MUTUAL
MUTANT
In norse mythology, there is a golden ring, called the dripper, a golden ring that every ninth night would drop off eight replicas, of same weight, same size. You could easily fool anyone that this is the dripper, this is the magic ring that produces golden rings. Made from the same smith that made the hammer for Thor. To get rid of this fertile producer of golden rings. Odin managed to destroy the magic ring, sending the dripper to the
At the other side of my window, there is a construction area. I usually sit by my desk, following the excavators rolling from one side to another. Watching the former building going down. It used to be a canteen, built for the workers of the telephone factory once located here. The house has been empty for awhile, soon they will build another one, a taller one, filled with apartments. In its current state it is basically a hole. A machine struggles to cover some rocks with a heavy rubber mat. Suddenly a sound of a signal appears, a shake in the ground follows and then another signal again. I see strange flowers in a strange garden, an intubated mountain. Neat lines of orange plastic tubes, carrying the explosives down into the rocks. A mountain is submissive when using explosives, or even a pick axe, if you want to. We crumble mountains into gravel and sand, dust flying in the wind.
The performing abilities of soil, nourishing seeds, minerals, even houses in a city. Exploitation of land has the same financial function as mining. In our modern cities, the value of houses can increase without effort from the house itself. It is almost like this process utilizes some kind of magic, or alchemy. Extraction of value through the soil seems like a continuations squeeze. Where land, building sites and construction areas function as fields of money, growing by themselves if given the right conditions. When looking at alchemical patterns I’m trying to move my understanding in other directions. I want to devise ways to un-understand this version of life and money I seem to be instilled with, where the land becomes a quarry, ready to grow its own worth. In order to do this, I’m trying to re-read what we perceive through language as verbal opposites, which often create binary thinking errors and blind spots. Where city has to oppose countryside, and industry oppose agriculture. Human or machine, body and spirit. In order to survive in a rational and decisive system, we seek for division, between people, material and places. My aim is to trace how value filters through the human body as well as through
architecture and city planning and land, posing as an extended common body. I am trying to read humanity and our way of living as a whole
When buying and building houses. What are we looking for? A place to live, eat and sleep? In a mine you dig for metals or minerals underneath the surface of the earth, when extracted they will later be refined into products. Moving from the ground to the surface, translating meaning and purpose. In a city we have invisible powers, refining value from land. An alchemical process is used in city planning, using buildings and its inhabitants to create value as a commodity, establishing the home as an objects of desire.
When considering buildings and city planning as an extended common body, I think about land, also as a biological clock. As a way to highlight a fertilization process in
relation to cycles and age. A usual example would be old industrial buildings. Once productive, now empty and let’s say ripe. These kinds of buildings are being demolished. Sometimes polluted with long and dirty roots underneath them, chemicals and toxic waste from another era. It is expensive and time consuming to save the situation where the soil will get cleaned, by fungus or industrial methods. But most likely, it will be replaced. The ground is forced to stay fresh and fertile. It appears to me like a circular movement for time to travel within. A biological clock, ticking. A compost on speed, where the land is forced to decompose fast, to become fertile and able to host again, tick, tock. It needs to produce and it needs to reproduce. The performing abilities of soil work around the clock. Today I live in an old factory, production disappeared from this place in the 1980’s. I moved into my studio in 2018, and into my apartment in 2019. The house was owned by a non-profit, which sold the house to a holding company. A company holding shares. The aim of holding companies is to gain control over the underlying companies. I don’t know what these companies are, but the holding company are going to put jobs into the market to demolish the old buildings, and build new, larger ones at the same location. The huge signage on the fence facing the lake promises that this will become smart urban
apartments. You can sign up now, if you’re interested in buying a part of this.
One place dies, for other life to appear. Another lap on the clock, tick, tock.
When we have value entangled in land and real estate at the same time as having a housing shortage, it may seem rational to remove areas without a clear logic or function. It appears logical, in a way almost ecological. A ripe piece of land get harvested, to grow another building there. We, our bodies and architecture, operate as oppressed under the constant economical fertilization of soil, where distribution of space in the city seems to appear and act rationally. But if we are able to find a connection between the
gentrification process in the city to an existential dimension of the way people, or places are affected, will we be able to find other outcomes? When the economy deals with land and soil, it is also linked to our bodies and lives in a cycle where economics cannot be separated from ecology. Economy depends on features of nature, such as growth, and directly on nature itself for a place to grow. The economic system does not use a stable point to anchor itself. It relies on an idea of constant potentials of expansion. In our current times, it seems like this system is running wild, treating land like both an
anchoring and reproductive agent. This is why I think of Alchemy, because value seems to appear in places, almost from nothing.
The area where I live is called Henriksberg. There is actually a lot of activity in this area, carpenters, artists, musicians, filmmakers and craftsmen. One can argue that this property is being sold due to it’s worth, it was all-in-all too exclusive for the owners to keep. The area is also being demolished, because of its lack of function, even if it actually has a
function. It’s in a poor state, and even if all the tenants want to help, we are not allowed to. They once told us that it would actually be much easier if the place just burned down. At that point, I was not sure if this was a threat, or a joke. Another lap on the clock? The janitor for this area is by the way a lawyer, with another company registered in juridical shutdowns of industrial areas. In other words, he has no skills in running or maintaining, but a lot of juridical skills in terms of closing down areas like this.
