The sculpture
The sculptur in its "natural surroundings"
Can you find your bike?
And there is a sign to tell you all about it...
Today on Tuesday the 19th of May we placed the sculpture at its place below and on Dombron. The transport went well with just a few minor adjusments in the planning.
Here are som movies from the transport and the placing:
Transport to Dombron
Final montage of the sculpture
Final montage of the sculpture at location
And down it goes...
The sculpture stays in place untill Friday the 29th of May.
Thank you everyone for helping us!
Please leave a comment.
Introduction
The course is given as part of the Landscape Architecture Programme in Ultuna.
It is about making a project from idea to proposal in the scale of 1:1. The project can consist of installations in public places, exhibitions, sculptures etc. The project is ten weeks long and we had a budget of 3.000 SEK from the SLU and could also try to find some sponsors for our idea if we wanted. We worked in a group with three persons with different nationalities.
We are...
Anna Büttner
...I'm here for an ERASUMS-exchange for a half year. I study landscape architecture in the fourth year at the Technical University Dresden/ Germany. I really love to be here in Uppsala. The city has a nice charm and reminds me a little bit on my hometown with the historical centre and river Fyrisån.
Markus Haselberger
...I'm a student of landscape architecture on an exchange-semester in Uppsala. My home University is the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna / Austria. I really appreciate that Uppsala is a vibrant city with a lot of students and a lot of beautiful nature surrounding it.
Annika Lundvall
...I'm a student in my fourth year at the program of landscape architecture at Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet (SLU) Uppsala, Sweden. Working with students from other countries and with other languages has been both expounding and challenging. It has given me the opportunity to look at Sweden and Uppsala from an outside perspective, using different eyes in looking at my surroundings.
All of the attendants in the course divided into 2 groups during the second week, our group early decided that we wanted to work with Fyrisån. We think the river is important for the city and the people. We wanted to investigate what kind of problems there are in the river and have a strong environmental message for the citizens. We wanted to illustrate this by working with a sculpture and/or installation.
The Goal is...
to make people to think of Fyrisån in a positive way. The river was really dirty in former times and but it's clean today. We want people to take better care of the river. The river is the pulse of Uppsala and the vein shouldn't be messy and blocked.
Stuff in the river
Fyrisån now and then
Fyrisån is Upplands longest river; it has its source in the surroundings of Dannemora and its outlet in Ekoln south of Uppsala. Fyrisån was first named Salaån and got its "new" name from Olof Rudbeck among others in the 1600-century. In the year 1841 the river was dammed and the islandfall was built to collect the power from the water. The dam made it impossible for the fish to travel upstream and play. The river was also for a long time considered a dirty ditch where all of the towns waste was dumped.
Today the water in the river is clean and fishstairs have been built by the waterfalls to help the fish to travel upstream. The Asp fish is Upplands landscape fish and it is on the IUCN Red List of endangered species. It lives in Mälaren and will hopefully start to travel upstream through Uppsala city and play. The shores have been made in to a popular recreational area and an indispensible addition to the city. People can come close to the water by walking on boardwalks and paved quays. Every year on Valborg (30th of April) there is a rafting arranged by teknolog- och naturvetarkåren (Technologist- and Naturescienceunion). The participants dress up in costumes and go down the river on their homebuilt Styrofoam rafts.
Cleaning up Fyrisån
Bike cleaning the weekend before Valborg
Every year before Valborg (30.4.) the river gets cleaned from bikes which were taken from the bike racks and thrown in. Divers from the local diving clubs go into the river and look for bikes and other large objects. People on the shore pull the items up with ropes and a big lorry came to transport the bikes to storage at Uppsala kommun. Usually the divers pick up around 100-200 bikes out of Fyrisån in on this day.
Waterbiking
Helpers pulling the bikes up on the street
A pile of wet bikes from the river
The bikes are full of waterplants and rost
Valborg cleanup 1st of May
After Valborg and the Rafting there is a lot of waste in the whole city. The kommun puts some ‘länsar' (ribbon to catch the swimming waste) in the river to catch the waste floating on the surface.
One of the ribbons to catch the swimming waste
Clean Upsala May 8th
This is an event form the Keep Sweden Tidy. ‘The Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation is a creator of public opinion that focuses on environmental issues, promotes recycling and combats litter through public awareness campaigns and environmental education. The Foundation strives to influence attitudes and behaviour in order to encourage a sustainable environmental development.'
The event clean Upsala took place this year on the 8th May. Between 14.000 and 20.000 people take part in this event. The goal is to clean up the city, for example schools, parks, pedestrian roads, public places and natural areas.
Everyone who wants to can attend CleanUpsala
Placement
Dombron
Working process
As we decided to work on the Fyrisån we started by looking for the problems of the river. Soon we concluded working with the waste out of the river would be the most interesting.
In the next step we collected our ideas by building models and drawing sketches about waste and the river. In this sketching and building process the idea of creating a waste sculpture was born. We decided to build a sculpture made out of bikes found in the river. The sculpture should look like someone is fishing a huge waste monster out of the river. We built a fishing rod on the bridge and a line goes from the fishing rod and hooks on to the bike sculpture which is in the water below. Everybody should be able to go there and hold the rod. That means everybody can try to help to clean the river in an imaginary way.
One of the early sketches
Modell
Building a sculpture out of bikes was a thing no one of us had done before. So we tried to build a small sculpture out of destroyed bikes as a trial version. We wanted to see how to fix them together. Another reason for this was to estimate how big the sculpture should be and how many bikes we would need. The trial version was a very instable, light construction held together with gaffer tape. We recognized that the real sculpture should be more stable and stronger until it should be between 4 and 6 meter high and placed in the middle of the river.
First trialversion of a bike sculpture
We got permission to use the bikes from Uppsala Kommun. Then we went to their storage area to have a look at the bikes. At first we tried to build the base of our sculpture and see how big it would be. While working we figured out that it would be difficult to get the whole sculpture on to a lorry without it falling apart. So we decided to use a rope going thru the whole sculpture which fixed it. Additionally we used cable straps to hold the bikes together. The bikes were placed in a way that they become wedged together to give the whole sculpture more stability. After we had reached a size of two meters we had a test lift with a lorry crane. Everything went good and so we knew that the construction would hold. We could continue building it higher and higher.
Movie of test lifting the scultpure
Attatching the lines to the crane, very nervous moment
A nest of bikes for this magpie
The cable stripes help to keep the bikes in place
And the rope so everyting will hold together
Thanks to:
Anders Larsson, VD Fyrisåns Vattenförbund, for being postive to our idea and teaching us about Fyrisriver
PerRickard Rönnberg-Fyrlycke, Uppsala Kommun, who gave us the material and a place to work on and knows all about cleaning Uppsala
Nicklas Ursin, nube marknentreprenad, sponsoring us with transport and giving us good advice
Bengt Jansson, Diver, informing us about the cleaning process of the river and helping out with the placement of the sculpture
Jöran Frohm, Uppsala Kommun, for giving us permission to do this
Lars Johansson, Uppsala Kommun, telling us about projects and being positive
Sven Ahlgren, Uppsalavatten, for helping us getting in touch with the right people
Karin Åkerström, Police, for being nice and helpful
LarsÅke Lundwall, Dad, for lending out his precious Danford anchor
Susan Paget and Ylva Dahlman, our teachers from SLU, for inspiring and mentoring us
