The art of displacement – curating a preschool context in a public transport system

ABSTRACT

This article discusses ways of enabling the youngest children at preschool (1–3 years) to participate in creating space in the public transport system. One researcher, two preschool educators and six preschool toddlers travelled on foot, by bus and by underground train to the Brunkeberg tunnel, a pedestrian tunnel in the centre of Stockholm, Sweden. Drawing on artistic site-specific methods of displacement, this article details three propositions for how to ‘do’ preschool in the public transport system: locations, dimensions and positions. By placing the routines and rhythms of a preschool practice into the urban spaces of transport, the ‘miniature preschool’ comes to curate context. The article proposes methods for a preschool practice to curate context through activating mobile but particular locations within a specific place; creating a vocal mobile architecture; and enabling multiple and mobile positions within one specific situation.

KEYWORDS:

• Preschool
• curating context
• displacement
• locations
• dimensions
• positions

Introduction

This article reports on an experiment that displaced what is commonly considered to be a Swedish preschool context into the public transport system, which enabled the youngest children at preschool (aged 1–3 years) to participate in creating the urban space. One researcher, two preschool educators and six preschool toddlers travelled, as a ‘miniature preschool’, on foot, by bus and by underground train to the Brunkeberg tunnel, a pedestrian tunnel in the centre of Stockholm, Sweden. The researcher actively enabled the travels,¹ as well as engaged in activating specific activities for the ‘miniature preschool’. The preschool children themselves also engaged in activating other specific activities. The director of Public Art Agency Sweden, Malm (2017, 7), considers the premises for a curating methodology when art takes place within the direct public realm of a situation as staging and situating experimental and collaborative enactments. Curating context focuses on the production of art in collective processes that activate a place in different ways. Curating context thus means to stage and enact situations within a certain context (Malm 2017), and actively participate in co-producing the meaning of art together with other practices (Mur Dean 2017). Similarly, the travels of the ‘miniature preschool’ curate a public preschool context in the transport system. The transport system is thereby a pre-existing public context that can offer the ‘miniature preschool’ the possibility to become part of other practices, which collaboratively transform the context of both the preschool and public transport system from the inside (Burtscher and Wielander 2010; Malm 2017; Mur Dean 2017). The public transport system can be seen as comprised of what the contemporary anthropologist Augé (2008) terms ‘non-places’: they are places that transport people between places with a significant shared locus of cultural and social meaning (i.e. preschools, museums, parks, playgrounds, etc.). The ‘miniature preschool’ came, through such travel, to participate in producing place, by displacing the discursive notions of the preschool practice’s routines and rhythms to the public transport context. Thus, these places are transformed by the many relations and heterogeneous meanings that converge with each other and that together assemble a specific situation (Massey 2005). In order to elaborate on, and outline methods for, creating a place for a preschool practice within the public transport system, this article engages artistic site-specific approaches of displacement, taking into account the physical and discursive conditions that a situation encompasses. Conversely, displacements are different depending on who (positions) is using them and when (dimensions), as well as where (locations) they are used. With this in mind, this paper focuses on the processes by which preschool practice is ‘distributed over many interactions’ (Peponis 2017, 220) and through various places, connections and movements that take place. Thus, the preschool displacements described below assemble different contexts (research, artistic work, preschool) that can work to displace preschool practice into the public transport system. In this way, the empirical field descriptions will, in this article, propose methods of displacing preschool that hold the potential to create new notions of what a preschool is and can become.

Earlier research on childhood mobility

A body of research that relates to this research proposition is the study of children’s mobility (Mikkelsen and Christensen 2009; Christensen et al. 2011; Horton et al. 2014; Nansen et al. 2015; Christensen and Cortés-Morales 2016; Ladru Ekman and Gustafson 2018). These researchers stress how mobility studies comprise a wide spectrum of knowledge about children’s independent patterns of movement in urban spaces, but also seek to gain ‘in-depth understandings of children’s interdependent relationships, contexts, and movements from the perspective of the children themselves’ (Christensen and Cortés-Morales 2016, 22).

