Woven Rooms of Childhood - From Parklek to Itoshima
Ongoing Project – Japan summer 2026
After the mobile Parklek in Artistic Form — a performative weaving project exploring collective childhood memories through woven artefacts and marionettes — was presented in Kramfors through a local residency, it now travels abroad. In July 2026, the project continues to Japan, where I will take part in an artist residency at Studio Kura in Itoshima.
This residency extends my long-term artistic inquiry into the cultural heritage of the Swedish parklek (staffed playground) and creates a dialogue with the Japanese asobi-ba, the adventure playgrounds that emerged during the 1970s from similar ideals of child-led play, creativity, and care (Halldén, 2009; Skantze, 1998; Statens kulturråd, 2020). Both traditions share a belief in the child’s right to play, to shape their surroundings, and to be part of a community — yet they express this through different cultural and material languages (Gruenewald, 2003; Inwood, 2013).
In Japan, asobi-ba is seen as a pedagogical resource, integrated into research and teacher education, and used to cultivate social learning, sustainability, and collective care (Kirita, 2017; OECD, 2024, 2025; Iaspis/Urgent Pedagogies, 2024). Here, the educational system is informed by play and relationships, rather than positioning them as support structures from below (Tronto, 2013). In Sweden, the parklek has gradually lost its pedagogical mandate and now exists outside the traditional triangle of care (Merchant, 1980; Plumwood, 1993).
Japanese educational culture also embraces a deeper understanding of body and material as animated — where learning emerges through sensory encounters between humans and their surroundings (Barad, 2007; Neimanis, 2017; Haraway, 2016). It is a spiritual attitude that we in the West rarely lean on within our pedagogical traditions (Woodman, 1985; Fischer-Lichte, 2008).
Through a study visit with the Japan Adventure Playground Association, I aim to deepen my understanding of asobi-ba — where experiment, material, and play influence education from within and above — and explore how such practices outside formal schooling can inspire educational thinking (Springgay & Truman, 2018; Gruenewald, 2003). The journey seeks to show how care and play can take a clearer role in our understanding of learning — not merely as methods, but as forms of knowledge (Tronto, 2013; Inwood, 2013).
At Studio Kura, I will weave these perspectives together through textile installations, performative storytelling, and participatory workshops where children and families are invited to co-create (Springgay & Irwin, 2008). As an artist and pedagogue, I see this as a continuation of my artographic practice — exploring how craft, play and spirit can function as acts of collective care, intergenerational learning, and cultural dialogue (Fischer-Lichte, 2008; Barad, 2007; Merchant, 1980; Tronto, 2013).
The residency becomes both an artistic and pedagogical inquiry into care as embodied knowledge — a weave of experiences, encounters, and gestures where learning happens through the hands, through relationships, and through presence in material (Ingold, 2013; Neimanis, 2017). Working in the space between parklek and asobi-ba, I seek to understand how trust, playfulness, and community can form the very structure that sustains learning (Iaspis/Urgent Pedagogies, 2024; Plumwood, 1993).
This journey is also a living fieldwork — a process where weaving, play, and conversation merge into one practice (Springgay & Truman, 2018; Fischer-Lichte, 2008). By meeting children, educators, and artists in Itoshima, I hope to understand how creation itself can serve as a language of relation, a way of listening to both people and place (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016). Ultimately, it is a return to childhood wisdom: to the hand that knows, the gaze that sees the small, and the play that holds the power to heal (Woodman, 1985; Neimanis, 2017).
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