Johanna Billing: Leaving the Factory

Swedish Artist Johanna Billing presents her latest work, Leaving the Factory (2026), a collaborative film and research project developed together with the architects Tor Lindstrand, Erik Wingquist and Anja Thedenius. The film depicts a community lantern parade and is set at Norrahammar’s Bruk, a former industrial site south of Jönköping, Sweden, whose history of foundry work and manufacturing spans generations and which is now facing a process of transformation. The work emerged from Commoning the Heritage: Norrahammar, a practice-based research project initiated by ArkDes, the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, together with Jönköping Municipality. Rather than treating artistic work as a cultural add-on to urban development it allows for a way of reading a site through its material layers, collective memories and patterns of use, and of raising questions of access and the common while the site’s future is still being decided. Developed through study circles with local associations, the lantern parade at the centre of the film temporarily opened the closed buildings to the community, staging participation as a spatial and embodied act rather than a consultative procedure.

Organised in cooperation with Nathalie Koger and Bernhard Staudinger.

Collective Viewing + Talking
Dienstag / Tuesday 20.10.2026, 6-7pm: Q+A and book presentation with Johanna Billing
Eröffnung / Opening
Dienstag / Tuesday 20.10.2026, 7pm

Lecture Performance / Listening Evening Mittwoch / Wednesday 21.10.2026, 6.30pm
@Shh. Listening Bar, WIedner Hauptstraße 18, 1040 Wien

Opening Hours
Sat + Sun, 24 + 25 October 2026 4-7pm
Tuesday 27 October 2026, 5-7pm
Viewing through the Gallery window till midnight.

In collaboration with IASPIS – the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts.