Dear Off griders!
We (Mike Bode & Staffan Schmidt) are presently doing a joint PhD, as visual artists, at the Valand School of Fine Arts, the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, at Goteborg University, Sweden. The PhD is both practical and theoretical in its nature. We have about two and a half years left until our examination. Our area of research has to do with the production of space: concretely and socially. Since 2000 we have been working on several exhibition projects which revolve around spatial production and politics. We have been working, together with the inhabitants, in, for example, the suburbs of Minsk, Belarus, on the industrial closures in Japan, Danish modernisation and centralisation in Greenland and situations of immigration and the critique of modernity in Sweden.
During a period as visiting tutors at the Maine College of Art in Portland last year we came across the term "Off the grid", and subsequently we have become more and more interested in the way in which this seemingly silent and non-organized movement as started to grow in the USA. We see this as a situation where well-educated Americans have made the conscious decision to move "up state", away from both the big cities and sprawls, and have begun living their daily lives independently and self-sufficiently producing their own energy. We feel that this can be seen as a tacit protest against ecology's diminutive role as a sign of the lack of far-sightedness in the political agenda in America today.
We now hope to come into contact with individuals which have for different reasons chosen to go "Off the grid", to visit and conduct short and informal interviews and to document the local surroundings. We calculate that the project will take around two years to complete and will be presented in public in the form of an art exhibition and a publication and our intention is that the work will be shown in parallel both in Sweden and in the USA. Our first visit will be in September 2006. Geographically our research will be based on the northeast in the states of Maine and New York.
We very much hope you might consider taking part in our project and that we could meet you during our research trip in September this year. We would also be very grateful to you for any suggestions about places where we might stay during our tour of the north east or other people (Off griders) you feel we should meet, as this would be of great help to our planning.
Please do not hesitiate to get in touch should you have any further questions about the project. You can find documentation of our other projects described in detail on our website: www.valand.gu.se/spatial_expectations/se/index.html
With kind regards from Sweden and with the hope of meeting you this fall,
Mike & Staffan