I’m not sure if it is complex, but it feels like it is. I don’t want to protest against the idea of providing people a home. But for small scale organization, it is impossible to find anything like this again. This is where I live and work, along with others. We get greedy, because we are all aware that in the new area there is no plan for us to stay. And we have no place to go. We are left do our own research into our current owner conditions,
potential new owners, and outcomes. We scroll through the homepage of the potential new owners. Showing pictures of young people smiling, the enthusiastic language grades the area with an urban score™ . This will become an urban paradise, it promises. Healthy 1
lifestyle, power walks, local cafés and bars, communication with easy access to the city. I I want to question how this is being conducted. This area is not dead, we are living, and producing things here. I find it brutal that what is already an urban paradise, needs to cease for this individual urban style to appear here. This makes me think that there is something else than eating and sleeping, that is about to be produced here. The remaining buildings from industrial production, being rebuilt to adapt with new activities, has been a part of urban life for decades, but can no longer act as not good representatives for urban life. They can only stay as facades. Some exterior of Henriksberg will be able to make it into the next phase, completely “restored” on the inside. An architecture agency made a report on site in 2015, before it got sold. They declare that most houses are destroyed, since they are no longer what they once were. My house, where I live and work, has always been in use, for several things, a store, storage, workshop, office, art studio space and apartment. This house was never a museum for the old factory. It adapted, and became a shapeshifter, and it seems like the creation of value connected to living spaces can’t appear if the transformation process happens in an organic way?
The depressing situation of the moment makes it hard to keep a distance, especially as I consider myself to lose something. But not only me, my neighbors and colleagues will lose their place to live and work. The carpenters and garden workers will have to relocate, drive back here occasionally to work in the surrounding houses and their gardens. The ground will change, the mountain will explode into small pieces and the soil will get cleaned and other houses will grow where the old ones were standing.
https://www.ssmliving.se/urbanscore/
To remove these businesses, that has a function in in society in general creates issues relates to urban planning and architecture, that could formulate itself in a general question about a city and its functions. How would we like to use a city?
Can alchemy still be theory? Can theory still be empathy? Can empathy still be alchemy?
Moses split the water, so did the nuclear weapons. In a state of grey zone depression, what is empathy? Out of our reach, a lighthouse hovering over the sea? In a model using forced-on binary thinking. We find ourselves opposing until we fail to do so, because where we are, we wanna be able to maximize.
Constantly loosing control?
I’m not sure where to start, but while talking slowly, I will make an attempt to follow my own voice. I don’t believe in money. Still, money makes me believe in magic. A fragile system, at first glance so easy, but unfolded, complex, unlogical and magic. Creation of numbers, a promise of happiness. What is it exactly that makes this so attractive?
How does a place prepare to die, or does it even? Soil is a playground for the symbiotic relationship swinging between death and life. Where life is set for death, but death is the condition for life. Henriksberg is a place that came to grow unexpected in the cityscape. The rigid but complex apparatus, now pushing this area into a grave, makes Henriksberg appear as an old and worn out area. It is unlikely to fit into a city like Stockholm, with this spontaneous-looking urban planning.
This place is like a mutual mutant, changing according to the current need. Housing a lot of weeds, rats, tenants, workers and potholes. The area is not well maintained, but still fertile. There is another alchemical agent involved, empathy. I feel empathy for the place, its history and the people involved. At times, I even feel empathy for our terrible janitor, I don’t think he ever meant to actually work as janitor but since the process of evicting is a slow process, he is forced to do some smaller janitor related tasks every now and then. He is walking around in his suit on a cold winter morning. First he states his bad
consciousness and then adding that there is gonna be two other years of tenancy before the house is going down. There is a low conjuncture, not a good place to start a
revitalization.
The market has a tendency not to show up in times when we need it, a reporter said on the news, relating to the corona-pandemic crises. I think about the mutual mutant, somehow stabile, in its state of unclearness. Contemporary economics feels more like temporary
economics. Although forceful and hard at times, it is also fragile and in need of timing and timing is hard to control. It seems hard to for a place like Henriksberg to find timing. It is even hard to find a place like this, infrastructure and maps hide them. They adapt slowly to changes, their aim was never to regain strength, but they can regain strange. A strange attraction, also carries a taste of magic. Places like this swings slowly to attack. By being weird and unexpected they resist the logical part in ecological. As they change over time, they might grow out of human control. Leaning towards a statement about control, not as a condition but as a state that needs assistance, unable to maintain itself. When man leaves soil open for a long time, nature will not leave it to rest, it will be treated like an open wound and then overgrow.
