At Stockholm's center, slowly being eaten away by the 21st century, is the Stadsbiblioteket (City Library). This group of structures was designed by Gunnar Asplund, who's hand defines a number of marks in this particular architectural style in Stockholm.
The building evokes some ancient civilization, its temple-like stairs and out-size doors entering a great block, crowned by a cylinder. This cylindrical hall gives all crowds a soft, murmuring echo, blurring speech in favor of the multitudes. The entrance walls are emblazoned in stone relief with images of the Iliad in black basalt. Chambers radiate into the outer block, each room holding the books for a different subject, some with long tables, decorated with old fashioned green desk lamps. I take my place with the pensioners and vagrants who read the papers, hanging from bamboo holders on a special rack for the purpose. Librarians walk the reading salons with low bells to signal closing. For many years one of the more utilitarian entrance rooms was a center of benign neglect, where people brought their Tupperware lunches. It has now been crammed full of audiobooks, and a commercial cafe has been inserted, with edicts everywhere that it is not permitted to bring one's own food. But the children's section still has an older, special room for the reading of stories, with a fanciful mural on the wall. I wonder how many late-life adults who were read to there as children visit that mural in dreams, trying to figure out how it all came to this, since it looks to be many decades old.
There are two additional, temple-like buildings that were made to be part of the library complex. The one this Ghost Installation is made for has been commandeered by the forces of privatization and hatred of public service characterized by the current swing to the right in Sweden, as well as the ugly racism nascent in Sweden's political landscape. There was once the International Library and Children's Book Institute in these buildings, with books for adults and children alike in all the languages of the world, available for all the city's people of many cultures to bring home. And there was a fantastic room for the reading of the news from every corner of the globe. The entrance hall had a whole wall of newspapers. Magazines and periodicals were also available, and the hall led to a large, gracious room, lit in the day by sweeping windows, in the blend of Nordic Classicism and funkis architecture Asplund was a master of. This room was full of the elderly, the iconoclastic, the scholarly – both academic and self-made – the outsiders, the lonely, the curious and the engaged. In 2020 this beautiful building was removed from service as libraries, and its functions were crammed into a much smaller space in an office and apartment building in Fridhemsplan that houses a local branch library.x That grand reading room of the international library has been “replaced” by a meager corner on the top floor, where a fraction of this teeming human variety is hidden away to read their papers and magazines out of sight, out of mind.
It is the imaginary city this project addresses. But that is the point; it is the city of memory, of imagination and of ghosts, that remains in the aether. It is that city these installations, and indeed all the works of this project, are made to address. The destruction of Asplund's conception of the city library is part of the destruction of many memory indicators of another version of Stockholm, and of Sweden. It is the on-going reshaping of space to try to bring forgetfulness to the idea that another world was – another world is – possible.
My thanks to artist Mitchel Ahern and Show Card Press for the use of his recordings of older printing presses in the installation.
