Planet Gustaf Adolf

I‘ve just learned how to make planets from 360º photo panoramas. This is my first successful effort.



The picture is based on eight photos taken in Gustaf Adolfs Torg here in Gothenburg on the first sunny day in April (4th). I stitched them together with Photoshop’s panorama tool then used Photoshop’s Polar Cordinates distortion tool to make the planet.

See it also on my home page here:
http://thesupercargo.com/2011/04/10/planet-gustaf-adolf/

Frozen Seas and New Year 2011

Greetings! My very best wishes to one and all for a happy 2011 with all the success and achievements you may wish for yourselves. Here's one of the photos I took of Göteborgs-Posten's New Year firework display. I share more on my homepage at http://www.thesupercargo.com/2010/12/31/happy-new-year-2011/

Yesterday’s paper reported what the radio news had said the night before, that the sea was frozen right across the Kattegat. Thin ice to be sure. You couldn’t walk across and a passing ship or even the wind could beak it up. Still, the sea was frozen, frozen all the way to Denmark.

In the evening, a wind from the south got up and blew increasingly hard and all night. The temperature, which had been going up anyway during the day, continued to rise through the night, something it hasn’t done for weeks now.

Last time I looked, the thermometer stood at +4º C, and now the sun is up. I wonder if the seas are still frozen across to Denmark?

Here below is a photo of the frozen sea off the west coast of Hisingen, taken with the camera in my mobile phone on 26th December. More on my homepage here: http://www.thesupercargo.com/2010/12/26/walking-on-water/

When I Grow Up

The homeless people's magazine in Gothenburg is called Faktum. It's the equivalent of The Big Issue and similar street paper's elsewhere. For this Christmas, Faktum has published a calendar for 2011 with large, black-and-white photos of 12 homeless people dreaming of the jobs they would like to have (would have liked to have had perhaps) "when they grow up". The sequence of photos is called "När jag blir stor" which translates exactly as "When I grow up".

The photographer is Patrik Andersson, a son of Gothenburg now living in New York, who has made a name for himself with high fashion, commercial and celebrity photography. He's photographed the likes of Bill Clinton, Mick Jaggar, Jennifer Lopez & Kate Moss. This commission (which he is doing pro bono) is a bit out of his usual way, but he brings a clear eye to it even so.



The subjects are photographed dressed in the clothes or together with props suggesting their dream profession, but the pictures are much more portraits of real individuals than this suggests. (For example this to the right - a man who would be king.)

All twelve photos are currently on display in the central square (Gustaf Adolfs Torg) in Gothenburg, where most of my illustrative pictures were made. Here to the left is a picture of the exhibition in the square.

The calendars are being sold, at 150 Swedish kronor per each, by the same homeless men and women who sell Faktum (and who have acted as Patrik Andersson's models). You can view all the photos, and buy a copy of the calendar over the Internet from Faktum's homepage here (but you'll need to read Swedish - or trust Google's translation engine to give you a fairly accurate idea of what you're doing!)

And here below is a picture of my own copy (still in it's plastic cover till 1st January). As you see, in this illustration I'm trying to be creative and not just reproduce the front cover photo. (Bertil Johansson, 74; Dream job: Priest; Homeless since 1994.) The two pictures here are of the same subject, the right taken with a flash, the left taken without.



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Related links

Faktum on the Internet at http://www.faktum.nu/

Patrik Andersson's homepage at http://www.patrikandersson.com/index.html

The homepage of the International Network of Street Papers at http://www.street-papers.org/

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Visit my main blog at http://www.thesupercargo.com/

Winter

This entry has been in the planning for weeks now, so long, in fact that in any country closer to the equator, winter has long turned to spring. Fortunately (well, depending how you look at it) winter is still very palpable up here in the north. Last week my wife and I spent a happy few days away visiting our old haunts up in Sundsvall on Sweden’s north east coast, and there the snow was piled high.

