No Gravity is a new public work by artist Roland Persson, created for the new remand prison building in Borås, Sweden. In the site-specific sculpture, nine goats climb up the facade in a realm that blurs the line between reality and fantasy.
On the facade of the building, mountain goats move across the masonry. They climb upward, meet, and pause – some have reached the roof and gaze out over the city with the sky as a backdrop.
Roland Persson’s (b. 1963, in Hudiksvall, Sweden) art occupies the space between reality and imagination, oscillating between the familiar and the unexpected. The mountain goats and the protruding bricks on the facade form a graphic pattern that changes throughout the day and is perceived differently depending on the viewer’s position.
In No Gravity, the goats’ movements can be seen as both physical — a climb against the force of gravity — but also perhaps as a metaphor for dreams and hopes. The work evokes thoughts of being on a journey, of making choices, and perhaps of finding new paths in life.
By making room for the unexpected — where the everyday shifts toward the surreal — Roland Persson has created a work that challenges our notions of what is possible. No Gravity offers a space for wonder and reinterpretation, a place where movement occurs not only within the room, across the building’s structure, but just as much in the mind.
