This is an excerpt of Vart ska dom ta vägen nu? (Where will they go Now?), which uses two different recordings from Fisksätra. The whole work can be heard here.
I was called, urgently, to the Fisksätra Folkets hus (Fisksätra, or roughly, “Fish cove” community center, or “fiskis” for short), one evening by my friends James Barrett and Morgan Karlsson, who ran a project there around community participation and culture, Med början i Fiskis (“Beginning with ‘Fiskis’). The house was a graciously large gathering point for youth in the area, and Morgan and James had added to this by helping the people in the neighborhood facilitate festivals, media initiatives and other events and projects. I played there for a festival that featured acts from literally every corner of the globe, with local neighborhood people selling homemade food for the occasion from another vast map of the world. It was the most diverse place I had seen in over a decade of living in Stockholm.
I was called there because the municipality had decided to close down the local elementary school with only two weeks’ notice, and people in the neighborhood were outraged. In Sweden, parents must accompany their children to school, and many of the families in Fisksätra are working class, work odd hours or are facing economic struggles. Moving the school to a far-flung area outside the neighborhood would up-end their lives. And the short notice was a clear indication of how little respect they were shown as a community. So a group of parents convened on a meeting with a city official at the Folkets hus. “Bring your recorder!” my friends ordered, and so I did. I recorded the whole situation.
Another night, I interviewed a gentleman there who had a degree in economics from Oxford university, but was working there as a security guard, and is a highly respected member of the neighborhood. He reminisced about a more affordable Stockholm in a more leftist Sweden, bygone by 2018 when I met him. I also recorded two Chilean men who had come to Fisksätra in the 1970s, and made a book about the history of the neighborhood. I visited several times between 2017 and 2019, and recordings from the Fisksätra Folkets hus appear in several of the music and sound works in this project.
As of this writing, Med början i Fiskis is some years over, and both James and Morgan have moved on to new work. That big, spacious building has been taken back by the company that owned it, and the Fisksätra folkets hus is now in what amounts to a wooden tent in a parking lot. Gone are the open rooms for aimless meeting and hanging out. Now, all activities are strictly planned, aimed at training the youth of the neighborhood in computer technologies. Benign neglect wanes and disappears again, sleeping for the next opportunity to somehow appear.