Sundsvall is a bit out of the geographical reach of this blog, but actually has a number of historical connections with Gothenburg which allow me to feel happy including some talk about the town, and some pictures taken up there last week. First of all, Sundsvall was founded by the same king who founded Gothenburg (Gustaf II Adolf – the Gustavus Adolphus of English language history books). Then Sundsvall’s industrial development in the late 1800s was stimulated by many of the same Anglo-Scot-Swedish families that first built their fortunes in Gothenburg (the Dickson’s in particular).


And then, of course, we lived up there for ten years, moving to Sundsvall from Gothenburg in 1987 and back to Gothenburg again in 1998.

But to get back to the Gothenburg and the west coast, winter here has been marked by some very variable weather. We have had some snow, but not really enough to get excited about. What we’ve had instead are cold snaps that have taken the temperature down well below freezing, often quite quickly.

Being a coastal city and built around a sizeable river, Gothenburg has a generally mild, and often damp climate. When I first moved back here after the 10 years or so in Sundsvall, I was enchanted by the sound of the rain falling. You don’t have a lot of that up in Sundsvall which has a relatively dry climate for all that it faces the Gulf of Bothnia. Of course Gothenburgers did think I was a bit daft when I told them how much I was enjoying the sound of rain … and of course my enjoyment wore off after about six months of unremitting rainfall.

The point I’m trying to make here is that a damp climate, especially one in which a snow fall is followed by a temperature rise be it ever so slight, tends to fill the city with mists and fogs. When these coincide with a snap temperature drop, the result is hoarfrost. This winter I’ve not seen the most dramatic hoarfrost of my life (I can remember winter days with much thicker, longer spikes of frost), but it’s been pretty dramatic even so. Sufficient to get me out and about with the camera as soon as there’s a suggestion of the sun breaking through.


Our local park, Keiller’s Park, is a happy hunting ground on these days, but even just leaning out my window can make me cheerful about what I can catch in my viewfinder.


The whole extended family spent Christmas with my brother and sister-in-law out at Tjuvkil near Marstrand. A wonderful spot. They were house-sitting for friends who were otherwise engaged. (Conducting a tiger safari in India I think it was!) The house in question is a youth hostel/b&b in the summer months, but was unbooked now, so we took it over. My godson Victor is 6 going on 7, and now highly suspicious of the existence of Santa Clause.

Now, in Swedish houses, Santa (or Tomten as he’s called) is actually expected to put in an appearance, and this year was no exception. The knock came at the door in the early evening of Christmas Eve (as it should do by Swedish tradition). The Old Man – or the Anthropomorphic Personification if you prefer – was welcomed into the warm and ushered into the living room where the presents (earlier concealed by a curtain) were now to be found.


Victor was quite convinced that our Tomte was not the real Tomte. Everyone else in the house, though, doggedly stuck to the fiction, asking after the reindeer, offering a glass of something and a bowl of rice porridge, thanking the Tomte for including us in his busy day, and eventually poor Victor started to doubt his own convictions. Next year will be more difficult, I suppose. He was happy enough with his presents, though.

The night was cold and dark – we were far enough away from the lights of the city to see something of the stars. Not like being out at sea, of course, but still. There was Orion and there was the Great Dipper – the only two constellations I can identify with confidence – and there was the Moon and Venus so the heavens were in order and all was right with the world.

The weather was cold at Christmas, a few degrees below freezing, and there was ice on puddles and fringing the rocks in fresh water lakes, but the sea hadn’t frozen yet. That came a few days later, just after New Year.

On the 5th January we decided to wrap up warm, take our cameras and visit the southern archipelago. The Swedish word for archipelago is skjärgård (say “sharegourd”) which sounds less high-faulting. In origin it’s the same word as English “skerry”, and though there are plenty of low-lying boulders and jagged rocks which tear up the sea (and tear the bottoms out of unwary boats), there are also plenty of little islands, so you can’t call them skerries. Not in my opinion anyway. So we’re stuck with archipelago – like it or lump it.


