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WATCHING STÅLENHAG’S DREAMS

: SIMON STÅLENHAG

There is an extraordinariness to Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag’s works. He constantly combines the past and the future, the mediocre and the remarkable. The abandoned robots, mysterious machines and even dinosaurs, roaming through the hyper-realistic tornadoes of rural Sweden, have earned him a great many fans so far.

‘We walked in long lines through winter nights, and you could see little points of light go on and off in the darkness – cigarettes smoked by teenagers who had gathered around their wrecked memories, like a requiem. We made our nights our days, squinted at the horizon, and sighed. Way over there, the morning dawned.’

INTERVIEW BY ELİF BEREKETLİ 

PHOTOGRAPHY BY FREDRIK BERNHOLM

 

‘You cannot say much about my life by looking at Tales from the Loop. But it feels personal, since it feels very harmonious with my feelings from when I was growing up’, says Simon Stålenhag regarding the popular Amazon Prime series, adapted from his 2014 art book, amidst the recent rise in popularity of sci-fi dramas.

 

Born in Sweden in 1984, the artist first began publishing Tales from the Loop on social media. The series got so popular that he turned it into a book, which was then published, thanks to a Kickstarter campaign started in 2014. The blend of Stålenhag’s visual work and the stories he wrote quickly gained a cult following. In fact, it was featured in a list by The Guardian of the ten greatest dystopian works, alongside Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca.

 

Directed by Mark Romanek and Jodie Foster, with a screenplay adaptation by Nathaniel Halpern of Legion fame, the series focuses on the extraordinary happen- ings in a town, set atop an underground machine called ‘the Loop’, which was built to discover the secrets of the universe. As the characters complete a process known as ‘mystery’, we also get to witness their daily lives. Although the adaptation is set in the US, many of Stålenhag’s works focus on rural Sweden. It is important for the artist to reflect ordinary life there. The street lamps and cars all mean something to Stålenhag. ‘That was my original passion, when I started to do these science fiction scenes,’ he says. ‘It was to capture the mundane reality first and then something extra.’

 

Tales from the Loop isn’t Stålenhag’s only work. He has two other books: Things from the Flood, the 2016 sequel to Tales from the Loop, and The Electric State, published in 2017. In The Electric State, Stålenhag explores the western United States. Not connected to his Loop series, the book is set in 1997, following a runaway teenager and her yellow toy robot as they explore an alternate United States, ‘where the ruins of gigantic battle drones litter the countryside, heaped together with the discarded trash of a high tech consumerist society in decline’. Yet this is by no means a dystopian vision for the future, as Stålenhag says he tries to steer clear of these types of narratives. ‘I am not so interested in the bigger picture; I am more interested in the more personal perspective and in that way it becomes more dream-like’, he says. So how does an artist so focused on the ‘personal’ draw a line between this realm and the private? Why does he shy away from making future predictions? In an hour-long conversation, we discussed how he began storytelling, why he is captivated by the mundane and why, contrary to popular opinion, he doesn’t consider his art to be dystopian... Welcome to the haunting world of Simon Stålenhag.

 

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How did it all start for you?

 

I started doing wildlife art. I was very much into birds and the outdoors. I was an outdoorsy kid, birdwatching and drawing. And then, when I was around 8 or 9, I got these coloured pencils and started colour rendering. I started sketching thin guys with birds. I was mesmerised by illustrations of the birds. So I started to draw birds and colour with watercolours, with scenery like Swedish landscapes. I was also aware that the artists that made them had been working outdoors and that they had painted what they saw. I carried on, and as I grew older, I tried to capture typical mundane things, like street signs or whatever. Streetlights, cars – they have a meaning. It is al- most like pop culture – but the boring part of our culture that we never recognise, but we assume it is there. Like the things that we notice when we go to another country and we see that the doorknobs, or the light switches are different – all those things. So, I think that was my original passion, when I started to do these science fiction scenes. It was to capture the mundane reality first and then something extra.

 

Why were you so captivated by the mundane?

