What happens when two artists are given free rein to explore a municipality? In the Name of Art follows artists Lisa Torell and Jenny Nordmark during 3 years, as they take on two public art projects in the municipality of Jönköping.

Lisa Torell uses place as her material, often within the public realm and its movements, boundaries, and social codes. She is interested in how places affect people and what they reveal about our perceptions of one another. In Jönköping, she turns her attention to the sites where truck drivers, who sustain the flow of goods through society, spend their nights between transports. Through litter-picking events, a nocturnal art performance, and a site-specific installation, she explores how notions of responsibility and care become visible in places overlooked by society.

Jenny Nordmark’s project Rädda konsten moves in the borderland between art, civic engagement, and research. Its starting point is Lake Vättern and the boat campaign carried out by the association Rädda Vättern in 1988, protesting threats to the lake’s ecosystem. Nordmark reconnects with this legacy by forming a new association, organising a new voyage, and bringing together art, research, and civil society in a shared action. At the center stands a 3D-printed Vättersnipa, a traditional boat with sails woven by handweavers from Jönköping County, intended to be sunk and slowly dissolve in the lake.

In a time when efficiency and utility often dominate, Torell and Nordmark create space for something else: for listening, for testing, for a quiet kind of resistance through curiosity. The film does not simply depict two artists at work, but a living inquiry into what art can be when it is allowed to enter the shared sphere.