Gothenburg has two archipelagos, one lying north of the river mouth and reaching up towards the islands of the Bohus coast, the other lying to the south, stretching down towards Halland. For reasons I’ve never bothered to explore, while the northern archipelago is its own administrative area, the southern archipelago is a part of the Gothenburg municipality. This has the distinct advantage that you can travel 90 minutes out to the farthest of the islands on the public ferry transports for the same flat rate fare you would otherwise pay for a ten minute trip into the town.

Of course, you have to pay again to get back home, but it still feels like very good value.

We took tram number 11 out to the harbour at Saltholmen and then the Vrångö ferry all the way out passed Styrsö and Donsö. (The Swedish word for island is ö.)


Bitterly cold. We could only manage to stand up on deck (gloves off to operate the camera) for about 10 minutes at a time. The cameras also became sluggish after a while, I suppose rechargeable batteries don’t manage so well at those temperatures. (Certainly my mobile phone went into hibernation!)

The sun was incredible, bathing everything in this golden, almost syrupy light. It looked like it ought to be warm, but it was not. And the sea was also somehow syrupy. Thick.

There was almost no wind, except the wind the ferry made passing, so the water was unruffled except by our wake, and the wake itself didn’t seem to churn up the surface of the water nearly as much as usual. The water settled quickly back into unbroken billows that reflected the sunlight, passing ships, islands, distorting them as in the mirrors of a funfair.


It was a cold journey, a Cold Journey to the South as I wrote in my photblog, but very beautiful, uplifting.

I could write more, but I think I’ll stop there. This blog has become somewhat irregular, but I shall continue with it from time to time. If you want a more frequent update on my doings, gentle reader, look at my photoblog (mentioned above) or at my more-or-less weekly musing on the art and discipline of writing At the Quill. You are also welcome to visit my new home page where I’m trying to tie together and link up my disparate Internet personas. The home page addres is www.thesupercargo.com

Välkommen!

Keiller’s Park and Ramberg

My local park, just down the street, is a place of trees, rocks, wind and colour. I see it daily from my window, and in this season, daily see the colours shift and change. The sunlight and the wind, but also the seasons. Autumn is advancing.


The park surrounds our local not-quite-a-mountain that is crowned by a flagstaff with halyards that snap and slap in the wind. On flag days and high days, the flagstaff bends and sings as our blue and yellow flag flies out in the wind.

The not-quite-a-mountain is Ramberg. Berg as in mountain, Ram as in ramn or ravn, the Old Norse name for raven. Either because the berg was once a home for ravens or because it looks raven-black against the sky. Or, I suppose, both.

I go with the raven-black myself, since Ramberg can still look very black against the rising autumn sun, but I’ve never yet seen a raven there. (Though I’m told they used to be common on the southern side of the mountain and still sometimes do build nests.)

Why “not-quite-a-mountain”? Well, I know the definition of “mountain” is very subjective, but the highest point is only 87 metres above sea level. That doesn’t seem really high enough. On the other hand, there are no other peaks higher than that close by, and it’s so rocky and some parts of it are so sheer it gives the impression of being higher than it is.

Ramberg has been here a while, long enough to have a Viking name. The park, though, that’s just a hundred years old. We celebrated its birthday earlier in the month, which is when many of these photos were taken.

A hundred and two years ago the owner, James Keiller, presented Ramberg and the land around to the Gothenburg city council. His wish was for the land to be used in perpetuity as a park for the citizens of Gothenburg. It took a couple of years to get the park in order, but the grand opening was in October 1908, and that’s the anniversary we have just celebrated.

James Keiller was the son of Alexander Keiller, a Scottish immigrant to Gothenburg, who started an iron foundry here in the 1840s. By the end of the century, the foundry had grown into Götaverken, the largest of the shipyards in the city and briefly (early in the 20th century) the largest shipyard in the world.

The foundry started life on the south bank of the river, west of the old city centre, but the Keillers saw the potential in the marshy land on the opposite side of the river around Ramberg. They bought the land cheaply, drained it and built their shipyards. Later, secure in his wealth and property, James Keiller could play the role of liberal patron and donated the bits of land he couldn’t use on the rocky shoulders of the little mountain.