A common research method here is to organise so-called ‘guided walks’ (Horton et al. 2014) in order to offer children the opportunity to express their experiences of public places through more embodied and sensuous mediums (Horton et al. 2014; Änggård 2015; Nansen et al. 2015; Christensen and Cortés-Morales 2016). In this way, it becomes possible not only to map children’s movements, but also to get an understanding of how children experience the places they move through (Raittila 2012; Horton et al. 2014; Änggård 2015; Nansen et al. 2015). This group of researchers stresses how children establish and maintain their everyday mobilities through interdependent connections and relations with the physical-material-social-cultural context they move in (Horton et al. 2014; Nansen et al. 2015; Christensen and Cortés-Morales 2016).

While the above-mentioned studies address children’s (in the age range of 6–16 years) individual and, to some extent, autonomous movements in public spaces, Ladru Ekman and Gustafson (2018) have focused on how children’s motilities are enabled by a mobile preschool practice for five-year-olds. Their research project followed a preschool accommodated in a bus that travelled to urban spaces such as forest parks, playgrounds and even a shopping mall (Ladru Ekman and Gustafson 2018). Their research reported on how children and teachers negotiated preschool practices and produced knowledge about how a mobile preschool can offer a more informal, situated and embodied learning practice (Ladru Ekman and Gustafson 2018).

While I agree with the many scholars insights on how children’s mobile experiences are constituted by intimate and interdependent relations between places and human activities (e.g. Hackett, Procter, and Kummerfeld 2018; Ladru Ekman and Gustafson 2018), I aim to expand the research focus to how different spaces also displace children’s existing experiences. This article focuses on how research carried out together with young preschool children (aged 1–3 years) both integrate into and intervenes in the public transport system, by using common experiences from the preschool to activate a public transport preschool practice.

Another body of research relevant to this study is in childhood studies on museums (Hackett 2014; Procter and Hackett 2017; Birch 2018; Hackett et al. 2018; Kelton et al. 2018). These studies report on how museums are constructed by the children’s interactions and meaning-making within exhibitions (Hackett 2014; Kelton et al. 2018). Museums are places with social and cultural significance, and in which children are intended to gain specific knowledge about the things exhibited in the premises. Conversely, the public transport system is a place where the shared understanding is that one is not supposed to linger, but quickly travel on elsewhere (Augé 2008; Sand 2012a). Thus, the choice of public transport as a space in which to create a preschool practice differs from the movements, routines and boundaries of a museum.

The following section outlines how the preschool context that we displaced into the public transport system is framed and shaped by the preschool doors. The doors can be understood to frame and shape the routines, rhythms and experiences that compose a preschool context. However, in this article, the doors also came to suggest the possibility of displacing the preschool practice into the public transport system.

The preschool doors as a condition for displacing the preschool context

This section works as a framework for the kind of preschool context that is to be displaced into the public transport space. Thus, the preschool premises (site) comprise a specific context that is constituted by both the institutional responsibility to provide children with care and education,² and the children’s and educators’ ways of creating the joint activities, routines and specific rhythms of the preschool. The preschool context is often created by the joint construction of emplaced rhythms and routines (Gallacher 2005; Rutanen 2017). There are also several studies that account for children’s meaning-making, and possibilities to express the experiences had within the preschool premises, through non-verbal mediums such as tactile, kinaesthetic or audial sensibilities, or through more aesthetic forms of expression (Olsson, Dahlberg, and Theorell 2016, cf.; Rautio and Winston 2015; Magnusson 2017).

Sofia Eriksson Bergström (2013) has pointed out how the doors in a preschool are central in shaping preschool practice, and how inner glass doors separate rooms at preschool but still allow overview, control and proximity for both the teachers and the children. The preschool participating in this research study was located in an apartment in central Stockholm. Inside the preschool, the toddlers could move freely between most of the rooms in the apartment. To enter the preschool premises from the street required the opening of a coded entrance door, followed by another coded door to access the apartment from the stairwell. The preschool always started the morning in the outside courtyard, and in order to get out there, yet another coded door needed to be opened. The toddlers were well aware that the doors opened onto places outside the preschool and as soon as any teacher or I, the researcher, made a move to open one of these doors, the children flocked around it in the hope of being able to join.

