2022

2023

2024-2025

In the 1960s and 70s a demolition frenzy took place in Stockholm wiping out large parts of the city center. This was a time with social and urban transformation en masse. Conflicting visions about a future in plural.

Suburbs grew up at the outskirts where everyday life would play out. In Vårberg, two artificial mountains were placed, designed to resemble an amphi theatre. They were built of the demolishing material from houses, blocks and blowouts from the expanding subway system. Its nickname became The Vårberg dump. The soil that covered the massive piles came from many directions. A flora that was versatile originated with time, just like the area itself where people from over a hundred nationalities live today. 

Wildflower Tales is shot with 16 mm film and processed by hand with flowers and plants from the filmed locations on the mountains. A document of short scenes with landscapes, flowers, family and friends in simple poses sweeps by, linked with what became the culmination of further blunt transformations in Stockholm this time around, the riot in Kungsträdgården 1971. 

A common quote from the urban planners in the 60s was the aim to create a new city for the new man. Decades later here we are, man and nature caught in-between opposing forces in a milieu both created and suppressed. It’s a wildflower, is a flower, is a flower.

Special thanks to my professor Tris Vonna Michell & the input from the student group of performance in the expanded field at the Royal Institut of Art during this process. Love to Caio Marques De Oliveira, Vladyslav Kamenskyy, Mikael Beckman Thor, Daniel Norrman, Björn Larsson, Jenny Nordmark, Åsa Andersson Broms, Liv Strand for additional feedback and artistic guidance!

2020

20 years old my grandmother Reetta Aulikki (Haapamäkki) Romberg (1931 - 2018) came to Stockholm. A farmer girl from the Finnish rural area who found a job as a factory worker at Marabou Chocolate AB. When she passed away we helped out to sort through her remains. Affected by war and careful upbringing, throwing away things were never part of her world picture and many of the proofs of her existence were stored in boxes of all sorts, often chocolate ones given that also my grandfather worked in the same business as a truck driver for another brand. This piece links to my interest in human traces and how to tell stories about ourselves and others via personal archives.

In this version I scanned 86 pictures and objects while letting the surface get exposed to different amounts of light from the outside.

The title (Swedish For You) refers to her swedish-finnish dictionary by Swedish Radio from 1955.

2013-

In these works I am looking at archive footage from the Internet Archive.
I am fond of the almost rhizomatic structure of their browser, possible to end up with very random hits when searching. A lot of the material I am scanning through deals with educational topics or explorative kinds, sharing the excitement when you are about to embrace something new. This has also coincided with my interest in the beginning of moving images techniques, especially the phenakistiscope (1833), the first widespread animation device that created a fluent illusion of motion when facing a mirror. In my version your eyes follow the small transformations in the motive, imagining the motion. 

The title refers to Ray Bradbury's novel Something Wicked This Way Comes from 1962.

Film 4:3 // 08:00 min

2023

Ljusår (Light-years) is a sibling work to the film House, Garden and So Forth Beyond and consists of Super-8 footage from my grandfather's personal recordings viewed from the monitor of a Vu-Editor, while it's being scrolled through. The duration of the work is interpreted from the time it takes for the light to travel between sun and earth.

Part of the collective virtual & live group exhibition Connecting Georgia (2019-2020) hosted by Intercult. An artist-led project exploring post-industrial waterfront heritage in the context of urban planning and community development, connecting the city of Batumi with other European cities. I was invited by SIMKA (Karin Lind & Simon Häggblom) to make a site-specific work connected to the path between Slussen &  Londonviadukten, Stockholm.

I conducted many walks back and forth during the week we worked, giving myself different tasks of walking, looking, listening while making memory notes after each walk. I then made a montage of some of these texts together with quotes from Walter Benjamin's writings regarding the flaneur, read by an AI voice. During the opening I also invited the visitors to perform silent backward walks with me.

Link Intercult >>

Participants from Stockholm -
Oskar Gudéhn, musician och architect
Felice Hapetzeder, visual artist
Sofia Romberg, visual artist and set designer
SIMKA, curators och visual artists

Credits -
Intercult
BAHA, Batumi Art House Argani
Baltic Sea Cultural Center, Gdansk
PPV Knowledge Networks
TU konstplattform/Art Platform
Svenska Institutet

Photo -
José Figueroa

Image from the performance lecture day at School of Economics, Stockholm, with “Prof. Wontag”. Here the film was projected accompanied with shadow play performed by Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski & Elmer Blåvarg.
Photo by Neil Bhat.

Lightspiel consists of an animation of red colored still images picked from a Super-8 film capturing an eclipse. This is the first filmed solar eclipse that we know about and was filmed by the magician and astronomy enthusiast Nevil Maskelyne in North Carolina on May 28th 1900. This animation is intended to be presented as a projection in different scales and on different surfaces.

Looped light installation transforming The Waste Land Part V – What the Thunder Said by T. S. Eliot, into morse code.
Installed at Rundgång /
Royal Institute of Art.
Floor piece by Max Landegren.

HUSMODERNS Köksalmanack (”The Housewives Kitchen Calendar”) is a Swedish combined calendar and cookbook published annually since 1933. The title changed to Köksalmanack in 1979.  