Even if the mutual mutant is hard to find, it seems easy to love. It looks cute as a quirky or queer object, but when trying to engage with it you will find the hard reality of
structural order, violence and problems. Like an endangered species Henriksberg carries an exotic taste, contrasting the general view of Stockholm which is well planned and controlled. As the city core is growing, the traces of it’s industrial past is erased. The lines of the rural-urban fringe are constantly shifting and being redefined. The borders of the city are themselves an ongoing act of erasure. When I invite people to Henriksberg, they wonder how a place could have been left like this, in the middle of the suburban area in this clean capital. I´ve heard about a rainforest in the middle of Rio, it is a park but it feels genuine upon entry. A reality escape, questioning the idea of what belongs where in the city pattern. This place is not a park, it is a left over, but it creates something similar . Unexpected places can provide some kind of oxygen.
There are motions in emotions making things grow. If you allow for the emotional aspect of being able to relate, relationships can appear everywhere. It goes beyond logical
thinking, as we can’t always know why we like certain things and why we relate to each other? But we do. I don’t know exactly how bonds are created, a chemical agent, or an alchemical agent? But it does have ability to transform us and to change our minds.
Can alchemy be empathy?
If it would be, how can it transform our cities, bodies and land? Where can we find love?
Could we ever loose control?
If we resist the biological clock, are we still allowed dreams of reproduction? Any relationship can carry dreams and expectations, but a queer relationship does necessary include the promise of reproduction. Hence, this promise could also be a question to our expectations.
At the back of the house I live and work in, there is an old garden. I spend time there, removing weeds, taking their roots up to the surface. Leaving them in the sun, dying from malnourishment, without a connection to the soil, absorbing of sunlight will kill them. Their way of receiving life sustenance happens in the dark. I slowly hunt their small and narrow roots through the dark, digging deeper than what I originally planned. My
encounter with the roots and the plants gradually becomes a way to spend time with unlearning, an act of care. Sometimes with a system running wild, it takes more time to unlearn or uninstall a mess you never asked for. I don’t even like systematic shapes. But to inherit someone else’s mess can add a more confident, comfortable way to destroy this tyranny of the unstructured. I used this as a metaphor, because my good friend Ronak once told me, that if we want to protect things, we should complicate them, not simplify them.
What are we feeding economy? A system that needs us to believe in it, before we buy. We need to have faith in credit, constructing the money, the borders, the system. It is hard to be in control, it consumes emotions and time.
We need to make time for other aspects of a home, because when buying a home, we are also buying an amplifier, for ourselves. The home has become a mirror, reflecting a personality. We are drilling deep down in the mountains to build valuable homes, and we drill deep. The strange flowers in the strange garden blossom in aggressive manners, lights up the grey part of springtime. Boom, We might lose that magic ring in there. I got to know Masha, in 2013, She had just graduated as an architect, in Kiev. The following year, she lost her right to her family home in Crimea when the annexation of Crimea happen. As an artist, she works with bodies and borders. I like her way of working with borders and the body. Where the body holds the key to transformation, but is the only separation too. Another mutual mutant relationship? She cast her own body in transformative materials, that changes over time.
Dear Masha!
After we talked the last time, I was thinking about soil. Wherever you are now, and
wherever I am now, underneath us, somewhere, we will find soil. This soil lies underneath our feet, does not act in ways we can read, cannot tell if it has feelings, yet we are trying to put words on its performing abilities. In our time, we can have identical pieces of land, constructed by the same minerals, rocks, and organic matter. But when we measure them with money, the prices will still differ, depending on the geographic coordinates. So when we talked about your experience with land and soil, my mind travelled. You told me about a very specific soil, thin and almost orange. This soil on the other side of what now is a
border, a soil that is not perfect for vegetables. You also told me about a melting and possibly bleeding body made of ashes and dust, pouring itself over the now abstracted landscape. Ashes, also excellent, as fertilizer. And fertilizer seems important, in a time, when everyone seems to seek growth. I want to talk to you about soil and it’s performing abilities, I want to talk to you about surface, land and growth. How soil will, in
combination with air, water and sunlight, transform seeds into flowers, trees, bushes and vegetables over time. When thinking of this magical everyday life demonstration, I also think about the alchemical potential.
A constructed body, melting, over the landscape. Made of ashes, the burned dead. Planting itself in the landscape. It makes me think about how constant death is also constant fertilization, and how land acts like a wound, if left open it will try to close itself. Maybe this is why you talk about non-commercial architecture, my association to this is this body, landscape or a building, that refuses a certain shape, melting, transforming, morphing or mutating, becoming its own foundation. It is constructed and it is real. The body turns into foundation or ground. A simple act, still, the pace of this melting body makes it somewhat artificial. It can also be the case that this is just the nature of a mutant, speed is somewhat like a parallel action for you. Like running while melting. Masha, you protect your body with cannibalism, it’s an ongoing transformation. It’s also excellent as fertilizer when you want to grow to an even stronger mutant. A way to talk, communication through the ground, it’s time to treat also this place like (your) body. If love could be a state, mind or a place where one could go, let’s go there. If love can be effortless, and always the same, that could be our perfect spot. I think place is important for this conversation we are about to have.