The apartment was not initially built and designed as a preschool, and this is particularly evident in the fact that there is a locked glass door separating the preschool from a retirement home. Sometimes the toddlers stood in front of this door and waved to the pensioners on the other side of the door; occasionally their greetings were returned. The doors separated and connected different bodies based mainly on age and the different routines and rhythms these bodies established.

The Swedish preschool was established in the early nineteenth century as a part of the modernity project (Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2007), with great confidence that the installation of a children’s institution would organise, structure and solve the ongoing social problems of the growing urban city (Westberg 2008). The institutionalisation of children was presumed to civilise the undisciplined children, who often spent their days in the unsuitable streets; the preschool was thought to offer a more appropriate place in which the children could develop properly and make progress (Westberg 2008). On the one hand, this idea stresses the importance of children’s rights in a society that strives to take their lives, needs and interests into account, including those inside the city, by building places specially reserved for them. On the other hand, such institutions do, in some ways, keep the children outside of and disconnected from everyday life in the city and society.

Consequently, the doors leading out from the preschool premises and into other urban spaces became important borderlines in this study. These doors worked both to separate the preschool institution from other places as somewhere reserved for small children and to create thresholds that connect the preschool with other urban spaces. These thresholds may be thought of as enabling a displacement of the practice that was going on inside the doors into the everyday public sphere outside these doors.

The art of displacement in site-specific art

Artists who produce site-specific works focus on how they can actively intervene with the mundane ways of moving in certain spaces, and participate in curating context by discursively constructing space (Deutsche 2008 in Mur Dean 2017). Some artists engage in site-specific walking methods in order to intervene and integrate with the mundane rhythms of a place. Walking becomes activated and conditioned by the specific place and activates the place by taking one step after another (Cardiff and Schaub 2005; Sand 2009). The writer Solnit (2005) is interested in connections; she focuses on what connections become possible by walking astray, and where the rhythmic movements of her body in place connect and move drifting thoughts. The sound artist Jane Cardiff (Cardiff and Shaub 2005) creates audio walks in order to actualise new connections and to expose the discrepancy between what we perceive visually and what we sense through hearing, feeling, remembering and fabricating when moving through a certain space.

Furthermore, site-specific art is always created in a specific situation, which draws attention to the spatial and contextual dependencies that condition and defines what art is (Kwon 2004; Malm 2017). The meaning of art lies not in the art-object placed in art institutions (i.e. galleries or museums), but in the processes and connections that activate both art and its surrounding context in differentiated ways (Smithson 1996; Kwon 2004; Sand 2008; Mur Dean 2017).

Robert Smithson, a site-specific artist active in the 1960s and 1970s, emphasised the historical origin of how the modern museum emerged in an era of colonisation when classification and categorisation stood as ideal ways to produce knowledge about the world (Smithson 1996, 48). Smithson worked with the relations and connections between the everyday contexts of the world as ‘sites’ that became transformed into ‘non-sites’ when placed in the confinements of a museum. Smithson (1996) plays with contingency and duration through a repetition of actions that brings two places together, thereby dissolving the boundaries between inside and outside or reality and representation.

Museums and preschools have many similar parables as they both are institutions that are defined by modernity and organise practices spatially. They both represent institutional practices placed in specially dedicated buildings, and both emerged in the modern era as ways to structure society through categorisation and classification.

Robert Smithson’s project ‘Floating Island’, which essentially places a place into itself by creating new contexts, has functioned as an inspiration for enactments of preschool displacement. This site-specific artistic work, conceived after Smithson’s death, consisted of a tug boat towing a barge filled with earth, trees, plants and stones from Central Park in New York, circling Manhattan (Yusoff and Gabrys 2006); thus, the park circled around itself as a mobile miniature version. Similarly, the mobile ‘miniature preschool’ moves around in the public transport system, where the preschool doors can function as both separating and connecting the preschool with the urban spaces of transport. Thus, the mobility of the ‘miniature preschool’ consists of a physical mobility allowing movement from institutional places into a public transport space; a discursive mobility of the preschool context into other places; and a conceptual mobility of the definition of ‘experience’ of and in public transport places (cf. Smithson 1996; Yusoff and Gabrys 2006).