”What does the Köksalmanackan want? It wants to become the housewives essential sidekick. If you use the Kitchen Calendar, the household machinery, the cooking, and the care of your entire home, will run much more smoothly than before."

1968 was in Sweden as abroad, a year moved by uprising. In the copy I worked on (ed. Elisabeth Tham / Åhlén & Åkerlunds Publishing AB) life trivia despite ongoing major events became visible. This led to the idea to become a "co-writer" 30 years later, minding that the world is a constant turbulent site. In this book I am overlapping my own notes, comments and images with the original ones. Like: "Britta is sick" next to recipes about double toast and chocolate squares, or sew meetings and church gatherings accompanied with ads for napkins and jottings concerning birthdays and weather reports. Sometimes I just hijack pages, try to reflect my unknown co-writer's life or let the outside implode. The participatory lies in letting these two decades somehow intwine. Two women with different thoughts and beings but united in the wondrous curse of everyday life side by side with earthly dramas.

I Strömmens spår started 2015 and deals with the Åland Islands author and public debater Anni Blomqvist (1909-1990) and has mainly been planned out during visits between 2015-2017 in her museum home, Strömmen, located at Simskäla. The working title comes from one of her novels that I found a discarded copy of 2014, the book worked as a catalyst for the idea to make a multifaceted project that finds its inspiration from her life and work.

I invited artists with different backgrounds to Strömmen during July 2017 with the task to make a work inspired by the location. They also lacked greater knowledge about Blomqvist as a way of making the image of her and the site more scattered. The collected material then became a 200 p publication with a CD and QR flyer to the video & sound pieces.

The first part of the book contains an introduction carried out like a script for a play between ”The Guide '' and ”The Visitors'" . I transcribed some of the guided tours that I held and added information about the book and thoughts about storytelling and the performance of the everyday accompanied by images from outside visits.

My other contributions were montage poems made from personal writings of Blomqvist and my own notes of our visits. I also took a serie of photographs were I looked at her albums from the past and made new images using the same set up. I also arranged with the photographer John William Häggblom to take images from the outside in the manner of a voyeur.

Kristina Janni Ståhl made a painting of a part of Annis bedroom wall that we moved around in the house and documented.

The dancer and choreographer Carima Neusser made a score looking at Blomqvists body language from still images, this was presented as a flip chart at the end of the book.

The performance artist Gabriel Bohm Calles made the film “Jag har lyssnat efter tramp av kära fötter; det går en stig genom huset som leder till havet.
View here >>

The musician Jon Lennblad made compositions out of field recordings from the site.
Listen here >>

A video and sound installation for a single-viewer aboard VL Rosella that trafficed Kapellskär - Mariehamn. Here we used images and sounds to foil context, time and space. Being out on the ocean can be like entering a kind of vacuum in time and this was something that we experimented with to amplify further via a windowless room (the cabin), to let a sense of dissolution and disorientation get reinforced. In the work empty areas from the ferry, a desert and intimate sonic landscapes got connected.

A spatial installation for and about the 100 m2 exhibition art space Kakelhallen (former milk store) in Mariehamn, Åland Islands (FIN) before it got demolished and an exploration about narrating a multifaceted place. The labyrinth worked as a way to arrange several rooms in one space to contrast each other and tell parallel stories with the help of darkness as a portal between what you leave and what you enter. 

After passing red velvet drapes and a dark passage you encountered a scene from the building filmed outside with a child dressed in a cape taking her time to mend and spend time with the surroundings. The following space was occupied with several monitors with flashlight films from the building and installation space by night. The path ended with a two-person tent, made by the cape that appears in the film, and the view of the installation space empty and endlessly sliding by at a monitor next to a wall which worked as a writing/message point.

Holiday was my examination project at SADA when studying Scenography and a leap towards processes that enables rephrasing, different angles of approach and ways of blending mediums. It was also a way of exploring my newly found interest in audiovisual installations. The method was trial and error in large scale where multi channel video and spread sources of sound became some of the tools together with the composer and sound designer Christoffer Karlsson and inestimable help from several others.

One's relation to time and space and how the visitor's path could be choreographed by external components, was also part of the investigation. A trip to the sun worked as video material where the subject of the tourist became the symbol of temporary attachments to people and places. The dubiousness about what is staged and genuine? The voyeuristic perspective between the locals and the tourist and how a memory can be reflected and constructed, were some of the interests.

The installation was built in a black box and presupposed that four to six visitors per loop would move through the room according to a dramaturgy set in advance. Your first encounter was in a quiet and pitch black gate, earlier you had been instructed to wait there and to start moving into the room at the start of sound. Simultaneously you saw a light evolving further in the room, voices instructing you became clearer. The first space was built like a peeping cabinet with tall red velvet curtains and hills of ochre colored sand. At the end of the curtains heavy light came flowing towards you like a sun rise. The landscape of light and sound changed as part of the dramaturgy of the room, ending dark again while the sound wandered off to another part of the studio. To help you find your way an old theatre back-drop slowly lit, leading you to a bigger room where a shaky film of a walk by the beach initially was projected, soon accompanied by two other films on parallel walls. This ended with the room pitch black again, letting the direction of sound change its position while fluorescent light gleamed behind black drapes of a further passage leading you out to the light of day again.