub in which the audience can experience stories, share their own and create new. A kind of stationary Asbjørnsen and Moe. During the event, Øy Lojo will make sound recordings, document and make artist interpretations of the stories being shared in the booth, often in collaboration with each story’s owner. Then it will be shared with the audience that comes next.
She will act as an event host and will sometimes invite other artists to taket the role with their own approach to the subjects.

Some of the experiences the event offers:

The event Stories is a place the audience can return to several times and have a different experience every time.

*The tickets being sold has parts of a story written on it. The audience can choose to take the ticket home with them, or use it to participate in a architectural installation in the booth with other audiences’ tickets and try to create a new, coherent story together.
*A Digital Confession Stand (with a welcome message from a theologist who decided not to become a priest after all).
*Share stories/ dialogue around the audiences experiences of the videoworks/ art/ the act of sharing stories.
Listen to stories with headset.
*Look at stories/ art in the Story-Booth’s exhibition, both the visual references to the video- container and the stories being worked on for artost interpretations.
*Read fairytales.

The Booth will be equipped, besides art and confession stand, as a kind of outdoor livingroom, with simple seating, plants and a small library.

The event comes from the experiences I made in exhibition context (USF Visningsrommet, March 2018) of the project Stilleben, where a strong relational and social dimention in the work was clarified by the audience. Their bodily experiences in the exhibition needed an expanded space; an arena for folk-dialogue, in which the audiences own experiences are central without the artworks having to make any compromises in order to be ”understood”. The event creates this space in the same location, with more artists involved and in the low threshold context of a Holiday Colony. The Story-Booth thus has an additional function as pedagogic comunicator.