Robert Smithson’s ‘Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan’, which installed and displaced mirrors in nine different sites in Mexico, also addressed how a site can be displaced to become a manifold of sites. These mirror displacements work as a means to suspend the conditions of experience as being physically, temporally and discursively connected with a site (Smithson 1996). The mirrors reflect, in various directions, the landscape back on itself, which creates an incoherent and moving experience. The reactivation of Smithson’s mirror displacement in the Swedish public transport system was first adopted by the artist and researcher Sand (2012b), where a collective group of artists, students and researchers travelled on the Stockholm Metro and displaced mirrors to load metaphors with new meanings. Thus, reloading metaphors exposes how language is not an abstract reflection of reality but deeply connected with a site, as well as constructing the site itself (Ruggeri 2007; Sand 2012b). Sand’s ‘Metro mirror travel’ was repeated shortly after by the Early Childhood Educational researcher Liselott Olsson (2013) as a means to address how the children’s performances of mirror installations were infused by the children’s ‘collective drive for learning’ (Olsson 2013). The mirrors came to work as a didactic tool that encouraged the children to formulate new questions about how to represent the reality of the subway.

The present article takes inspiration from various artists working with walking methods of converging one place into another in order to identify three coexisting preschool displacements – locations, dimensions and positions – that aim to delineate the methods for children to participate in creating space in the public transport system.

The following sections will describe how the displacements of locations, dimensions and positions emerged when the researcher, two teachers and the toddlers travelled on the public transport system and used voice as a way to create connections and activate a preschool context in the public transport system (Eriksson and Sand 2017, 2018).

First preschool displacement: location

The first preschool displacement concerns the matter of where a preschool practice is enacted, as a place transforms the practice as well as the context transforms when new practices enter. Several of the above-mentioned childhood researchers have investigated children’s visits to museums, and how children participate in constructing space for learning (e.g. Procter and Hackett 2017; Birch 2018; Hackett, Procter, and Kummerfeld 2018; Kelton et al. 2018). One way of displacing the meaning of art is to place it into public contexts other than museums, since this physical move enables relocation of the meaning from within the artwork itself, to the interplay with the context in which it is placed (Kwon 2004). Thus, even though museums are nowadays defined as everyday spaces for art, art originally emerged in the everyday contemporary contexts of public society (Arrhenius 2014). A museum can, therefore, be understood as a displacement in itself: art objects from other places and cultures are displaced into museums, which become the context in which children visit.

In this study, I actively relocate the participating preschool into the public transport system. The etymology of the word ‘location’ being ‘to put, to place or to set’ offers another way of understanding location: as the act of placing and engaging, and not merely an established geographical spot.

The following section describes how the miniature preschool group transformed a pedestrian tunnel by displacing various preschool activities. However, the pedestrian tunnel also transformed their actions.

Excerpt 1: We sat down on the doorstep just outside the tunnel to have some fruit at around 9.30, as that is the time we usually eat fruit at preschool. When all the toddlers had finished their fruit, we walked in a clustered group 10 metres into the tunnel opening. Often when we entered the tunnel, the toddlers hesitantly let go of our hands, and started running and teasing me for not being able to catch them, as if inviting me to start chasing them. Once, one of the toddlers had new shoes, which were too big for him, and that made him unable to lift his feet very high as the shoes would fall off his feet. He ran very slowly. The tunnel (231 m. long) was a long, open and uninterrupted way for the roughly 60 cm-long toddler legs. The toddlers zig-zagged through all the other pedestrians, but after a while they got tired and we sat down and sang some of the preschool songs we used to sing at circle time. The floor of the tunnel was made of hard stone; there were no low benches or tables, no toys, no crayons or tape recorders that played music. There was, however, a long space defined by walls on each side made of corrugated steel, steel grids or rock, other passers-by, bikes, overly large shoes and a long white line on the floor.

The movement here marks a displacement of the location where a situation can be temporarily de-contextualised through relations between the place in which we move, and the body in place (Cardiff and Schaub 2005; Sand 2008).

Firstly, the tunnel is a place of transport and flows of people passing; this makes it very different from the preschool, which is a more framed place to inhabit, mostly containing the same group of people every day. Secondly, the toddlers’ movements in the tunnel diverge from those of most of the other people passing through. We (researcher and children) together bring the running and chasing of the preschool courtyard into the tunnel, as it is a perfect place for this game. Thus, the toddlers are not only placed in a new location; they also place the location of a preschool in the tunnel. The children’s preschool courtyard offers a rather restricted place to run in, while the long tunnel has smooth, tiled floors and is enclosed by walls, directing movement forward.

