City Symphony Malmö: the spatial politics of non-institutional memory

ABSTRACT City Symphony Malmö was a collaborative documentary that engaged citizens of Malmö in recording short film sequences. The Symphony’ video material was also performed at the art and performance centre Inkonst where electronic musicians improvised to VJ’s digital and analogue live mixing of the material. A remediation of the performance was streamed live on the Internet with live footage from the performance. All clips were released under the creative commons licence and made available for remixing through The Pirate Bay. This article explores what it can imply to hand over the means of film production to citizens. The discussion concentrates on participatory and spatially distributed filmmaking and screening of non-institutional memories, produced in the symphony. The analysis merges influence from silent cinema and Soviet Montage [Vertov, Dziga. 1929. A Man with a Movie Camera. Documentary/City Symphony Film], theories of public memory [e.g. Casey, Edward. 2004. “Public Memory in Place and Time.” In Framing Public Memory, edited by Kendall R. Phillips, 17–46. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press; Young, David E. 2000. At Memory’s Edge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Bodnar, John. 1992. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press], new media [Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press; Manovich, Lew. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.] and place [Appadurai, Arjan. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Lefebvre, Henri. (1974) 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers; Harvey, David. 1993. “From Space to Place and Back Again.” In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Exchange, edited by Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner, 3–29. London: Routledge]. It describes the complexities of creating non-institutional memory and archiving practices and argues that such citizen-driven and non-institutional memories may challenge official history and societal memory production, yet also reproduce typical and iconic images which reveal spatio-material hierarchies. Such complexities demonstrate the value of an analysis of participation and spatio-material dimensions of public memory as unfolded in the article.