Participating artists: Nils Agdler / Timo Menke, Magnus Bärtås/Camilla Ed, Jeremy Deller, Sten Eklund, Carl Johan Erikson, Ellen S Holtskog, Lina Persson, Anna Ridderstad and Judi Werthein

The exhibition has been assembled by Magnus Bärtås, Anna Livion Ingvarsson and Anna Ridderstad
Text: Magnus Bärtås

The town of Vulcan in Alberta, Canada was established as a farming community during the expansion of the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the beginning of the 20th century. The town’s symbol was nine silos which rose majestically over the flat landscape. In the 1960s
conditions for agriculture deteriorated, farming became unprofitable for economic and climate reasons. The nine silos – “9 in line” – had become a collective symbol of hard work and industry, but burned down in 1971. During this time of recession for Vulcan, another Vulcan arose in the world of fiction: the planet Vulcan in Star Trek. The series, which began in 1966, is one of the greatest and most long-lived successes in television history and has generated a world-wide devoted fan culture. Early on, Star Trek fans began to make pilgrimages to Vulcan in Canada to express their devotion. Later on, the town embraced this linguistic mix and tried to exploit it to attract tourists. In 2003 a sculpture was made representing the Star Trek ship Enterprise which became the symbolic as well as real replacement of “9 in line” and marked a new era.

In the film the story of Vulcan is told in Lojban, a language that has been created by linguists and technologists and absorbed by the Star Trek culture. Lojban and the example of Vulcan show how Star Trek fiction functions as a media text that shapes reality at the same time as it is taken over and extended by a group of consumers inventing their own social culture.

Lina Persson talks about her film on Vulcan as a semiotic monument. The monument is recreated in the film through combining different levels of reality, though a fusion of material from documents, archives and scenarios. Uploaded on Youtube, the film generates constant comments on Lojban and has become a part of fan culture. In the centre of the story is the farmer Nora, who has been hit by crop failure and shadowed by apocalyptic reports. Nora experiences a transformation into an alien.

Carl Johan Erikson: Like a Thief in the Night, Barksnåre 080707 (2008)

In the summer 2008, the artist Carl Johan Erikson got the impulse to break into a Pentacostal chapel. With no particular purpose or direction, he wandered through the chapel and found two christening gowns, worn and a bit dirty, in a box. He put them on the floor of the chapel and then took them with him.

In parts of the evangelical movement, it has been said – referring to the Bible – that the second coming of Jesus will happen when we least expect it. Jesus will return “like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians, 5:1). In Sweden the evangelical churches have been marginalized, split and broken into sect-like congregations. Not least in the US, where Christianity has a firm grip on and influences a considerable portion of the population, is nourished the hope of the second coming of Christ and scenarios around his return have become part of the culture of fear. “Left behind” is the expression that warns of lack of preparation for his coming; preachers conjure up images of driver-less cars and women flying out of kitchen windows, with their aprons wrapped around their waists. Friends and relations follow Jesus up to heaven and leave the unbelievers and doubters behind. Carl Johan Erikson’s act and the christening gowns’ ghost-like presence open up and intersect these images: the gowns which conjure up a body though they are empty and abandoned; the human being as a phantom or ghost, the evangelical church as a relic or spectre, the chapel as a time warp, the empowering of fear, fear of the night and of loneliness.

Magnus Bärtås/Camilla Ed: You live in another world, but I live in the same one (1998)

When Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy, created his puppet show and then dolls for pedagogical purposes, he based them on the magical powers of mystery plays and wished to show the possibilities of establishing contact with the transcendental world. When anthroposophy arrived in Sweden, the Waldorf dolls spread all over the country and became a popular and harmless mainstream phenomenon. They have long been used as so-called roll call dolls in ordinary nurseries. Have Steiner’s original magical and utopian visions been diluted, even dissolved, or are they still here, latent, dormant? Representatives for evangelical churches think that Waldorf dolls are based upon magic that is not possible to control. Therefore one should pray a liberating prayer for the dolls in Jesus’ name and then get rid of them.

The objects in You live in another world, but I live in the same one, which has been a part of the film, Anna, where is Paulina today? play with these values and notions, and prompt analogies with the movement from underground to mainstream. In opposition to the Waldorf pedagogy, where it is important that the dolls are empty, anonymous projection surfaces for the child’s fantasies, they have been transformed, or mutated, into individuals. You live in another world, but I live in the same one is intended to make a reconnection between the esoteric and the general, between the infantile and adulthood, between representation and rites.

Ellen S Holtskog: Redeemed and impenitents (2005)

When Ellen S. Holtskog showed her work The Saved and The Impenitent (2005) for the first time, she wrote a text on how, when she was growing up, she divided people into two categories: the saved and the impenitent. There were no border zones between these categories. “The saved were like me, or rather, they believed like I did, while the impenitent belonged to ‘the others’, those who should be converted. When I met new people I tried to look them deep in the eyes to see what category they belonged to. In order to challenge my views, as an adult I sought out a group of redeemed people. Now the roles are exchanged: it is me who belongs to ‘the others’. I met a woman who talked to me as if I were saved. When I pointed out that I no longer share her belief, she looked surprised and said, ‘but you look saved!’”