Here, it is worthwhile to mention Robert Smithson’s work where he constructed objects from mundane sites, such as a sandpit or an industrial relic, and placed them into museums or galleries, creating what he termed non-sites (Smithson 1996). In his exhibition ‘A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey’ (Smithson 1996), he placed sand, cobbles and stones from New Jersey (the site) in boxes and placed them in an art gallery. The non-sites refer both to the interior boundaries of the gallery and the exterior structures of New Jersey. Bringing stones from New Jersey into the art gallery displaces New Jersey as an exterior structure, transforming it from the concrete, open, outdoor, multiple sites of New Jersey into an abstract elsewhere in the art gallery.

The institutional preschool practice often consists of activities that try to process and understand the world outside by transforming particular experiences into more abstract representations. However, when enacting preschool in the ongoing situations outside the preschool premises, the preschool participates in creating the rhythms and routines of the streets. Re-connecting with Arrhenius (2014), it becomes possible to propose the preschool as a displacement in itself, since it was originally intended to remove undisciplined children from the streets. By bringing this non-site preschool into the site of the tunnel, the tunnel transposes into a preschool site and brings the preschool practice back to the particularity of the streets. The connections between the preschool and the tunnel establish mobile but particular locations.

Seasons and weather also displace the location of the tunnel (cf. Lefebvre 2004). Big shoes and winter overalls change the way we move, and hence offer a possibility of experiencing a bodily difference. Big shoes, short, tired legs, dirty hands, runny noses, and sweaty clothes are all mundane and somewhat unnoticed concerns in the everyday preschool, but in the tunnel they work as methods for the preschool to transform the everyday location into a preschool location, where the mundane preschool concerns intervene with the rhythms and routines of passing through a public tunnel passage. The displacement of location exposes the routines and rhythms located in the tunnel and those at the preschool, but also the way they transform each other through the needs and conditions that fluctuate in different places. The preschool displacement reveals location as a bodily and direct engagement in place and by place.

The preschool becomes part of the public transport system and the public transport system becomes part of the preschool. One site represents the other, even if they do not mirror each other, as there are multiple, mixing and simultaneously ongoing reference points (Smithson 1996). The preschool displacement of location proposes a preschool practice that enables the children to participate in creating urban space by repeating the routines and rhythms performed behind the preschool doors. This is slightly different from a mobile preschool practice, aiming to offer informal learning by direct experience or meaning-making in public spaces (Gustafson and van der Burgt 2015; Ladru Ekman and Gustafson 2018). In this way, the mobile location is not only moving from one place to another but placing one place into another. Multiple locations are created in the same place.

Second preschool displacement: dimensions

The second preschool displacement is about when a preschool practice is enacted, as temporal dimensions hold the possibility to displace different notions of places into each other. Hence, a site is not only a physical and material location, but also constituted through historical, cultural, economic and political dimensions (Kwon 2004). By activating different temporal dimensions, multiple versions of reality overlap, connect with and produce each other (Mol 2002, 31). This allows an understanding of dimensions as actions of unsettling reality and expresses multiple dimensions of a place. The philosopher Peter Janich traces the literal meaning of dimension as a ‘spatial measurement in different (or all possible) directions’ (1992, 173). Both Smithson (1996) and Janet Cardiff (Cardiff and Schaub 2005)³ play with the dimensions of time as a way to include other times in the real-time of a place. Thus, in the displacement of a preschool into the public transport system, the displacement of dimensions will be elaborated through continuances and durations of various kinds when walking the streets.

Excerpt 2: When we took the first steps out of the preschool and into the street, I was reminded that short legs are not capable of walking at a quick pace. With no buggies accompanying us, the toddlers’ pace became the rhythm to adapt to. It was slow. Very slow. Holding the toddlers’ hands, we gently walked the streets towards the bus stop. We were in no hurry as the whole activity was aimed at the travel itself. Concentrating only on taking the next step allowed us to become aware of what the streets might offer. It offered pavements that required us to balance as we lifted one foot onto the next level of the street. The children sang songs when walking to the bus stop. They howled into the cavities between the high rises. They called to a dog passing by or asked each other questions about what they could see in the streets.

