Wednesday, January 13, 2010

It Has Happened...

In 1986 - just weeks before the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe - the Gothenburg Art Museum exhibited the art of Swedish painter, graphic artist and sculpturer Roy Friberg. It featured - amongst other works - a large array of life-size sculptures, clothed and partially covered by webbed drapes. The whole installation was placed in a seperate room with elaborate lighting. It was awe inspiring and conveyed the impression that these men were part of an overwhelming catastrophe. They seem deeply affected, but most likely also responsible for it. Months later Friberg was interviewed and asked if his sculptures expressed a premonition of the Ukrainian nuclear disaster. He admitted that he often feels like possessing a seventh sense. But he also felt that the scope of his foreboding art may unfortunately be much broader than a single technology accident.
It turned out that Friberg lives and works only a few kilometers from the Ringhals nuclear plant near Gothenburg. That means: He would be one of the first to be evacuated at an incident - or to be fenced in, as radiation victims beyond hope likely will be...
I took 35 mm slides of his artwork with great difficulties because of the sparse lighting. These slides spent a long time in a drawer until I digitized and used them for this show...



Thinking of Chernobyl always brings back a dream I had about half a year before the event. The dream was so intense that I wrote it down immediately upon awakening. Yet it was first several months after the Chernobyl catastrophe that I realized that my dream had some strange correspondence to the Chernobyl event.  Or more precisely: the part of my dream that dealt with a physical disaster. There was also another part, dealing with a disaster of a different type: the breakup of my parents' marriage.

At one point in the dream my parents and I travelled by bus through an area north of Stockholm and towards Furudal in Dalarna province (where I actually worked occasionally around that time). My parents were at ease with each other, but affected by a growing nervousness in the bus, which had its cause outside. Passing small towns we noticed groups of people everywhere, looking helplessly around and at each other, talking quietly. It somehow became clear to us on the bus: Sweden had been invaded! But it was a different type of invasion, nobody knew what the nature of it was, it wasn't an army, even though it had come from the East. It was more like some kind of general change of conditions. Something that was all around. We stared outside and couldn't make out anything threatening. It was a clear day, huge clouds roamed the sky, fierce sunlight and deep shadow constantly giving way to each other. Some snow was still on the ground, mostly walling roads and sidewalks.
The bus drove into a dense and dark forest and suddenly stopped in the middle of a long curve, where the view cleared. Before us was a broad and rather steep hill, with a village of nearly identical log houses covering the middle of the slope. I noticed that the cabins lacked the red copper oxide paint typical for Dalarna province. I don’t know if the driver invited or urged us to walk up to the village, we were all walking anyway. On my way I kept thinking: 'This is not a Swedish village!' The houses were empty, no doors or windows in place, just gaping and frighteningly dark holes. Immaculate curtains were still hanging in the window openings, moving about slowly in a light breeze. In some places on the house fronts where some coarse ornaments. For some reason they made me think that this was a Russian village...
Then I noticed something else: On the outside of all hoses, every opening - windows, doors - showed a faint greenish staining, triangular, with the pointed side upward, not unlike the marks smoke leaves after a house fire. Only that the unpleasant greenish color suggested a very different cause.
The bus driver must have noticed my interest in the strange marks, he approached me and was about to start talking to me when he obviously realized that what he wanted to say was of interest to the whole group. He stopped short and turned around to the rest of the group, then raised his voice so that everybody could hear:  "Something happened to this village last night and nobody knows the cause of it, nobody can explain it!". I think the dream went on after that, dealing again with my parents, but I cannot recall details.

The dream had some odd similarities to the nuclear disaster, especially in the way it affected Sweden:
- the fact of an "invisable" invasion
- massive radioactive fallout from a then unknown source was first discovered in Sweden
- Eastern Europe was "suspected", but the origin was not pinned down right away
- the helplessness as to how to handle unprecedented high levels of radiation
- Sweden was among the countries most affected by the radioactive fallout
- the area our bus travelled through was the hardest hit region in Sweden
- a "Russian" village in the middle of Sweden

Finally, a few years later I "recognized" the abandoned houses from my dream on a photograph in a magazine article on the evacuated area around Chernobyl... very strange, a spooky feeling, especially for a skeptic like me!

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