The former national postal terminal of Sweden is in a part of Stockholm with a strange name: Ingenting (Nothing). This brutalist structure, built in the 1980s, is now mostly empty. Its name–emblazoned across its upper stories–is Tomteboda (Home of the Gnomes). During the years when the national postal service was deregulated, the work that was once performed at Tomteboda was moved to Rosersbergs post terminal. The main office was moved from Vasagatan to “Arken”–a glass curtain wall building shaped rather like an ark, right across the street from Tomteboda.
In 2009, I took pictures of a kolonilott (community garden) on the Tomteboda grounds, because it looked like a very imaginative, communal space, and because there were signs and flags throughout trying to save it. In 2016, when parts of the the garden were still left, abandoned, I walked there amongst the remains, and took more photos. I later learned that it was almost a century old, and had originally been a community garden for railway workers.x
The garden has since been evicted. Some of the structures remained for several years after its demise. Other portions were fenced off. Eventually, some of the massive old trees were cut down, their trunks cut into chunks and strewn across the ruin of the garden. And finally, a bus depot was built whose new, corporate version of architectural brutality makes the old Tomteboda building look positively baroque. There is a bench with a trash can beside it which has not been emptied in years, frozen in time, behind the fences erected first to keep the former garden-keepers out of their outdoor abode, and then to secure the buses.
I made this installation as a kind of sonic “garden”, and installed it along the fences around the small patch of green space and stone that remains where the garden once was. The sounds the installation was comprised of were birds from that area of Solna; postal machines from the night-time sorting operations, some of which were taken from videos of Tomteboda still in operation; trains creaking on the tracks recorded both behind that facility and behind the former central station at Norra bantorget, echoing both the Post Terminal itself, and the fact that this garden was originally the Järnvägsarbetarnas kolonilott (“Railway Workers’ garden”); sounds related to the activities of the garden like trowels in the dirt, rocky soil and stones being moved, and; since there was a little stove built by the disappeared gardeners from bricks there, part of which remained in the abandoned garden for some years – recordings of a similar little wood stove. To these sounds, I added more musical materials, indicative of a bucolic garden, like drones, egg-harps and melodic violin fragments. Finally, some of the sounds were processed using my Eurorack system, especially the 4ms spectral resonant filter module, a Eurorack module which creates chord progressions in filter bands, resonating whatever material it is fed.
