"This is an Address That Does Not Exist #2"

The sign on the footpath between Bankogatan and Riksdalersgatan is part of the WHOSE SQUARE exhibition, an initiative by Högsbo Library and Högsbo Church in collaboration with GIBCA EXTENDED with the support of Familjebostäder.

THE DREAM

a text by Lars Embäck

Högsbo was once rural. In the early part of the twentieth century, Högsbotorpen grew up on the hilly terrain. Now, the district of Högsbo has been part of the city of Gothenburg for decades.

Högsbo's history is expanded and united with Europe's twentieth-century history through artist Endre Nemes' artwork "Marmorintarsia" at the square in the centre of the district. Nemes' monumental composition can be interpreted as a story. Here, we see the presence of Nemes' upbringing in Central Europe during the First World War. It also reflects his later escape from Hitler's persecution of the Jews before the Second World War. Nemes' abstract imagery touches on a painful autobiography. But perhaps Nemes was unaware that his work was or could be regarded as a personal testimony. "Experience has fallen in value... We have not become richer in communicable experience, but poorer," writes author Walter Benjamin in a reflection on the civilisation that saw the silent soldiers return after the end of the First World War.

Many people say that it is important not to get stuck in the past. Perhaps the expression is not only about time, but also about not unnecessarily emphasising ourselves. We should appear reliable and secure by forgetting and/or holding back ambiguous and difficult experiences. At the same time, people can become speechless and mute for many different reasons and to varying degrees.

In the early 1960s, when I was of preschool age, my mother stood on our balcony on Bankogatan in Högsbo and shouted threats. She shouted at the houses on Riksdalersgatan and the forest between them. Life with her was unsettling for a child. But my mother was my mother. She told those around her that we, she and her family, were being persecuted. My mother lived in an incomprehensible and frightening reality.

In recent years, I have imagined that my mother was in a strange place together with the artist Hilma af Klint. They could meet regardless of time and space to explore together the borderland between spiritual experiences and insane hallucinations. Hilma af Klint and her contemporary friends put themselves into trance-like states when they communicated with spirit beings named Amaliel, Ananda and Gregor. But the high masters of af Klint's spiritualist world would certainly have seemed like creatures from the abyss to my mother. My mother's inner world was populated by witches, murderers and sex offenders. There were criminal lunatics and blackmailers such as Hajd, Tilbit and Verner Klägg.

It was not until middle age, after searching through public archives, that I began to understand events that had previously been hidden about my upbringing and my mother and father's lives. My father was travelling in a car that veered off the road in 1933. A motorcycle ran over my mother as she was crossing the street in 1948. Both suffered severe brain damage, the consequences of which were not apparent until much later. My parents met two years after my mother's accident. They dreamed of starting a family and living a happy life. Neither of them was completely healthy or young, but my mother and father saw each other as their best chance. This text is not about accusing anyone. Given the circumstances, everyone did what they thought was best.

The square in Högsbo was completed in the mid-1950s and was given an oversized bell tower in the form of a high-rise building without a bell. Later, in the mid-1960s, a church in the brutalist architectural style was built one block to the east. The newly built place of worship was given its own tower, which houses a church bell that regularly rings to call people to worship. Today, we can imagine the square as a surrounding antechamber to the Christian church – similar to the older trading places that for millennia were located right next to basilicas and temples. Nemes' intarsia, which my father or my older brother showed me around 1960 as an expression of modern art, could, from this perspective, serve as an external altarpiece despite its relative distance from the church interior and regardless of the fact that it is a secular work.