“By what does a line drawn on a piece of paper become art?”
Lund, June 9, 2017
As readers of this blog will know, I am not an art critic; I’m an art recommender and write only about what I like and want, therefore, to share with others. There is enough of negative energy in this world…
I’ve known Anita Christoffersson for over 3 decades, she’s a friend of the house and I am – bear with me – happily biased in what follows.
Today I went to see Anita’s studio in the small idyllic Swedish town of Landskrona, located in a huge, almost empty factory building full of spooky rooms and corridors but hosting a collective of artists and their studios.
They do their creative work here because the municipality of Lund 30 kilometres south of Landskrona where they used to have their studios for years didn’t see the obvious benefits of supporting their rent with a few thousand dollars per month – while it goes out of its way to brand Lund as the new high-tech centre of Sweden, if not all of Scandinavia. Catchwords: Ideon Science Park, ESS and Max IV.
It’s a huge development in Lund, a picturesque historical and green university town in the south of Sweden. Over the next couple of decades its population may increase from the present 110,000 to 160,000 or more because of the inflow of researchers and their families from all around the world.
Aiming at such branding without any sense of the role of art and culture in a broad sense – and investing seriously in it – will likely end Lund up as a cultural desert and all the internationals it will attract to its science parks will flock instead to culture and art-filled places like Malmoe, Copenhagen, Berlin, Basel…Bilbao.
What an opportunity lost!
But fortunately, little Landskrona saw the light – as it has with its investment in branding itself as the new centre of photography in Scandinavia. It’s started out, boldly, with the Landskrona Photo Festival that you may read more about here.
Anita Christoffersson – Photo Ulf Gertz
Anita is one of those artists who struggles with her subject.
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