It is incredibly exciting to be able to announce that I'll be taking up one of the AIR Litteratur residencies in Västra Götaland in Sweden this coming November. I'll be staying in Stationen i Svenshögen (The Station) which is about 60km north of Gothenburg. It's an old station house built in 1907 to service the steam locomotives with water from nearby Lake Hällungen and is one of the oldest buildings in the area. It is now a cultural centre run by a collective of artists where all manner of exhibitions, residencies, and performances take place. Their latest collective endeavour seems to involve doing something artistic with a year-old landslide that took out part of a major road. I'm determined to find out more. Whatever's happening, The Station seems to be a real gathering place for the local community, and for daytrippers from Gothenburg and beyond. And when there's nothing happening, I'm sure it's a wonderful and/or unnerving haven of peace and quiet. Just what I need.
I'll be there for a month for a low-pressure, low-intensity retreat where I'll be tinkering away on a newish piece of writing. I hope to make some inroads into a brief and peculiar tale about my beloved Tartu, the location of my last residency. I have this fancy that Tartu is something of a dreamlike place, set deep within a similarly dreamy country, but I'm also cultivating a little nugget of scepticism about what we mean when we refer to a place as 'dreamy' or 'dreamlike'. I'm also still snagged into a quiet fascination with the 'edgelands' (see my Instagram highlight reel), those strange non-places at the fringes of civilisation where the detritus and decay is gathered. It seems to me that the edgelands are also dreamlike places, but ones that are more filled with a sense of dread uncanny or an edge of unease. They're the kinds of places documented by Cal Flyn in Islands of Abandonment, or captured in the sounds of Boards of Canada, especially on Tomorrow's Harvest. I think I want to take Tartu, this quietly incredible city, and dislocate it slightly to find its uncanniness, to play among its shadows. I've no doubt that an old, remote, and quite possibly haunted train station in the depths of Sweden will serve nicely for such explorations.
My time in Sweden will likely prove a little more sedate and remote than I experienced in Estonia, but that's all good with me. I'm keen to squirrel away for a while and emerge the other side with some serious word count. In the spirit of being artful among artists, I'll post daily pictures on Instagram across the month that lean towards the abstract and the mysterious, but beyond that I'll likely be mostly on lockdown (I may even pop an 'out of office' onto my email, imagine that!). I'm sure I'll emerge in December with a full report but in the meantime, may your dreams be dread uncanny, may your lands have an edge of unease...
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