What’s so romantic about lower Norrmalm? [...] Lower Norrmalm´s property portfolio already went rotten, it was thrown together during the times of bull markets by private construction bosses. They put up the tenements. I'm one of the only people talking about this who’s lived there all along. My mother moved every year, every two years. Big, primitive apartments with outhouses and rats in the yard, devilish and foul. In other words, these are properties that are ready for redevelopment. Romanticism is for those who live well. Then poor people will keep living in rotten tenements indefinitely. The property portfolio that has been there has no aesthetic, architectural, cultural or historical value.
One of the first films I watched about Stockholm when embarking on my PhD project was Anders Wahlgren’s Staden i mitt Hjärta (The City in my Heart).x I was struck both by the aching loss of the author’s home, and by the finality of the accompanying nostalgia barring any sort of positive future in what replaced it. Although I share Wahlgren’s dismay in some ways, I also see the idealism and vision for a more egalitarian city in the then-new center that the men who carried out the tearing down of Klara held, as immortalized in the words of Hjalmar Mehr:
Vad är det för romantik i Nedre Norrmalm? [...] Nedre Norrmalms fastighetsbestånd var ju uppruttet, uppsmällt under tider av spekulationshausser av privata byggherrar. De smällde upp hyreskaserner. Jag är ju nästan den ende av alla som diskuterar det här som bott där hela tiden. Min mamma flyttade vart och vartannat år. Stora omoderna lägenheter med torrklosett och råttor på gården och djävligt och dant. Alltså saneringsmogna fastigheter. Romantiken är för dem som bor bra. Sedan ska fattigt folk bo kvar i uppruttnade bostäder hur länge som helst. Det fastighetsbestånd man har haft där har ju inte haft några estetiska, arkitektoniska eller kulturhistoriska värden.x
The remains of Klara, the city’s former central neighborhood, which was demolished in the 1950s and 60s, form fountain grottos of stone angels and relief facades grown over by ivy, deep underground in the subway. These are the ghosts of pillars, window-frames and statuary of a disappeared Stockholm. Above them, Kungsträdgården (The Royal Garden) hosts medieval festivals, ice skating, party speeches for May 1stmarches, local hip-hop and synth-pop events and schlagercontests. Across from the grandiose Nordiska Kompaniet, (“The Nordic Company” or as Stockholmers call it, “NK”), department store, built in marble and filigree brass in 1915, the people of the present-day town either shake their fists in dismay at or welcome the approach of plans for a high-end computer store on what was once communally owned ground. In this quickly growing city of nearly a million, where do the landscapes of memory lie?
Like most of the larger urban centers in the world, Stockholm is going through fast-paced transformations, through processes like gentrification, re-urbanization and the globalization that comes with corporate capitalism. The country is undergoing a shift from a social democratic model, where apartment buildings, companies and other city resources were either owned or strictly regulated by the state, to a privatized model based on the principles of globalized, market capitalism.,The breathless rate of change leaves a spectrum of reactions, from euphoric optimism for the new market-based economy and the culture of private ownership, to anger over the loss of equal opportunities, resources and protections, to nostalgia and anguish for a city disappearing before our eyes. The seething build-up of hard right populist movements also intensifies with the change, where some people look at those who come from other places and cultures, and cast scapegoating blame on them for this loss.,,And at the more subtle level, the last spaces of free public space or benign neglect are rapidly converted into hyper-planned models for capitalizing upon every square inch. How tangible can the landscape of memory remain in the face of such rapid and extreme change? And is there a third way, separate from these multiple poles of strong reaction, to contemplate and re-orient oneself in some less disempowering, more reflective way in the city while it changes?
I have talked to those wax nostalgic for various periods of youth in the city’s Kulturhuset, and some even speak with appreciation for the modernist ideals expressed in the “Five Sisters,” whose official name is Hötorgsskraporna (Haymarket Skyscrapers) or Hötorgscity (Haymarket Square City). Each of the five buildings were designed by a different architect or firm, and they are one of the few examples of early concrete and curtain wall office buildings in Sweden. With these stories in hand, one can regard both Klara and Sergels Torg simultaneously, thus dwelling beyond the predominant features of the current street–advertising and international franchises–and imbuing the real city with the life of its other selves.
Lennart af Petersen’s way of addressing, documenting and lamenting the psychogeography of Stockholm’s former center, through his photography, informed the way I made many of the music and sound works of this project. Looking at these photographs, which depict layers of everyday life against the on-coming machine of massive change and demolition, was a determining factor in how and why I chose to take up and juxtapose different sets of real-world sounds and materials. Both Petersen’s and Strindberg’s work also inform my use of acoustic artifacts to fore- and background timbres within timbres, mirroring the simultaneity of time periods and memory the kind of dérive in their works illuminates for the one who wanders.
This is an excerpt from Ghost Installation: Kafferepet. A more in-depth documentation of the installation can be found here.