Karl Sjölund

The fortresses at Rödberget, Pagla, Mjölsjö, Degerberg and Gammeläng together constitute the expansive fortification of Boden. Here, the artist and musician Karl Sjölund has created a site-specific installation about waiting for a war that never commences.

Boden is a town, which, in every way, has emerged as an effect of the military strategies of centuries past: should a Russian attack on Sweden occur, it would be necessary to go through Boden (to avoid ending up either at the bay of Botten or lost in unruly mountain terrain), but such an attack never happened, and military-technological development would since render the speculations around which the fortifications at Boden were designed obsolete. Now, most of this vast defence complex is in abandoned. The ramparts, slinging like a river through the forests surrounding the town, are overgrown with moss, fungi and stalactites. And since the obligatory military conscription was discontinued in 2010, the ever-shrinking professional forces have been left to fight the still absent war on their own.

In Sjölund’s work, he examines the tragic logic of war. With video, sound and found objects, he has constructed an installation throughout the hallways and rooms of the Rödberg fortress. Archive material related to Boden’s military history becomes part of a collage of real and composed soundscapes from the fortifications, and recordings of popular tales of the mountain’s dormant armies and epic expositions. The work is an attempt to reproduce the aspects of war that pertain to the senses; the more abstract or psychoacoustic phenomena, and the fantasies necessary to wage a war: the logic of armour, tinnitus after the detonation of a bomb, the image of the enemy.

Karl Sjölund (b. 1986) is an artist and musician based in Boden and Stockholm.

Thanks to Sally Sundbom, Ralf Adolfsson, Acusticum, Resurscentrum för konst Norrbotten, Norrbottensteatern and Teg Publishing.

Work

A Sense of War, 2018
New commission

Location

Rödbergsfortet, Boden
17.11.2018–17.2.2018