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A slow piecing together of images taken most impulsively, with a cell phone through a broken window on an express train to Arlanda Airport outside Stockholm. Moving through a shattered landscape illuminated by cracks in the glass, instigated thoughts of how the eye is connected to the powers of imagination. The everyday flow of field and tree, sky and sun, transposed to an innerscape. The idea of the periscope is to organize your vision so that you may know what you see and where you are going. At the same time, that decision is yours to make. This periscope is a tool for disorientation, for looking into your own vision and end up in a very different place. The Periscope collection is presented as a projection and a book, where you will find these thoughts:

The periscope is an obstacle and a promise. Following a certain order, a world will become visible to me. I put my eye to the window, to follow mirrors and lenses upwards and outwards. This system of reflections forms the gaze, which in turn forms a map on its way through the glass. Directions and positions change places, and a motion is defined. This eye looking out at the world is also reflected towards the viewer. Details of a landscape meet a document of memory. A life of gathered experiences deciding the topography of the map, my index finger decides the scale. In the circle of the periscope there is a moveable sight, a center always shifting toward new meanings. A tool for reading the world’s map and my own.

The periscope breaks the surface between where I am and what I see. Splitting the visual field yet opening the possibility to take it back. Different cutouts are tried against each other to build thinkable worlds. Limits of insight try the place and the image of the place. A scenario of water and space, land and light, breaks up into several simultaneous scenarios. Each fragment becomes a point of orientation in a moving structure where I am a marker. The map shows the way where the map-reader is laying down new roads.

The periscope sees me. Its glass captures and enhances the light, which becomes a part of the darkness obscuring other eyes in other periscopes. There is an active gaze in many directions, an encountering presence. In the blue and the green there are traces of a concentrated seeing. Waiting in the shadows for the view to clear. The line of the forest can be known as a histogram or a horizon, the horizon as a horizon of understanding. The landscape becomes visible, anew. The factual and the imaginary melds into layers upon layers of likely landscapes. With a periscope you seek what you know but find reality inside your own head.

Port of call is an artist book multiple consisting of nine photographs out of thousands, all with the same view from my childhood apartment overlooking the industrial port of Stockholm. During the years of living with this view, I became more and more interested in the invisibility of this place despite its obvious ever-presence outside of my window. I started to document the place in order to make it visible to myself. In the process, I realized that I kept documenting my idea of this view, this port, more than anything else. The repetitive frames were charged with memories and dreams, and that in turn gave me an entirely new view. The images are on one side of the multiple, and on the other is this text, handwritten with silver ink:

”between a home and a final destination, the port of call is where a ship collects fuel and supplies / one such mid-journey stop takes place at frihamnen, across from the rooms i grew up in / it's a restricted non-site / connecting me to a map outside of my own / opening up a world of cargo real and imagined / an interface of cityscape and seascape / a guessing game of where from and where to and why here / my everyday view / invisible in its evidence”

The word “märke” means mark but also trace, sign, cut. “Märken” is a project on the theme of personal traces in public spaces, which characterizes the city in ways determined by the individual. Some of these pictures were exhibited in 2003, along with the text below. Lately I've been interested in ways to connect this project with both "City Flow / Urban Tattoo" and "Cover Space".

"Personal messages in public spaces lead a life parallel to the established communication of society. Here is a longing to turn the anonymous city into your own. To make your mark, to leave a trace, to make yourself heard in a place where you may not feel represented. To engage in the everyday, constructed for and shared by anyone moving around in the city. Here is an alternative to commercial mass information. This process is open for everyone to create, view and take part in. It evolves and invents itself in relation to the already existing. Someone is seen, if only in passing. It is an action for a highly personalized democracy, on ground level. It is an interactive art form taking place in the grey areas which hold together urban life. Layers upon layers of marks tell stories of the now. Random samples of patch-work thoughts and emotions. A creative disturbance in the well-to-do grid. Something to measure the temperature of the city and to raise it. To be seen on power plants, lamp posts or escalators is directed by who can afford to buy a place for expression. It is an aesthetical and ethical strategy to reach those keeping their eyes open in unusual surroundings. Detached remarks in a consumer culture that validates some and passivates others. Here, the individual action becomes important. It articulates a question to the predominent order of normality, a world of given limits. Here is a conviction that my voice means something, means everything.”

“Stadsflöde” (City Flux) was my first solo exhibition, showing images from travels in Capri and Sicily at the Italian Institute of Culture in Stockholm 2001. This essentially documentary collection revolved around how you move in and through a city, turning a new place into your own. From the exhibition text:

”Flowing through a city, places of noise and motion, quiet and stillness, where lives are lived. This flow is the point of departure. Allowing for the unprepared encounters. Connecting to a new place, creating relations: colours, lights, shapes, individuals, buildings, objects. Traces of activity, life. Someone doing something, something taking place, that has taken place. Presence and absence. The passing things which constitute that first impression; immediate, instinctive, intimate, merciless. The things just existing, where you are not looking, where you are lost. The things you almost do not see because they disappear in their quantity. Details stuck in the corner of your eye, in the back of your head, in the moment. Suddenly important. No fixed pattern or given order. A flow through the city. A city flow."

”Urban Tattoo” is a development of earlier urban thematics as well as a connection between that and “Cover Space”. The tattoo contains the idea of an imprint on your skin telling a story, as well as the idea of the body carrying memories. It connects the immaterial emotion to something physically tangible, something to take with you when you move on. The starting-point of this new work is the body in relation to urban space, especially your instinctive response to a place you find by chance. You move around inside the city grid and you come upon a place which somehow gets to you. I am interested in creating a visual equivalence between the experience of a place and the representation of it. Again, this involves documenting a reality, but reality from the inside – the photograph as the physical expression of a direct experience. In this process, the place becomes your own.