Introduction to Unqualifiedcomments at friends arena with Ella C Bernard
16.30–17.30
tuesday 30/9
Lundagatan 57
Bernard is co-founder of Unqualifiedcomments, a platform for feminist, queer, and anti-fascist resistance.
at freinds arena she will give a short inroduction on the platform and how it is working.
friends arena is a new forum for shared encounters with questions of the present, with an emphasis on informal and experimental forms of presentation. In the spirit of re-commoning urban space via non-extractive forms of friendship and solidarity, we seek to be a generous space for ongoing study and debate. We presently operate without external funding on a voluntary basis.
Ella C Bernard is invited by Natasja Loutchko in the unfolding project Cave.
Walk and screening with Ella C Bernard 27.9 Saturday
Walk 16.00 Nytorget 15A
Open studio and screening at Nytorget 15A
17.00- 19.00
18.00 Soup and tea
We begin at the studio, where Ella C Bernard will give a short introduction to her project and practice. Afterwards, participants are invited to join Ella on a walk to observe the “details” inscribed in the urban space—traces that reveal how we live in and engage with the city. Participants are encouraged to bring their phones to photograph or film what we discover together. After the walk we gone head back to the studio where there will be the a chance to see Ella C Bernards practice and the project Fragiles. There will be soup and tea.
The walk in the neighbourhood lasting about 1–1.5 hours and will be in the area around the studio.
Fragiles
Fragiles is a series of abstract portraits of places and cities. The artist began the project as a sculptural installation in Paris in 2023. Since then, it has developed into a combination of sculpture and film, with Stockholm becoming the third iteration, following Paris, France, and Lima, Peru.
The work focuses on infrastructure and explores how film can create a tangible, haptic experience of the city. In each location, the artist collaborates with local sound artists, musicians, and writers to discover the city as its residents live it, and to trace how they care for their environment—inscribed in the marks of time on architecture and urban space.
The project pays particular attention to structural elements—such as sewer and ventilation systems, the wear of time, or visible DIY fixes—that reflect how inhabitants engage with their surroundings.
Bernard is also interested in underground cable and piping systems, which reveal something about the invisible forces and artificial structures that keep our urban societies running. These systems serve as a metaphor to investigate what remains hidden in plain sight: covert architectures that shape mass and crowd movement. For similar reasons, since 2016 the artist has also explored themes such as the cult of personality, adoration, and fandom, engaging critically with a wide range of figures including David Guetta, Angelina Jolie, Hitler, and (in the making) the band Rammstein. She also pays close attention to small acts of domestic patchwork and repair—gestures that a careful eye can spot in large and medium-sized cities.
The artist sees in these acts attempts to engage with the city and to reclaim public space through simple, if fragile, gestures. In turn, the city records the memory of its inhabitants’ actions—human beings and materials meeting through a mutual acknowledgment of their respective characteristics and powers. Bernard describes her sculptural practice as a conversation, a dance, sometimes a wrestle with the material, and says that most of her sculptural work does not operate primarily on the visual level, but rather as an attempt to approach a bodily sentiment or sensation—for instance, the struggle of holding a pile of sports balls together with a ratchet strap.
Her videos and installations are informed by this sculptural practice. She describes her video installations as essays on specific or distinct topics—for example, the violence of the gaze in the project Birdwatchers. Her sculptural work informs these more essayistic pieces, and what she learns from her immediate exchanges with materials and objects feeds directly into how she conceives space in her installations.
Biography
After studying Biochemistry and Philosophy in Berlin, Ella C Bernard graduated from the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2022. She has held solo exhibitions at Garage Gallery in Prague (2024), at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2023)—where she was also an artist-in-residence that year through the Berlin Senate Art Residency Program—at Stadium Gallery and Cave3000 in Berlin (2018), at Rue de Pompe in Paris (2018), and at Shore Gallery in Athens (2017).
From 2024 to 2026, she is supported by the DAAD in Berlin and has received several travel grants. In 2024, she took part in group exhibitions in Prague, Berlin, Romainville, and at Bard College in New York, where she is currently completing her MFA in Sculpture. In 2025, she has participated in group exhibitions in Mexico City with the collective N/A/S/L (Mexico), at Scherben in Berlin, at Marcelle Alix Gallery in Paris, and at Glassbox Nord in Paris. In June 2025, she presented the first iteration of Fragiles – Paris in the group exhibition La Flânerie at Au Passage, Paris.
After completing her residency at NKF in Stockholm, Ella C Bernard will begin a residency at Synagogue de Delme Art Center Lindre-Basse in October.
Bernard is the co-founder of the newly forming online platform Unqualifiedcomments.com, envisioned as a space for discussion, exchange, and feminist, queer, and anti-fascist resistance. There, she contributes reflections on how to approach difficult memorial legacies such as the Holocaust (e.g. podcast: Promise No Promises, Episode 95) and works as an organizer and editor.
Ella C Bernard is invited by Natasja Loutchko in the unfolding project CAVE — an art project of intimate dialogues. Ella has earlier worked with Loutchko on a solo show at Cave3000 Loutchkos project space in Berlin.