One way of exposing multiple dimensions is to walk through a place. The phrase ‘to walk [someone] through [something]’ refers metaphorically to discussions or dialogues that ‘lead someone through a complex problem or thought process’.⁴ However, here it has a more material denotation. The toddlers, the teachers and I walk through the streets by taking one step after another in order to let realities come into being that ‘inform and are informed by our bodies’ (Mol 2002, 7), taking place in physical reality.

The artist Viv Corringham creates audio walks, where she ‘sings the walk through vocal improvisations’,⁵ thereby not only encouraging listening as a way of perceiving the walk but also encouraging people to engage with a location by producing sound (Belgiojoso 2014). The different dimensions of the street are exposed by voice when the toddlers howl into a garage, sing a song or chat about this and that. The streets are not only something we can perceive with our eyes; they are also created by the sound of voices. In Janet Cardiff’s audio walks, a voice narrates history as a response to the location by conflating the present and the past (Cardiff and Schaub 2005). Thus, history is not only to be read in a book at the library but also enacted in the vibrant city (Sand 2018). The voices of the miniature preschool activate the contemporary history of the streets. We cannot see time, although we can sense it when walking and can sense that there are more dimensions than we can perceive with our eyes (Cardiff and Schaub 2005). Where guided walks aim to inform research on children’s experiences of a space (Horton et al. 2014; Änggård 2015), the site-specific walking referred to here, displaces the rhythms and routines of different spaces into each other.

Rhythms outline the duration of moving in a place. A place has different rhythms depending on the time of the day. The temporal notions of a space become exposed when the toddlers walk the streets:

Excerpt 3: There was no appointment to miss; we could take the next bus if that was necessary. At ten o’clock in the morning most people had already commuted to work even if there were some latecomers with suitcases running to catch the next bus. There were also people walking their dogs, beggars outside the grocery store and of course, other people who were walking the streets at that time for reasons that were not clear. The streets, however, were quite calm. The toddler’s rhythms fit in well with this tranquillity and were a relaxed feature in the rhythm of the street.

Rhythms are a dimension of the streets at ten o’clock, which assert how the streets’ connections with other places are exposed when walking. If we had entered the street at eight o’clock, the rhythms would have been faster and the rather slow pace would have disturbed these rhythms. The children take one step after another, and with their slow pace, they help to create the calm morning rhythms of the street. In order to displace the calm rhythms of the street, I tied a rope into a circle for the toddlers to hold on to when walking through the pedestrian tunnel of Brunkeberg. This idea came to me when reading about the artist and professor of digital art O’Rourke’s (2014) improvised sidewalk choreography in 2006 when a group of people were literally bound together by a giant rubber band:

Without speaking, the group formed a mobile architecture in which the individual parts worked together to create an overall shape, a fluid configuration that was arrived at by subtle negotiation. Both the walkers, who were busy concentrating on being ‘here’ while we walked, and the passers-by, whose remarks were met by silence, perceived the urban landscape differently. [… ] Walking together structured our perception here, and as we moved along, the time we spent confined within the elastic band felt like an experience. (O’Rourke 2014, 45)

The toddler group, however, was not silent, although the responses of passers-by were mostly expressed physically as they adapted their bodies to the group’s movements. The slow, circle-formed, vocal toddler walking ensemble took up almost the entire space between the tunnel walls, thereby either creating a procession of people slowing down to their pace behind them or confronting people trying to get past in the other direction. The children holding on to the rope create a cavity inside the rope where no one takes place. The habitual rhythms of passing through the tunnel are exposed by the differentiated ways of moving through it with a rope, as well as by creating new rhythms that unintentionally construct a preschool parade or demonstration. Thus, the miniature preschool curates a vocal mobile architecture that transforms the pre-existing rhythms of the tunnel (cf. Cardiff and Schaub 2005). The mobile vocal architecture connects the separated preschool practice with what Cardiff highlights as the endless combinations of the streets (Cardiff and Schaub 2005).

