Essay written in releation to a site specific study of Sätra Centrum, a suburb in Stockholm. Published in “The Great Accelleration”publication in relation to the Post Master in Architectural Conservation at the Royal Academy of Arts in Stockholm, spring 2022, KKH.
The larch stretched its short, soft needles towards the sun. After a long winter dressed in misty orange, its elegant coat longed to transform and grow new buds. The tree was planted in an open square that was empty except for a man that sat beside the larch on a wooden bench. Larch is not indigenous to Sweden. It was first mentioned in a journal in 1555, but upon later examination, was concluded to have been a depiction of a yew tree. Its arrival has since been dated to the late 1700s. The man had come here as a child some sixty years ago and was now thinking of the larch as he gazed at the light that filtered through the branches hovering above. He squinted as rays tapped the facing façade, succumbed to storefront stickers, and drowned in a disorderly pattern of stamped cobblestone. The larch got its name from an ancient settlement in the Alps, a fortified stronghold called Larignum whose inhabitants had built a high tower of wooden beams, like a funeral pyre, to protect their village. As it was made entirely out of wood, Caesar ordered his army to burn it down. The larch wood made a lasting impression when the tower came out of the soaring flames almost entirely unharmed.
One year prior to this moment, the man had been asked to document the square and its vicinity. It was the first time he"d been back in years. On his first visit he took several hundred photographs, mapping every path and every house, and felt very content with his efforts. However, upon scrolling through the images he had taken, he found that they were all full of white blobs. Not a single picture had been spared, blobs in various shapes and sizes were visible in all of them. Some were small, resembling dots made with a match, leaving the likes of punctuation marks erasing features on a wall or a blind spot obstructing a view somewhere. Others sprawled out like Rorschach inkblots. There was no hierarchy between them, all were solid, white and impossible to get rid of. Upon his second visit a month later, he arrived a little less confident, a little more alert. He zoomed in on surfaces, followed traces and listened to people. Observed hair dryers, food carts and smoothie machines. Became more specific. Traced the highway and lingered on footpaths. Took to a bridge to catch one view and hiked up a hill for another. Only after many hours, when frost began to gnaw at his bones did he decide he’d had enough. He had been everywhere and couldn"t think of anything else to frame. Arriving back home he brewed tea while anxiously waiting for the pictures to upload. The first image popped up on screen and he resigned. There weren"t as many as before and not as white, but they were still there, all over the images. He stared at the screen, what kind of mind boggling, bad joke was this? The blobs sported various percentages of transparency. He zoomed in, came close and made various attempts to decipher what they were hiding. Some made way for vague assumptions, others gave nothing but the trace of an eraser. He sighed and left the screen.
The next morning, while pondering how to advance with the assignment, he flicked through the weekend paper and came across a story about a scientific project called Die Fund, initiated in Copenhagen in 1959. He read, "It is common practice in archeology to illustrate by drawing. What makes Die Fund stand out is that it focuses on drawing the present state of the object in as detailed a fashion as possible, and not on an idealised version of the object. They explained that they are always asked by people outside of the field why they don"t just photograph the objects instead, and always respond that the function of the brain, when drawing, cannot be replaced by a computer. That the senses are capable of deciphering an object as it is, including subtle ornamentations, strands of hair, textile textures and plant-fibers, that a camera is not able to show. Especially because bronze is a soft, reflective material that quickly becomes very worn.”
In the square, Spring closed in on the man’s face and he closed his eyes. Recurring tides of children# playing in the schoolyard let him tap into the child that ran across the same schoolyard all those years ago. Knowing had become difficult to defend. Nothing had turned out to be what it seemed. He could no longer measure his math, and the logic of lessons had disappeared in the absence of a simple answer. What he had called blobs were his own blank spots, the layers he had failed to see and had merely assumed. He thought of how the blobs crawled across the page, how they faded, how some disappeared while others morphed and grew. There was a sequence to this matter, one thing on top of another. He had been tempted to stop, but the blobs had triggered his curiosity. He thought about the process as waves, how he could put his hands into the foaming water and feel the vegetation, flow and temperature. How he could be taken by the exhilarating movement and forget, that if he waited until the water was still, he could look past the white foam of the swells and look into the waves. First he might become hypnotised by himself, he knew the story well. But then, if he managed to look beyond the spectacle of his own mirrored image, he would discover a whole world hiding below, and his reflection would grow into the larch above.
He had gone back a third time. This time, in addition to his camera he had brought along the newspaper with the article about Die Fund, together with a pencil, a marker, a microscope and big dose of patience. On the bench in the sun, he thought about the mixture of discontent and excitement he had felt that day. How everything had changed. How yellow fences had turned purple, then black, and then white. How plaster had crumbled and revealed windows. How entrances had grown and surfaces morphed into others. How care flowed from every counter as he scraped, smelled, and touched the walls, and found depth. Leaning back on the bench he knew history was going to be repeated with the same shoes and the same pressing of the stone as had come before. That was why he had been asked to go there in the first place. And just like that, the larch fell prey to pastel coloured food trucks and two-dimensional humans.5 Who knew that larch can"t grow on train tracks.
The reformulation ‘If this place is destroyed, something in me is killed’ perhaps articulates some of the feelings usually felt when people see the destruction of places they deeply love or to which they have the intense feeling of belonging. Today more space per human being is violently transformed than ever, at the same time as the number of human beings increases. The kind of $’killing’ referred to occurs all over the globe, but very rarely does it lead to strong counteraction. Resignation prevails: ‘You cannot stop progress.[…]’ (Næss)
1. Beiter, Emil Leith, Ting Forsvinder, Weekendavisen, Københamn, tryck 24.03.22 https://www.weekendavisen.dk/2022-12/samfund/ting-forsvinder
2. Lärken Dess Betydelse för Svensk Skogshushållning (the larch and its importance in Swedish forest economy) av Gunner Schotte, Samt dess form och variationer (And its form and variations) av L. Mattsson, Statens Skogksforsökanstalt, 1917, Centraltryckeriet, Stockholm
3. Næss, Arne, There is No Point of No Return, 2021, Penguin, UK
4.https://vaxer.stockholm/nyheter/2020/04/samrad-for-satra-centrum/