Holtskog’s series of portrait photographs tests the viewers’ gaze (eye) and their ideas. At the same time, they pose questions that not only relate to religious groups but also to ethnic minorities, tightly knit groups and individuals in societies strongly marked by class. How do we manage to shape our bodies in line with our affiliations and understanding of ourselves? How is this social choreography created? What is needed to succeed in transgressing one’s social definitions and what is the price of heresy?

Anna Ridderstad: Hökarängen – Another Order (2008)

Anna Riddarstad’s work in Konsthall C consists of props for and documentation of when she placed nine astrological symbols in various places in Hökarängen for 16 days in September. Anna Ridderstad’s work is part of a series of events with workshops, discussions and staged happenings dealing with different aspects of anthroposophy. The object – symbols of six planets, the sun, moon and the world of fixed stars – refers to Rudof Steiner’s ideas of the places people visit between their reincarnations. The blue colour of the object represents the colour the Martin School used to paint the windows in its building from the 1950s in Hökarängen. Steiner’s lectures and notes contain detailed descriptions of how different people, depending on their ability to receive “impulses from Christ” on earth, might move between these cosmic places – slowly or quickly, alone or with others. The artist’s action, where a mind map is placed over the real geography, creates a superpositioning and a conflict between everyday “rationality” and the somewhat deteriorated suburban architecture on the one hand, and an esoteric world view that includes journeying through the stars in the sky, on the other. In this way the presence of anthroposophy in Hökarängen is made visible, a presence that is otherwise imbedded or even hidden.

Nils Agdler/Timo Menke: Escape from the Field (2005)

Escape from the Field focuses on a group of people who move with their own form of physical sensibility and history. Their lives have come to be surrounded by protective measures and include an arsenal of technical solutions and self-organising principles. Their symptoms of hyper-sensitivity to electricity, which are fully detectable on the body, threaten the basic organisation of a high-tech society wholly dependent upon electricity. If the historical battles on the beneficial/destructive characteristics of electricity constituted a central struggle between individuals and their patents and between different views of reality and science, then contemporary critics of electricity have mainly been classified as dogmatists and reactionaries and marginalized. In the massive electro-magnetic radiation that people are constantly exposed to, only a few individuals seem to have been stigmatised. That these symptoms cannot be produced during tests in laboratories only heightens suspicions against the sufferers. Do they form their own biological category, a hyper-sensitive sort which involuntarily presages catastrophe? Does the majority refuse to see them and listen to them because they hinder “development”? Or do the dangers only exist in their minds and are their bodily manifestations only psychosomatic? Escape from the Field enters into the perspective of the sufferers and has been mainly filmed with a wind-up spring-loaded16 mm camera. Sound was largely recorded on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. These measures were taken to minimise the electro-magnetic impact when interviewing the subjects who are hyper-sensitive to electricity.

Sten Eklund: Kulla House’s Secret (1970s)

During a walk in the summer of 1849, a Swedish professor, JMC Paléen happened upon an abandoned area, bordered by a magnetic field. Paléen reported the following: “In addition to all sorts of strange and incomprehensible apparatuses, there were mines where useless ore was mined, weeds were cultivated and there was a greenhouse where it was cold not warm.”

Sten Eklund’s series of water colours, which should be seen as the backbone of a life-long project, is placed so that they physically cut through the space and the exhibition, Another Order. On this axis are also fixed many of the questions contained in the other works and images, and oddly enough, even Hökarängen’s and suburban architecture. We see architectural forms that seem to belong to power stations and electricity plants on the margins of towns and cities, magnetic fields which invisibly create a boundary for an order and a social and architectonic construction. Here is a deviating history, parallel worlds in which one can be mirrored or used as a correlate. Here we have the ability of fiction to establish another order bolstered by both aesthetic and scientific rhetoric, including documents and proof: an order that can capture our senses and feelings to the degree that it breaks into and affects reality.

Judi Werthein: Secure Paradise (2008)

Judy Werthein’s documentary on Colonia Renacer, a heavily guarded German enclave in the Aracuania region in Chile, shows a society within a society. German customs prevail and anachronistic notions of a life in another place (in geography and history) are maintained. Children who grow up in the area do not learn Spanish until they are almost adults. This being closed off and having a border against the rest of the world are well guarded, which made it possible for the war criminal and Gestapo officer, Walter Rauss, to have a refuge in the area. The residents uphold their own normality, but in the surrounding districts myths and stories are told about strange occurrences inside this society surrounded by barbed wired.

Jeremy Deller: Memory Bucket – a film about Texas (2003)

In Memory Bucket stories about George W Bush’s farm in Crawford, Texas are brought together with events at the nearby Mount Carmel Center (afterwards Ranch Apocalypse) outside of Waco. It was at this ranch that David Koresh’s religious sect was more or less exterminated in a dramatic military raid in 1993. Deller calls his film a “sketch and video diary”, and has managed deftly to create a dialectic form where power and the “comprehensive account” of events are broken by the statements of one of the nine sect survivors, Clive Doyle. The documentary language is displaced by a representation of a psyche by metaphorical images of millions of bats against the night sky. The bats seem to form their own coded graphic script, readable for those who, like Bush and Koresh, await premonitions and signals from higher powers.