A Glitch in the Matrix

(Väst på fjället – Origin Story)

It began with a classified ad: a school for sale in Bjurholm, Sweden’s smallest municipality. Corridors, classrooms, a modest gymnasium – 750 square meters in total, priced at 350,000 kronor. When a building is sold, an invisible order is sold with it. But who, really, can claim to own an order?

The school stood in Karlsbäck, once a thriving village. Teaching stopped in the late 1980s. Still, people kept coming to organize, to work, to keep the community spirit alive. Over the years, the rhythm changed. As the average age rose, activities dwindled. Soon there were more associations than permanent residents in the village, and those associations, despite their official presence, worried about their future as fewer people had the strength to keep them alive.

When the municipality put the building up for sale, it added an unusual condition: the buyer would have to reach an agreement with the associations on how the space was to be divided. Otherwise, no deal. At the same time, the municipality refused to mediate, effectively outsourcing the responsibility of maintaining community harmony to the potential buyer. In practice, it meant that the buyer would inherit not only a building but an entire social contract. Ownership became less about property and more about managing relationships and the infrastructure of village life.

I hesitated, but I was already in love with the place, with the possibility of shaping my own conditions. Perhaps that could be possible here? I said yes, and before the purchase could be finalized, I was summoned to a first meeting in the village.
It was mid-September, during moose-hunting season. Yet everyone came: full-time residents and summer residents, associations from neighboring villages, the entire municipal council with representatives from every party except the Sweden Democrats. We gathered outside the school to debate its future. The poor timing was pointed out again and again: “right in the middle of the hunt!”

The mood was tense. The anger wasn’t really directed at me, but at the municipality, eager to sell the school while at the same time investing millions in a new eldercare facility in central Bjurholm. “Why don’t you care about the countryside, about the associations here?” someone demanded.

I was urged to explain my plans, but caught off guard by the charged atmosphere, I couldn’t find the words. My voice faltered. Nobody really understood why I was there at all. Art? Here? Why? “Where on earth am I supposed to put my coffee cup?!” someone else shouted.

That question was sharper than it seemed. The coffee cup marks the boundary of an institution. An institution exists where you know exactly where to set your cup down. When the cup no longer has a place, the institution is under threat. To buy the school was therefore not simply to buy walls. It was to buy a place where someone else’s coffee cup already had a designated spot.

As the meeting ended and broke into smaller conversations, I pulled the municipal property manager aside and asked what would happen if we couldn’t agree, or if no buyer emerged. The answer was immediate: the heating would be turned off, and the school eventually demolished. This had not been said openly to the villagers. The choice was brutal in its simplicity: either I carried the responsibility, or the place would be erased.

The drive back to Umeå had the mood of a wake, not a celebration.

I was able to buy the school because no one else wanted it. No one wanted the burden of electricity, heating, and endless maintenance. I could buy it in the void left by everyone else’s disinterest. This institution became possible precisely where it was no longer desired.

But what does it mean that I, an artist, should be the one who owns? Ownership is not supposed to belong to the artist. The artist borrows, rents, asks permission, is granted access on favor. Ownership is for others. And who am I, to own a school? I come from a working-class background: my father spent his life at Nybro Stålprodukter (later Stena Stål); my mother, now retired, worked first as a maid and later as a shop assistant. No one in my family had ever pursued any higher education.

Institutions have historically been owned by others: municipalities, the state, the church, patrons, foundations, sometimes the ever expanding upper middle class. That I could buy the school was not a matter of wealth but of neglect. Nobody else wanted it. The democratic possibility lay in that very crack, where the traditional owners withdrew, I was able to step in.
And yet, ownership and democracy remain in uneasy tension. Rousseau noted that the first person to fence off land and declare “this is mine” became the father of inequality. Proudhon went further: “property is theft.” Private ownership always confers power, and therefore inequality. So what does it mean for an artist to own an art institution? Is it a revolt against the art world’s owning classes, or simply a repetition of the same logic on a smaller scale?

A few months later, after the papers were signed, I went to Bjurholm’s municipal offices to receive the keys. It was late November. Snow had already fallen; the sky was dark and heavy. The property manager happened to be driving past Karlsbäck on his way home and dropped me off. When I opened the door, the warmth struck me: fifteen degrees felt suddenly generous, almost like an embrace. Inside it smelled of dust and varnish, the air dry but gentle. Coming straight from Stockholm, with Tele2 as my mobile carrier, I had no reception. My only company that evening was a pack of instant noodles, an air mattress and a glass of red wine in the darkness and silence. There, alone in the corridors, I encountered the building for the first time as its owner.

Brian O’Doherty once said that context becomes content. In the white cube, context is stripped away, neutralized, elevated. Here, context was already overpowering: the village, the associations, my father’s legacy, the depopulated municipality. I could not neutralize the walls; they were saturated with what had already taken place. Infrastructure itself – the heating, the distance, the lack of reception – inscribed itself into the art. Ownership was not the backdrop. It was part of the work itself.

When nearly a hundred people came to the opening – in a village of only eleven permanent residents – the perspective shifted for an afternoon. The small place became the center. The coffee cup, the local associations, the fragile order of the village met the language of art, and both were unsettled in the encounter.
And yet the unease remains. I own the institution, but not in a settled sense. Not to uphold the order, but to disturb it. Out here, the institution is less about white cubes or balance sheets, and more about hammer blows echoing through the walls, a coffee cup, an entire village angry at its municipality.

Owning the school is therefore neither a right nor a resolution. It is an ongoing problem, a question that never finds its answer. What does it mean to own something that others already feel belongs to them, albeit in another way?

The institution is not the building. Nor the people who come to it. It is the friction between them. It emerges every time a door is opened, every time someone asks where the coffee cup should go, every time a wall is raised or a painting hung. The institution is not a place to rest, but something that continually remakes itself.

A friend once told me: “This place shouldn’t exist. You shouldn’t exist. This isn’t supposed to be possible – it’s a glitch in the matrix.” Perhaps it is precisely there, in that crack in the order, that another type of cultural infrastructure might become possible.