A Brief History of the Urban Swing Movement

Red Swing Project, Austin 2012, E. Seventh overpass at Tillery Street. Photo © Alberto Martinez/Austin American-Statesman.

 
"Swing Hall, Swing All" joins a series of temporary urban swing interventions like Caroline Woolard's Subway Swing (2006), Bruno Taylor's busstop swing (2008), Didier Faustino's billboard swing (2009) Jerome Demuth's Paris swings (2010)  and of course Andrew Too-humble-to-give-his-last-name's Red Swing Project, whose DIY go-anywhere instructions have been swinging since 2007.

Caroline Woolard via her website

Bruno Taylor via dvice

Dider Faustino, via dvice

Jerome Demuth via urban prankster

But the real fathers of the urban swing--and here we mean a swing that is inserted randomly within the urban space, not just on a playground, and available for use simply by passersby, not particularly children--were Akay and Peter, also known as the Barsky Brothers, who after a stint as graffiti artists turned to a different sort of street art project in which they thought of Stockholm as their playground and their intervention as 'an act of re-creation through recreation', according to the excellent book on their work Urban Recreation (here's a link to Urban Recreationon Amazon if you wish to use it...essential reading for all urban interventionists).

Their projects included the installation of a holiday cottage and later a communal picnic table on a traffic island,  a silhouette 'zoo' in a vacant highway lot, and a tiny wooden trailer for kids used to set up camp in an scary urban corner.  And for several months in 2004, they installed swings, sixty-five of them, around Stockholm.  They made them of found materials:  a milk crate, a bench plank from McDonalds.

"There is something simply charming and disarming about swings.  It's hard to describe the feeling of watching crowds of people hurrying along the sidewalks, then suddenly seeing someone break away, take a seat, and start swinging.  It's like love.  There's a feeling of instant affection for any individual who would stop everything and just take advantage of the moment, allowing herself to get swept away."

the city is a playground.

set down your shopping bags,

swing.

swing from bridges, swing from busstops.

swing after you crossed the street at a crosswalk.

backwards.  forwards.  look around.

barsky has been to your part of town.

they take a bit of rope, plastic crates,

anything they can find.

carpet scraps, abandoned tires,

wooden boards people leave behind.

they hang the junk from bridges.

tie it tight to traffic signs.

so you can swing into oncoming traffic

and wave to people passing by.

the city is your playground.

do you need to ask them why?

-Kidpele
in Urban Recreation