Fictional Hometown

Both artist are German and had a residency during a longer time in one of the Nordic countries, Maja Rohwetter in Finland and Gabriele Kûnne in Sweden. Both dealt with their new environment specifically on a modern urban basis. Rohwetter combines photos of different small towns in Finland in photoshop and uses these collages for her paintings. The results are paintings of seemingly recognizable places where everything looks familiar but something is different, you just can’t point out what. Künne deals with roads and bridges, highways and viaducts seen as enormous sculptures in the cityscape. She uses these shapes for making sculptures.

Parallel to Fictional Hometown a 3-day seminar was arranged on city planning, the city as living environment and the place of art in the city, inviting a tenant association that deal with the parks in Vaasa (Jaakko Vainiopää, Kantakaupungin asukasyhdistys ry), an association of shops around the town square (Tuula Wägar; Vasa affärscentrum rf) that usually arrange some strange occasions on the market square where they put up a fence around it and you’ll have to pay to get in, the town architect (Kalle Viljanen) and a researcher and architect from Helsinki (Panu Lehtovuori) and an architect from the neighboring city Jakobstad (Roger Wingren).