Coming to Rejmyre as a stranger, I found myself immediately invested in questioning the role of the glass factory as Rejmyre's reason for existence and simultaneously as representative of the burden of being dependent on a shrinking industry. Inevitably what strikes anyone entering Rejmyre's main street is a romantic notion of a small village 'glass town' now turned tourist attraction of the post-industrial era. In "Reijmyre Glasbruk 1810 - 1926, 1932 - " I erected a gravestone for the factory at a memorial site in the local cemetery, among the family graves of its workers. I left the end date open, implying that perhaps it had already passed.
"Har du hört????" (Have you heard????) was a group intervention that re-edited and altered the local bulletin board where everyday announcements are hung. As outside observers it was clear that the richness of the announcements called for an intervention that did not aim at adding new elements or changing the overall look of the board, but asked for the addition of layers of absurdity, humor and wonder.
In an effort to shift focus towards working with Rejmyre as site, I inhabited the inside of the old glass mill, in an empty space that was once used for storage. Here I carried out four 'urges' to try to become familiar with the space. "The four urges (extractions and imaginations of a place)", with four subtitles: "Sound recorded with no-one in the room", "Segment with surface removed (194 grams of dust)", "The death of a glassworker" and "Imprints of a wall", I investigated the materiality of layers of dirt, the residue of wall paint turning slowly to dust and the soundscape of an empty room where sound was echoing from the floors underneath and the roof above. In the smallest room, farthest away from the exit, a mass of blood-red and bone-white glass shards from the factory was piled on the floor to satisfy my imagination of a past, fatal event taking place in these deserted spaces.
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