Made from discarded theater silk-curtains, re-colored black while letting its past stitchings and patterns still shine through. The hole in the middle is cut out and possible to step through. The title and work draws inspiration from the book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carrol (1871).

I am  drawn to re-use and mis-use the tools from the theatre - off stage. The curtain has historically been used within the playhouses as a division between audience (reality) and the stage (fiction). Curtains are
often also used for more practical reasons: making the sound environment less brute, controlling the light and making hiding spaces for props and actors. The curtains I worked with here are about three decades old and have an immaterial archive of their own that I
wanted to display by placing it in a setting where you can view it from both sides in a day-light setting.

The curtain was also part of the play “The Opening Night” directed by the artist Iris Smeds 2023 at The Art Academy. We were asked to use a work of our own and create a script/life around it, all our parts were then assembled
and became material for the play that Iris wrote. I used the curtain as a point of departure and wrote it a monologue that I shared from the stage wrapped around it.

CREDITS LilaRo Skrädderikompani & Riksteatern

”The everyday imposes its monotony. It is the invariable constant of the variations it envelops. The days follow one after another and resemble one another, and yet - here lies the contradiction at the heart of everydayness - everything changes.”

From Henri Lefvebres essay ”The Everyday and Everydayness” 1987

House, Garden and So Forth Beyond was filmed between the summer of 2021 and 2022 in the house and garden that belonged to my grandparents Sture and Reetta. With a single camera placed on furniture, flower boards, the ground documenting the ebb and flow of  everyday encounters between generations, internal and external events, still and active life, intimacy and loss, without a hierarchy in-between.

This visual setting of “the flow of time” during a one year time frame is accompanied by sounds from the films mainly disconnected from the images; The radios disparate tableau, fragments from conversations and environmental sounds. The captions is a montage from transcriptions of our voices, milieu and sound descriptions and from a manual regarding Super-8 screening.

The installation was built in a newly emptied storage room for tech equipment at the Royal Institute of Art. I was interested to work in a space with its own personal traces, caught in an in-between - about to move in or out? I covered parts of the floor with a paper often used during renovations, and placed a soft carpet on another part for its domestic and welcoming quality along with garden sun chairs. In the back of the space I built an installation with props from my grandparents home, as well with objects from the original space. Here I placed a screen with the sibling piece Ljusår that consits of my grandfathers Super-8 recordings viewed from the monitor of a Vu-Editor, while its beeing scrolled through. The main film was projected on four connected screens covered in thin cotton, letting the construction shine through and the image bleed out and reflect on the surfaces behind and above it.

Camera & Editing : Sofia Romberg
Super - 8 : Sture Romberg
Text Animation : Rahul Gunnarsson
Sound Design : Jon Lennblad & Sofia Romberg

Special thanks to my professor Ming Wong & the input from the student group of performance in the expanded field at the Royal Institut of Art during this process, aswell the awing technical support from Caio Marques De Oliveira and Astrid Braide Eriksson <3

One of the highest peaks in Stockholm is the Vårberg mountains. Designed by Holger Blom in the shape of a massive amphitheatre. Man-made by demolition materials from the city center and expanding subway system in the 60s and 70s. A period in time when immense social and urban transformation was conducted and debated in Sweden as abroad. When a long chain of events led the government in Stockholm to wipe out large parts. Replacing its gaps after some years with mainly banks, offices, shopping centers. Big, high, square. The Trumpet Blows, some were called. The Vårberg peaks got covered in soil from many directions, a flora and fauna that was versatile originated with time. A landscape that both feels charged somehow and of indifference today. They also work as ruins, a material testimony of transgression and rebirth one could say. Created oblivion? The term agnosis (latin - not knowing) early entered my research, described as a political tool of using conscious actions to make us forget. To replace the old with the new, to cover up, to lose history. To make it fast so we don’t get too sentimental about our cities and places of belonging.  

A city resembles a stage in some ways. A shape shifting scenography that we are required to follow. We create so much matter and trails with every shift, geological as social. I need to re-visit some of these remnants I notice. Like a strain cat. Why I wonder? Maybe to make meaning of it all. To understand our drive to make things fall apart and wonder again.

Here I wanted the mountain's origin and life to physically affect the material. To make a document of some of us that exists here today alongside these passings and visions about Stockholm; A new city for the new man, as it was spelled out some decades ago, when parts got demolished and others shaped.  

The films presented here have been processed by hand with plants from the mountains that’s been harvested during their cycle from May to August.  Clover, rosehips, apples, nettles, elderflowers... During the beginning of summer the tone gets ochre or light pink when I pour the boiling water on them. Towards the end of summer the nuance resembles umbra, like the soil itself.  

Landskap med solar (Landscape with Suns) lends its title from the poet Tranströmer (1931-2015), a poem he wrote after a seizure and writer's block that deals with disrupter and continuations. The beauty and hardship in that. I think about crisis as a recurring narrative of our time but also of all our personal lives. The feminist thinker and historian of science Donna Harraway, speaks in relation to our alarming present  about the responsibility to never think it's too late. What is left already carries the seeds to endless possibilities and places that we can only reach through unexpected collaborations and combinations. We must become with each other, otherwise not at all, she says. A point of view, here presented in pink, purple and blue.


Camera Vladyslav Kamenskyy
Plant developing / editing / sound
Sofia Romberg
Scanning Mutascan Service, Helsinki
Discarded dance carpet from the Royal Opera, 1970s
Photo Jean - Baptiste Béranger