Pinocchio in Borås

[Pronunciation note: Borås. Say ‘bore-awe’ and put an ‘s’ sound on the end.]

Borås is a little town. (The people of Borås would probably want me to call it a city. They insist that the proper name is Borås Stad; they passed a resolution in the council making it so. But calling a place a “city” in the local by-laws doesn’t actually make it one.)

So, Borås is a small place that nowadays is little more than a dormitory town for Gothenburg. Once it was an important textile centre; weaving and spinning cloth for the Swedish market and for export, but that was then. Today, only the shell remains. Some of the local schools offer tailoring and design programmes, some Swedish textile and clothing designers are based here, there are a number of clothing chains and mail-order clothing stores with warehouses and offices in and around Borås. Borås folk, especially women, seem more fashion conscious that the average Swede, and (for Swedes) remarkably well-dressed. And there is a museum reflecting the glories of the past.

Other than that …

During the summer now, Borås is hosting an exhibition of modern sculpture. Exactly why they are doing this is a bit of a mystery, but it seems to have to do with the town’s curious decision to buy a nine metre high painted bronze statue of Pinocchio by the American pop-artist Jim Dine.

Pinocchio, yes. The wooden puppet, who comes alive, whose nose grows longer for every lie he tells, who goes on a journey to find out how to become a real boy. Him. This spring the story has been a gift to Swedish newspaper columnists (and bloggers) with nothing else top write about. Trying to find a connection, I mean. Does the Pinocchio story have a particular appeal to the people of Borås? Are they rather wooden? Thick as two short planks? Are they, like the wooden puppet, searching for a place in the world where they will be taken seriously as real people? Are their noses particularly long? If not, does that mean they tell fewer lies than other Swedes? How likely is that, given that the town’s previous anthropomorphic personification was a knallehandlare, a peddler?

Some Swedish journalists and bloggers have compared the Pinocchio statue to the Eiffel Tower. Nobody knew what good the Tower would do when it was built, but look, more than 100 years on it is a world renowned symbol for Paris! OK. But Paris was still Paris before the Tower (capital of France, major European city, place of trade industry and culture ...) With or without Pinocchio, Borås is still, well, Borås.

There’s a Swedish gesture. If you’ve fooled someone, or witnessed someone fooled, and you want to draw attention to the fact, you can ‘make a long nose’. Put the tips of the fingers and thumb of your right hand together, touch the end of your nose with them and ostentatiously pull your hand out from your face, going “Nä-nä” the while.

I don’t like to think of myself as having a closed mind, and my regional bus pass had 24 hours left to run, so on Tuesday I decided to take myself off to Borås and see for myself the new attraction, and the rest of the sculpture exhibition.

If you are tempted to do the same, here’s a tip: Go on the Internet and print out the map of the town which has the sculptures marked. Go here. (The link should work and map should be available till the 21st September 2008.) Why? Because this is the only place you are going to get any help finding the sculptures. Borås is not a big town, and the sculptures are generally quite monumental (though none come up even to Pinocchio’s hips), but trust me, you can’t find them just by wandering around. That was what I tried to do.

Another interesting fact about Borås. The only tourists they expect are the ones who come to study at the technical college. It must be so: that’s where they have located the tourist information centre. Not at the bus station, not at the rail station, not in the town square, not near the town’s main hotel, not even near the town (“city”) hall, but across the road from the college. I found it, now, on an internet map. On Tuesday when I was in Borås, though, I asked several people, and got some friendly (and contradictory) directions, I never did find it.

(Oh, and a tip for the people in Borås, why not tell Eniro that you have a technical college? They don’t know - see right!)

The first sculpture I came across was near the train station. It was (is I suppose) called “Whirlwind”, and looked as though it had been made from several lengths of different coloured hosepipe. The light was very dull, so I didn’t take a picture, which I regret in retrospect. Nearby I found a metal sign which identified this as sculpture number 16. The metal sign also identified the sculptors (a pair in this case). And then there was a telephone number to call for more information about the sculpture.

A telephone number.

Well, this is the mobile age, and did have my cell-phone with me, but I wasn’t sure how much money was left on the card, and there was no indication how much the phone call would cost me.

Having carried out some investigative journalism (ahem) I can inform you, dear reader, that the price is “the price of a normal local telephone call”. (I got this information by phoning the people who organise the service, a company called "On Spot Story".) It’s a clever idea. Saves the museum, or whoever is organising the exhibition the cost of printing information, but it could so easily cost 10 or 20 crowns a call and be a method for the organisers to help finance their exhibition.

Hi! Borås people! It would intelligent to tell the public how much a call is going to cost. Not doing so sends the usual message when there’s no price tag on something you have in your shop window: If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.

So on I walked. This statue of a meditating head and shoulders rising out of the water of the town’s little river (Viskan) was the next sculpture I came across. Actually, this one’s been in Borås for four or five years, so I’m not sure whether it’s part of the exhibition or not. (I couldn’t find any metal signs.) But it’s a nice statue and someone had crowned it with a wreath of flowers (now a bit withered). I sat on the steps down to the river opposite the statue and as the sun obligingly broke through the clouds, I took some pictures.

Walking further along the river, I crossed over to the park on the other side when I saw this monumental stone quadrolith. (Well, it’s not a monolith, is it! There are four blocks of stone. What would you call it?)

It has a name – apparently it’s called “Dogon”. I don’t know why. (OK, now I know. I phoned the number and heard the sculptor explain that he was inspired by the masks of the Dogon people of Mali. I do actually see something of a similarity.) It was dull again, so my photos were dull too, but I’ve tried to brighten them up with some Photoshop tinkering. What do you think?

The next statue was a giant rabbit with blind eyes. Then there was a twisted yellow shape that looked plastic but turned out to be metal lacquered like a car. And then there was a corkscrew of metal tubing, square in cross-section which I found quite fascinating and which I think has the shape of an eye in either end. But maybe I’m just seeing things.

There were several more statues in the park along with the twisted eye, but as they were not monumental, not abstract and not ‘pop’, I assumed they weren’t part of the exhibition. I did like the two life-size children playing on a see-saw, though it crossed my mind to wonder whether such a statue would be acceptable nowadays. The children just pre-teen and are naked (or should that be nude?) Thinking about the recent political censorship of photos of nude (naked?) teenagers in Australia and the general hysteria over child pornography. See my other blog on Ipernity for more on this.

Eventually, I found my way to Pinocchio. He’s on a roundabout on the edge of the town centre, striding in towards the town. A local pizzeria has taken advantage of his presence to become the Pinocchio Pizzeria – complete with some much more cheerful representations of the Disney character. Because, frankly, Jim Dine’s sculpture doesn’t seem very cheerful. He doesn’t seem to have much character at all. Blank expression, little eyes, long nose. Well, more character than the Eiffel Tower, I suppose, but still. This little girl was playing about his feet with her brother, under the watchful eyes of their father. She seemed to be having fun – and to be oblivious to the giant metal monster towering over her.

I ended up seeing eight or nine sculptures in the exhibition, but the Internet (go here) lists 28 or so. So, again, if you are planning to visit the exhibition, print out the map in advance.

Oh, and a footnote to those phone-in recorded messages about the sculptures. They’re only worth calling if you understand spoken Swedish. Yes, there’s a message in English and German as well as Swedish, which tells you when to input the code number for more information about a given statue, but the information itself is only in Swedish. The exhibition organisers obviously don’t expect any visitors who are not Swedes. Way to go, guys. That’ll really put Borås on the international map!