ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates a concept of postmigrant public space from a study of how art in public spaces can address disagreements and conflicts resulting from the need to tackle togetherness in difference and how contemporary art can intervene in postmigrant public spaces, understood as plural domains of human encounter impacted by former and ongoing migration and by new forms of nationalism. The chapter focuses on the public park Superkilen (‘Super Wedge’) in the multicultural Nørrebro district of Copenhagen. Designed by the artist group Superflex (in collaboration with architects from Bjarke Ingels Group and Topotek 1), Superkilen opened in 2012. Based on this case study, this chapter examines what the reconfigurative power of art might accomplish in postmigrant public spaces by considering the following questions: how can public art open up a social and national imagination pervaded by anxieties about (post)migration to other ways of thinking about diversity and collective identity? And is it possible to identify a common pattern that is, a particular postmigrant strategy, which underpins and interconnects various types of artistic interventions in public spaces and debates, which on the surface present themselves as radically different kinds of projects?