 

Because it is so typically Swedish. I was also not expecting this to become an international thing. I thought that some of the readers would be my friends. I wanted to paint things we have all experienced. So, I wanted to do this typically Swedish dish that we eat every day, the ‘bloodpatty’. It is something we eat on Thursdays. Everybody likes it on Thursdays. We might also eat pea soup, especially when I was a kid – very Swedish! You would have it in school, on Thursdays – and you would have fish on Wednesdays. I wanted to highlight the fact that it is a mundane foodstuff. But, obviously, the most important things are the landscapes – the rural landscapes, the point where society meets nature, country roads, street signs, homes and buildings... the way they look, it’s very important. Every little detail has meaning to me. When I did The Electric State, it was even more important because I didn’t know. I travelled in the US, took a lot of reference photos and did a lot of research.

 

You have been imagining ‘dystopian’ worlds for some time. How have you been feeling, now that we’re actually facing one with COVID-19?

 

I don’t consider my work dystopian all that much. I never thought that I produced any premonitions of the future. My work is not about the present; it is not about the future. It is more about dreams, images, memories and other things in the past.

 

Why do you think a lot of people have turned towards these kinds of predictions during COVID-19?

 

I think people really need the sense of belonging to a bigger context. People who live cut off from society – for example, they might live in the rainforest – they don’t care about the virus. Well, that might not be true anymore, because there are not many of those places left, nowadays – but the more globalised and the more connect- ed we become, the more we gain a sense of our society as a whole, and that scares us. Then we become more interested in either comforting or worrying answers – but we are principally looking for answers.

 

Why are you uninterested in making predictions about the future?

 

I am not so interested in the bigger picture – I am interested in a more personal perspective and, in that way, it becomes more dream-like. This is how I dream and this is almost how I remember dreams. Or, it’s like a dream of a memory. So, yeah, I really don’t make any claims or predictions, trying to analyse society. I trust that whatever comes out of me already has the synthesis of the present that has happened subconsciously, like the synthesis of the present... of my ideas and... the mind does solve things subconsciously. So, I don’t try to analyse it too much.

 

You said before that ‘it can ruin art to be unambiguous’. Is this also partially why you stay away from making predictions about the future?

 

Yes, I think I want to give the feeling that you are opening a book into a dream and it is like watching somebody’s dream. The difference between a dream and a vision is that a dream is its own entity: you cannot control it. I don’t like controlled, intelligent narratives. I am sure there are people who can create that, knowing exactly what they are saying and how it should be interpreted. But, isn’t the mind such a mystery? If I started trying to analyse things, I wouldn’t be able to do anything. I would just be too critical.

 

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But you have produced artwork with giant Trumps, for example. Can you really say that you are not making any political or social commentary with it?

 

Well, Trump is an asshole, that is my message. [Laughs] But I wouldn’t use that in a book because it would be like a political cartoon – and I don’t do that. So, the work with the giant Trumps was something I did on Twitter: somebody sent me that photo and asked, ‘Can I have a pintogram?’ I made it in 5 minutes and said, ‘No you can have a Trumpover’. I wouldn’t spend more time on something like that because it’s flat. It is good for a tweet. That’s what it is.

 

Yes, but it got a lot of attention – it went viral. You don’t consider it an important part of your body of work?

 

No, but at the same time, you cannot control where things go. It became viral and people asked me if they could use it; a newspaper contacted me. I said, ‘You should ask the photographer’, because I just copied and pasted Trump into somebody else’s photo of a parking lot. So, as a tweet? As a funny tweet, I can definitely stand by it. But as a work of art? No – it is a joke.

 

What do you think technology shows us about ourselves and about humanity?

