Building on models of collective living and engagement, Lockhart and BAC hosted a three-week summer residency for six girls on a farm on northern Gotland August 6-26th, 2018. During this time, Lockhart and her team lived together with the young women, forming a collective household where they created a community based on trust and respect in the shared duties, joys, and responsibilities of creating a home and new collaborative works of art in the form of film, photos and textile.

Once they age out of the Youth Sociotherapy Centre, the girls are separated from friends with whom they spent most of their young lives. At the residency on Gotland the girls focused on working towards their own imagined futures. They participated in a program of workshops that taught them skills they will need to navigate adult life: cooking, organizing a home and developing their speaking and writing – also in English. Activities included workshops with local artists, architects, and designers. The girls worked with architect Jenny Lundahl, textile designer Gunila Axén, potter Eva-Marie Kothe, as well as choreographer Camilla Båge, to learn how to create scale models for collective living, mathematics furniture restoring, pottery and movement.

At group dinners hosted by the collective, visiting lecturers like the architect Kerstin Kärnekull and artist Matts Leiderstam were presenting informal talks, centered on Sweden’s unique history of alternative living. The young women took a short course with the astronomer Gunnar Welin to gain new tools to observe and absorb the landscape, as well as the sky, in a new environment. Lena Pasternak, director Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators, organised a discussion on the daily life of a writer and poetry reading with the polish resident writers Krystyna Dąbrowska and Pawel Śpiewak.

EVENTIDE (2022)

Eventide was recorded during the three weeks of the so-called Collective Living Seminar with the participation of the young women from Rudzienko. In this contemplative film, shot on the shore of Gotland, Sweden, Lockhart captures the gradual shift of dusk to night, in turn expanding this notion of transition to the group of figures, moving slowly through the film’s fixed frame.

Lockhart visualises the power of time through the gradual disappearance of the light of dusk as it gives way to night. Under a vast sky punctuated by streaking meteors or orbiting satellites, the girls search the rocky shore with lights in determined, measured movements. Over the course of the 30-minute take, the search party slowly enters and exits the frame, leaving only a darkened landscape behind. The transitory and provisional nature of human existence is foregrounded by the figures' immersion in the present, their collective gaze fixed downward, while the sky above - an almost navy blue - glows with traces of the past, stars whose light has travelled for eons.