Ramberg has two peaks, the flagstaff peak with its wide views over city and the river out to the sea. The lower peak is called Ättestupen (roughly “the relative drop”) in the belief that it was from there the Vikings used to throw their elderly relatives. This is probably a 19th century invention. Probably. Hopefully.


Between the two peaks is the widest, flat shoulder on Ramberg where the park itself was laid. In fact, long before the Keillers appeared on the scene, housing and boat construction and the demand for firewood had denuded Ramberg of its trees. The local people’s practice of letting their cattle and sheep browse on the common land meant that no trees grew back. It wasn’t until the land was enclosed by private landlords that trees started to return.

In the 1850s another immigrant entrepreneur, Peter Dickson, gave money so a local school could buy trees to plant in the area that is now the park. After Keiller’s donation, this forested area was re-fashioned into an “English” park (though with Swedish “national romantic” elements). Most of the trees on the wild sides of Ramberg, though, the ones I admire daily from my window, they are self-seeded. Birch, beech pine and oak. As you see from these pictures, I was particularly taken by the oak trees when I went out, the day before the celebrations, to take a few pictures.

In the event, the celebrations lasted three days, and we had decent weather for at least one and a half of them.

On Friday at midday the celebrations kicked-off with speeches (among others, from David Keiller, descendant of James and Alexander), and the unveiling of a new sculpture for the park.


The sculptor calls them “The Three Graces” and they are supposed to call to mind the cranes that used to work in the harbour and the ship yards. At least a couple of the older people who were among the crowd at the unveiling prefer to think of them as workers from the shipyard, which is a fair interpretation. Personally, I think they look like giraffes.


There was a piper – bagpiper that is – (who had some problems starting and finishing his tunes) and a very serious looking drummer. A whole crowd of people from around about including kids from the local primary school who had been “doing a project” on the park and the Keillers.

The sun came out and, all in all, it was a nice day.

Celebrations continued the day after at the top of the hill

At 6 p.m. on Saturday 4th October the weather gods decided they were tired of holding back. The wind picked up and short but intense rain showers blew horizontally in our faces. There was to be a second opening ceremony. The previous midday’s affair was obviously too soft for real Gothenburgers.


So we waited, as the rain lashed us and the wind snapped the flag overhead, for Göran Johansson, to open the proceedings. The local (non-socialist) press like to describe Göran Johansson as “Gothenburg’s strong man”. As the leader of the Social Democrats on the city council, he’s run the city for years and is a canny politician.

He’s also a good public speaker (when he has a script). I’ve heard him a few times and his speech on this occasion was quite up to par. In particular he stressed the important contribution to Gothenburg made by immigrants throughout its history. (This is an important truth that at least one extreme right-wing political party are trying to fudge. The Sweden Democrats have called for Gothenburg to be “returned” to its natural 100% Swedish state. They may well get a toe-hold in the local council at the next election.)

Then Göran Johansson had to ad lib in response to some questions from the master of ceremonies, Harald Treutiger (a TV personality), and that didn’t work out quite as well. (Repetitive.)


The opening ceremony also involved Göran Johansson helping to rivet two pieces of iron together. In memory of the shipyards I think and in recognition of his own past as a metal worker. By then, it was nearly dark and a light show that had been set up on the mountain was starting up. Cold, wet and hungry, I decided the celebrations could get along without me, so I headed on home.

I missed the male voice choir of retired ship builders from Götaverken (though I think I caught some of them in my photos), I missed breakdancing by Octagon Crew, I missed Åsa Fång singing Piaf and someone else walking on fire. I missed the fireworks (well, I saw a corner of them from my window, but I’m sure they’d have been more dramatic from up on the hill.

I was happy to get indoors.