Third preschool displacement: Positions

To move the routines and rhythms of one place into another stresses how experiences are produced by both the cultural and structural organisations of space, and the physical properties of the place itself (Kwon 2004; Gabrielsson 2006; Malm 2017). Site-specific methods, which bring art outside of art institutions (i.e. galleries, studios or museums), thus expose that it is not only the artist who exclusively produces art. It is rather a question of assembling positions. The position is a spatial concept that may be understood as what Solnit (2014) describes as embodied presence in motion, or what Cardiff refers to as a mobile act that consists of ‘a net of possible references and relationships’ (Cardiff and Schaub 2005, 11). The word ‘position’ has sprang from the concrete, physical action of ‘putting something in a particular position’.⁶ Consequently, positions will be discussed here as direct, bodily responses to the situation that is actualised.

Earlier research has produced valuable insights of how children’s expressions, experiences or learning processes in preschool are also tactile, audial, kinaesthetic and aesthetic (cf. Rautio and Winston 2015; Olsson, Dahlberg, and Theorell 2016). However, experiences are always conditioned by a specific location. I will, therefore, argue that the displacement of the mundane acts usually performed inside the preschool premises into urban spaces not only displaces our understanding of children’s experiences; it also means that the experiences change, fluctuate and overlap with each other through the displacement of specific, but still multiple, positions.

Excerpt 4: I read in the news that they had put loudspeakers in the tunnel that were supposed to answer (mimic and repeat) the sound of people singing in the tunnel in front of them, as the Eurovision Song contest took place in Stockholm this year. ⁷ On the 11th of May, we stopped in front of the speakers and sang songs. The speakers answered with a low, wailing sound. It was very disappointing and the children did not seem to think there was anything special about it. However, we met and greeted several other preschools passing through the tunnel, as they also wanted to test the speakers. They were walking in a line with their teachers in front and behind them, and they all glared at our toddler group that was running around freely in the tunnel, singing, shouting and laughing loudly.

Our very direct and bodily positions in the tunnel form and shape a situation and the situation affects our bodily positions in a simultaneous return. The events described above expose a displacement of positions that moves between walking in line and moving freely. This could not be planned or prepared in advance but only reacted to in the present situation. The artist and researcher Monica Sand emphasises the importance of being able ‘to get lost’ and to be ‘out of position’ (2011, 8) as part of the ability to deal with situations of uncertainty and doubt, that opens the door to the production of new knowledge and methods. Thus, the toddlers, the teachers and I, the researcher, as well as the other people in the tunnel, together curate an unknown situation that everybody can both integrate into and intervene in order to continue the situation.

Displacement of positions is thereby highly connected to the corporeal and vocal ability to respond to a spatial situation which von Rosen, Sand and Meskimmon term a response-ability that conditions responsibility (2017, 11).

Excerpt 5: As a researcher I was responsible for seeing to it that the tunnel was a safe and secure place for the children to be. One action taken towards this was to put up notices at the entrance doors saying ‘Beware: ongoing research. There are small toddlers in the tunnel.’ Several passers-by stopped when they met us in the tunnel and asked us how we were researching the children. When we answered that we were researching the tunnel, they quickly turned their heads towards the toddlers, replying: ‘Oh, so you are helping them out, are you?’.

Hence, participation becomes what Rosen, Sand, and Meskimmon (2017) claim to be a question of being able to respond to space and time – a response-ability. How we take response-ability is conditioned by the present spatial and social relations, which shape and frame the possibilities to act. In the situation described above both the children, the researcher, the by passers, as well as the notice on the doors shape and frame the situation in which each and every person can respond to by their different positions. The children’s actions are activated by the conditions that emerge by the situation. My researcher position enabled the children’s response-ability, and at the same time activated my own response-ability in the situation. This marks an embodied and situated method of spatial ethics in which we are (en)abled to respond differently (Blaise, Hamm, and Iorio 2017; Rosen, Sand, and Meskimmon 2017; Springgay and Truman 2018). The tunnel, the passers-by, the teachers, the children, the researcher and even the public and pedagogical practices participate in creating multiple response-abilities. Various positions, taken by children, researchers, teachers and others in the tunnel, transform each other. These positions are discernible but not separate from each other. They have what the philosopher Isabelle Stengers describes as different ‘matters of concern’ (2018, 3–4). Smithson (1996) suggests that these reversed positions are a responsibility to expose what we bring into a situation in terms of experiences, cultures and understandings and how the ongoing situation influences our experiences, cultures and understandings.

