The Limbo Party

Abstract

This piece is comprised of video stills from The Limbo Party, an audio-visual collaborative project cumulated through a long-term creative and dialogical process that explored representations of human mobility, archaeology, and landscape between 2017 and 2019. The Limbo Party features a group of “limbo experts,” Tivoli Föreningen, a self-organized association of refugees in southern Sweden. Initially, members of this group came together to learn Swedish, but then later expanded to include a wide range of practical and leisure activities. This led to the development of The Limbo Party, an arts-based investigation that considers how spatio-temporal concepts, such as limbo and twilight, can be metaphorically connected to the state(s) of waiting for asylum or other such permits. In so doing, the project explores the relationship between middle states, potential states, and suspended states in relation to migration. Together we interpreted and materialised concepts of limbo, investigating its limits and potentialities as a fertile, subversive and creative space. The first part of the process connected the contemporary reality of refugees living in Blekinge with a nearby iron-age pagan cult site. Banners were produced and placed on the ‘Dansbana’ (a typical space for dancing during social gatherings) of the local social centre followed by a party and twilight walks through the area of great archaeological significance. A second phase saw the conception and creation of a messenger-object from limbo and its ‘finding’ in the local landscape along with the the message/gift it was sent to communicate.