This morning in Fabrique, I ordered my latte and a cheese and ham roll, completely in Swedish. The woman serving not only understood me, but she also responded in Swedish asking if I’d like the walnut roll, and I understood what she said. This is a big moment in my life.
Mind you, I stuffed it up at the Moderna Museet, when the woman at the gift shop check-out asked me if I’d like to buy a bag. I had to admit to not understanding her. Still, I did manage to say “Jag pratar lite svenska!” Which made her laugh. That makes up for a lot.
I was, ostensibly, in Stockholm to buy a pair of shoes. Icebugs to be more precise. Mirinda has been raving about her Icebugs ever since buying them. I needed a new pair of shoes because mine are not waterproof. Or very grippy. So it was a trip into town for me in order to be shod for the winter.
Naturally, I combined it with a trip to the Moderna Museet, given I’m a member and I had yet to finish the surrealist exhibition that I saw half of the other week.
And the day was beautiful. After a bit of dreary weather, today was bright and sunny all day. And it wasn’t cold. The temperature stayed above zero.
The Moderna Museet was strangely busy. Then I discovered, downstairs, there was some sort of conference being held and the milling thousands were attendees rather than visitors. For a Tuesday, it meant a lot more people than you’d normally see.
Not that it caused any problem in the exhibition. The crowd wasn’t there to see any art. I actually had the gallery space, more or less, to myself. Though, there was one moment, as I sat watching The Book of Flowers, that a large group came in, went to a small space and was taught something by a guide.
The Book of Flowers made me laugh.
It’s a video piece written and directed by Agnieszka Polska. She has used AI to generate a world of flowery shapes, growing, changing, shrinking as Tina Greatrex narrates the story of how we evolved away from flowers to where humanity is today.
You see, in The Book of Flowers, it is stated that humans originally lived a symbiotic life with flowers. We would live in the giant cups of the flora and help spread their pollen during birth. Of course, the males would be eaten following insemination because this was seen as a better future than the alternatives: starvation or war.
I thought the piece was delightful. The images were bright and intriguing, the voice of Tina Greatrex was fantastic, and the content was surprising and, at times, delightfully amusing. Mind you, I don’t think the old lady sitting on the bench next to me saw it in quite the same way as I did. While I regularly giggled, she sat stony faced and focused, gripping her walking poles with grim determination as the flowers grew before her.
Of course, it doesn’t matter what emotion is inspired by a piece of art, as long as something is stirred within the viewer. It appeared not to inspire anything in the old woman. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. There are plenty of pieces that do nothing for me. Or, I guess she could have been laughing on the inside.
While I loved The Book of Flowers, my favourite piece this week was a painting by Erik Olson, a Swedish Surrealist.
Olson was part of the Halmstad Group which was centred around the Swedish coast, therefore their paintings tended to feature things like the sea, shells, sand, etc. I love the light in the painting and the feeling that a slight, salty breeze is relieving the summer heat. It is a very calm painting that is full of summer.
Of course, there was also the beginning of the gingerbread house exhibition to admire.
Lots of gingerbread structures (I’d hesitate to call some of them ‘houses’) are in a room at one end of Ark Des. As you walk into the room, your nostrils are filled with the most intense scent of gingerbread as it wafts up from the displays.
As I gazed at the intricacies before me, two fellows were setting up lights and generally darting about the room in the final preparations for when the exhibit goes live.
The Gingerbread Exhibition has been going on for about 30 years and really has to be smelled to be believed. It also has to be one of the few exhibitions that gets eaten by the artists once it’s completed.
I also popped into the Ooooooooo-pus exhibition of some of Katalin Ladik‘s works. She is an intriguing artist. I bought a book on her because she sounds like an amazing artist who, among other things, struggled for acceptance against a communist regime that thought women shouldn’t express themselves.
By the way, in the exhibition you are supposed to voice the title by saying the letter ‘O’ nine times with ‘pus’ at the end. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be pus as in what seeps out of an infected wound or pus as in puss. I opted for the latter because it sounded nicer.
Having filled myself up with art, I headed for the Icebug store, noting, on the way, that the ice rink has opened in the King’s Park, though skaters would need their own skates at the moment as the skate hire bit has yet to be included. About ten people had done just that and were happily skating around.
Reaching the tiny Icebug shop, I successfully bought my shoes before wandering down and through Drottingattan before heading home. And I wasn’t the only one getting winter shoes either. At home, Mirinda took a second trip to Nyköping, in order to have Max’s tyres changed to his winter ones.
A very enjoyable day. For me, anyway.
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