The above excerpt takes into account the researcher, the teachers, the travellers and the children, but the tunnel also has the position of a participant, and together they curate context (cf. Malm 2017) with a situated response-ability. Thus, each and every one of us has different abilities to respond to the situation at hand, thereby activating the situation differently. Metaphorically, to ‘curate’ means to ‘take care’ or ‘to offer’.⁸ Public transport spaces offer the children a situation to respond to and take care of and vice versa. Context thus comes to be the very creation of knowledge and not merely scenery surrounding the enactments (Malm 2017, 8).

Concluding considerations

In these preschool displacements, I have proposed methods for children to participate in curating a preschool in the public transport system through assembling different contexts and joining them to each other. By these displacements, children’s existing experiences of how to make a preschool inside the preschool premises, are re-utilised to produce a preschool in other spaces. In this way, the miniature preschool’s travels change the conditions of the streets, bus rides, underground trains and the Brunkeberg tunnel. However, the public transport system also transforms the rhythms and routines of the children’s preschool practice.

The first preschool displacement concerns the location of a preschool practice. This displacement exposes many mobile but particular locations that exist simultaneously in the same place. The second preschool displacement articulates how the dimensions of a preschool space are created by the children’s howling and singing when walking in the streets, and travelling on buses, on trains and in tunnels. The temporal dimensions of a space are exposed by the vocal mobile architecture, which connects the preschool with the spaces of transport.

The third preschool displacement of positions considers how the conditions of a place and situation change the experiences we have already had. The way we respond to a situation also conditions the ways in which we activate a space. We all hold multiple and mobile positions in one situation, which we are response-able to activate and be activated by. In this way, a preschool practice in the public transport system could be to actively curate context by repeating the routines and rhythms of the preschool practice enacted behind the preschool doors. The place is not merely a container where practices take place, but also participates in the structuring and constructing of the very practice itself (Lefebvre 1991). The public transport preschool practice could, therefore, offer self-differentiated experiences by moving one place into another.

Locations, dimensions and positions are all spatial concepts that frame the displacements of a preschool. They are displaced at multiple levels: from metaphorical spatial abstract concepts to physical concrete actions in time and space; from site-specific art displacements into Early Childhood Education; and from gaining experience into creating connections and movements through existing experience.

The non-places in which the miniature preschool travelled are in this way transformed into specific places that enable multiple meanings. Preschool is no longer separated and defined only by the age of its participants but is delineated by the methods in which it participates in society. In this way, the miniature preschool practice not only experiences the public space but also enacts it (cf. Malm 2017, 9). The public transport preschool practice curates context in relation to other practices and fields of society.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to offer her special thanks to the preschool staff and children that participated in this study. She is also grateful for the positive and thoughtful comments the Editor and four anonymous referees gave on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Written and verbal informed consent to participate in the study was obtained from teachers and the parents of the children. The study’s set-up, filing, aims and publication forms were reviewed in advance and approved by the Swedish Ethical Vetting and follow the ethical regulations of the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, revised in 2008. There were 31 children enrolled in the preschool unit. We (the teachers and I as a researcher) altered the toddlers attending the travels so that all children would get the opportunity to join.

2 In Sweden, preschool is part of the public education system offered to all children aged 1–5 years. The Swedish preschool is based on an Educare model which is understood as offering both day-care for children when parents work and education (Jönsson, Sandell, and Broman 2012; Hammarström-Lewenhagen 2013). In 2016, 84% of children aged 1–5 were enrolled in preschool (SCB and the Swedish National Agency for Education).

3 For example ‘Alter Banhof Video Walk’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOkQE7m31Pw.

4 https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/walk+through.

5 http://vivcorringham.org/shadow-walks.

6 https://www.etymonline.com/word/position#etymonline_v_47283.

7 http://www.stockholm.se/-/Nyheter/Kultur–Fritid/Fem-sjungande-tunnlar-under-Eurovision-Song-Contest/.

8 https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=curate.