Gruppen ("The Group") on a Situare walk on the Belgian side of St. Peter’s Hill, December, 1983. Reproduced with the artist’s permission.
Kunsthall Trondheim welcomes you to join a Situare walk: a group walking tour with artist Oddvar I.N. Daren, visiting secret locations in Trondheim. The walking tour is arranged as part of Oddvar I.N. Daren’s solo exhibition, Local Land.
Starting point: Kunsthall Trondheim.
In 1983, Oddvar I.N. Daren and artist colleague Lars Paalgard made the rounds to different bars inMaastricht, The Netherlands, inviting their audience by handing out invitations to a happening. The invitation’s instructions were to turn up Sunday morning at a given location, where a bus marked “Extra Dienst” would pick up the participants and transport them to a secret location where they would take part in a “Situare Walk”.
The same year, Oddvar I.N. Daren and Lars Paalgard wrote 1st Manifesto Ars Situare. In the manifesto, they described their joint artistic venture under the name Gruppen (“The Group”) as “the action and manifestation of human creativity, based on the desire to highlight the ambiguity in everything that surrounds us […] Ars Situare is a philosophy of perception whose goal is to […] enable active communication between subject and object.”
The projects entitled Ars Situare could involve observing the movement of light and marking the shadows’ movements in chalk lines. Or it could involve carefully exposing a 140 metre line of dust, gravel, broken glass, and pieces of wood painstakingly arranged across the floor of a factory building. These actions, which imposed little change onto the existing situation, were often marked with an Ars Situare stencil or stamp, and the audience would be invited to observe the situation with the artists. Ars Situare could even unfold in public places, for example by means of walking tours for groups.