Badedammen * 2020

Badedammen is an arts-based research residency and participatory immersive film project developed in Stavanger, Norway at TOU Scene / TOU Art Center (the former TOU Brewery), in January 2020. Led by António Baía Reis as the facilitator, the project brought together a small, carefully mixed group of local participants, such as artists and cultural practitioners alongside members of the Stavanger Municipality (Smart City), to co-create a 360° film as a form of situated, community-led portraiture.

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Commissioned through collaboration with the Stavanger Municipality and Urban Sjøfront, the residency focused on East Stavanger, a neighborhood historically framed through industrial memory and persistent social stigma. Rather than reproducing external narratives, the project treated immersive media as a curatorial method: a way of training attention, slowing down perception, and composing a collective “reading” of place through embodied observation, conversation, and spatial storytelling.

 

Over 15 days of intensive process, combining guided walks, VR screenings, collaborative ideation, on-location production, and post-production, the group created Badedammen, a short 360° work that captures the affective texture of a specific local area often associated with the district’s most visible challenges. Participants also recorded daily video diaries, forming a parallel archive that documents the residency as process: the negotiations, tensions, discoveries, and moments of unexpected intimacy that shaped the final piece.

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Presented publicly on 29 January 2020, Badedammen positions immersive documentary film as both artwork and civic interface, an experiential form that does not simply “show” a neighborhood, but invites audiences to inhabit it, listen to it, and reconsider how urban territories are imagined, narrated, and governed.