Kafferepet was a konditori (traditional Swedish coffee house) at the center of the city. It opened in the 1950s, when it was still a part of the Klara neighborhood, and closed in 2020. It was just outside the churchyard of Klara kyrka (Klara church), on the second floor of a building across from Åhlens. And there was a window from which a view containing only buildings left from the original Klara could be seen.
Ghost Installation: Kafferepet. Above is a phone film; it was very windy and cold, and the film is accordingly rough. Below is a headphone rendition of the tracks used in the installation. I have left the volumes of the sounds as they were, so that one may hear teh difference between how the blend in with the site, and how varied they are when heard separately.
This konditori was unusual for a centrally located Stockholm establishment, for its multicultural diversity, and the coffee cultures of lands around the world that could be seen in daily evidence there. There were late afternoon groups of people from many cultures: men from Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria; lunch groups of taxi drivers from Croatia; Tunisian and Moroccan men playing Backgammon; meetings of two simultaneously intent and relaxed people in the tradition of Swedish fika,x and more across its tables, punctuated by students and tourists–instead of those from other places in the world having their afternoons relegated to the outer suburbs. Now, Kafferepet is gone, along with all the other businesses on the block. The statue of Nils Ferlin in the little plaza where its outdoor seating once was is dwarfed by vinyl and scaffolding, and the magic window into the snow globe of a disappeared Klara inaccessible to the public. But I looked out of it many times, and showed it to friends, always wondering who else had seen the ghost of Klara just outside, and imagined that the surrounding Åhléns (a department store), the concurrently built Orgelpipan (The Organ Pipe) building, and the new Scandic Klara hotel were only a glimmer in some city planners’ eye.
This block is called Orgelpipan as well; one of the hundreds of old names each block in Stockholm si christened with, perhaps because of the towering spires of Klara kyrkan and the organ one knows must make Sunday music there, its simple bell tolling the hours, over the area as it changes, and changes and changes again. Ephemeral places are evoked from imagination. Without the stuff of stories, there can be no ephemeral places. Standing at the edge of the little patio where Kafferepet’s outdoor seating once was, beside a bench that looks as grown into that place as the trees above, Nils Ferlin eternally lights his cigarette.
This Ghost Installation is the last I made in the project, and it is much sparser than several of the others. It is made to meld almost completely into the plaza, except for the emergence of table talk and counter rattling from Kafferepet, interspersed with other voices, as well as some few recordings of other konditorier which have shut down after long runs, such as Konditori Kungstornet and Cafe Valand. There are organs, of course, as well as bells, controlled with more voices through a Buchla 281c Quad Function Generator and 292c Quad Dynamics Manager, in the former studios of the old Kungliga musikhögskolan (Royal College of Music, or KMH) building, long ago in 2011, when I first began to make music about Stockholm and the Ephemeral City. These blended with and answered the bell of the church. There is pensive piano music, a little FM synthesis on some of the cafe recordings, and the voice of Nils Ferlin, himself, can occasionally be heard. This Ghost Installation was carried out on January 3rd, 2023, using 8 MiFa A1 speakers.