 

I think the whole point of technology is to do those things that you, as a human, cannot do, and that you are bad at. Social media, I think, shows us what is good and bad in human cognition – like confirmation bias. More people have become aware of that because it is happening all the time, in front of our eyes. We can follow and see people’s discussions with strong points of view and we can elect somebody like Trump. So clearly, it shows us the fallacy of human cognition. How can you support him while he says these things? Thanks to social media, the discussion is very much alive and it is easy to see the fallacies of human cognition – and also my own fallacies. It is easy to see my own confirmation bias on social media. When you become aware of it, it is not easy to unsee it. I think that is a very good thing that we are becoming aware of the complexity of problems relating to the human condition. Humans are imperfect. The human brain is imperfect and it evolved for other things, and not the society we are living in.

 

And how many of those answers is technology capable of providing? Do you find the direction the technology is taking comforting, or is it worrying for you?

 

The spread of information is accelerating, and I think things like ‘flat earthers’ and ‘anti -vaxxers’ are kind of a symptom of that hyper-acceleration. It is like the first time that people have come to understand that misinformation is really dangerous. So, it is a very big cause of alarm, about vigilance on how information is spread. But, when you think about it, the other side of the coin is that people are much more aware about social injustices, like black people’s history. In a history book called A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn has written an alternative look on history, talking about minorities’ struggle and the workers’ struggle in America. It was a fringe book – I think you would have to study political science to come across it – and I only learnt about it through reading Noam Chomsky. But now those things are becoming mainstream. Even huge corporations are joining the movement. I don’t know if we can say that they are really joining it, but at least they carry out some performative acts. I think that, when a huge company like Nike or something does that, these ideas become mainstream – and that’s thanks to technology.

 

What do you think about the series, Tales from the Loop, adapted from the visual world in your 2014 book?

 

I wouldn’t call it my show, but yeah, it is my childhood. Also actors and charac- ters saying things that are from the book – it’s really, really weird. I did some designs for the show, but I didn’t write the scripts or anything. I came up with the English translation as ‘the Loop’. I was so flattered that they kept the title. One thing I keep thinking about is that they talk about ‘the Loop’ and I came up with that. In Swedish, it is called ‘Slinga’, which is a very mundane name. Then I thought of what we would call that in English, and it’s ‘the Loop’. It has a slightly cooler sound than the Swedish ‘Slinga’. It’s what you could call a kindergarten, ‘slinga’. It’s kind of cool that it is set in the US because it creates a kind of distance between me and the show. But it’s still similar, with the Jacob character who grows these robots. It feels nice actually. It feels like a personal thing, but it doesn’t feel private. You cannot say much about my life from looking at the show – so, it’s not a documentary. But it feels personal, since it feels very much in harmony with my feelings when I was growing up. Well, it’s a little more vintage-looking than my real life. In the show, it even looks like the ’50s sometimes – primarily due to the monochromatic filter, the production designer and the cinematographer, Jeff Cronenweth. I think they have that kind of look. If you look at Never Let Me Go, it has the same kind of aesthetic, in terms of the ‘vintage-y’ feel. I think it’s smart for them to do it this way, instead of doing ’80s nostalgia. They went with a more post-war, mid-century vintage look – so, visually, it’s not very realistic... I mean, Sweden in the early ’90s, parts of it looked much more modern.

 

In autobiographical storytelling, how do you draw the line between what’s ‘per- sonal’ and what’s ‘private’? Do you think the story would come across as more gen- uine if it’s personal but not private?

 

I think it’s the other way around. Everybody can be private, but not everybody can be personal. To write down what I had for breakfast – that’s private, but not very personal. Or ‘I hate my dad because he said these words when I was a kid’. That is private because it is true. I think it is harder to make personal something real, like the relationship with your father, rather than just giving the facts. Being private is just writing down facts about my life.

 

What are you working on these days?

 

I am working on a new book, or potentially a new series of images. But I hope it is going to become a book – although I have not started writing anything yet. I am also directing. Now I am doing a commercial and a music video, and I am trying to learn how to direct. I am not sure if I would be able to direct anything like my own story... But that would be the goal, I think – to be able to transition to another dimension. I want to use time as an element in my storytelling and I want to put music in there. These are the things you cannot put into a book.

 

 

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