The next day it rained pretty much all the time. Coward that I am I stayed home in the warm. I did make coffee for my parents-in-law though, when they came by. They were both up on the hill for day three as they had been for days one and two. For both of them, but especially for Ulla, my mother-in-law, Keiller’s Park and Ramberg have an importance that goes beyond my mild curiosity and current pleasure. Ulla grew up in Rambergstan, the part of town closest to the west side of Ramberg, and went to primary school in Kvillestan, on the east side of the park, climbing the hill and walking through the park in both direction twice a day.


I don’t suppose any of the kids who go to Ramberg school now make the same journey. Their parents drive them, I expect. The park has a reputation for not being entirely safe. There was a murder committed here ten years ago (satanic, homophobic) and the reputation hangs over the park still.

A pity. There’s so much beauty here and so much variety.

If you liked these photos and want to see more, welcome to my photo site at Ipernity. Click here or on the photo below.

The Hollow Woman and a Three Legged Buddha

An open air exhibition of modern sculpture at Pilane on Tjörn

At the risk of being permanently associated with open air sculptures, this blog and accompanying illustrations are all about a visit to the island of Tjörn [sounds like shurn], a drive of about an hour and half north of Gothenburg on the Bohus coast. Tjörn is both an island and its own municipal area (eller kommun på ren svenska). Like Borås – see my previous entry – Tjörn has been trying to promote itself as an attractive place to visit for the culturally minded tourist. In my opinion, they’ve made a better job of it.

Tjörn is the home of the Scandinavian watercolour museum, and has been cleverly building on the success of the museum for a number of years. This summer, for the second year, the island is playing host to an exhibition of modern sculpture at the iron-age grave fields at Pilane [PEE-lan-eh – sort of].

The large-in-a-small-scale landscape of the Swedish west coast is a beautiful setting for the pieces that have been chosen for exhibition, though it probably helped on the day of my visit that the sun was shining, the sky was blue, the clouds were fluffy, white and flying and the breeze was warm. The sculptures are distributed among the low stone circles and grass-overgrown settings of the graves, and there was a peaceful, timeless atmosphere that was only made more apparent by all the enigmatic faces of the black and grey sheep grazing the grass or chewing the cud all about the statues.

You walk and you look and most of all, you touch. The surfaces, especially of the stone sculptures invite your hand. Different stones, different finishes, different textures. The sun warmed slightly irregular flat surface inside the slit of Knut Wold’s “Pilane Sten”, for instance, feels exactly like living skin.

The most extreme example of a sculpture inviting human contact, though, is one I’ve been thinking of as “The Hollow Woman”, though I see from the Pilane Internet site that the sculptor, Marit Lyckander, calls it “Helt i VIII” (= Completely in VIII). Inside a stone boulder is a space. You can enter the boulder through a slit door (if you’re not too fat that is – I couldn’t get in). Inside you find a hollowed out shape into which you can put your arms, legs, breasts (it’s a woman, ok?) and face – there’s a slit to look out of. You become the body that has been freed from the stone.

Scattered around, up on the rocks and variously over the grazing land, these figures contemplate the scenery, one another, the visitors. Neither specifically men or women, rather both genders in one. Androgynous. Human. Thoughtful, bored, meditative, afraid, listening, despairing, amused, questioning. The faces and poses tell different stories depending on how you look at them. I thought of them as Silent Figures, but the sculptor (Hanneke Beaumont from the Netherlands) gives some of the figures names, “Ennui” is one, and others are just “Bronze #7”.

Over the rocks and juniper bushes, out of the corner of your eye, you see glimpses of a massive leg, or two. Or three. The largest of the sculptures at Pilane is the “Three-Legged Buddha” by Zhang Huan. Apparently, this was first exhibited last winter at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. I’ve seen Zhang Huan’s work before. He was included in the exhibition of modern Chinese Art at Louisiana in May 2007. I remember most the video sequence of him standing in a Tibetan river, repeatedly stamping the water with a giant stamp engraved with the Chinese character for “China”. This three-legged Buddha is a similar commentary on Chinese imperialism, cultural and otherwise. Shards of Buddhist statues collected and rearranged in an unnatural form. One foot rests on the Buddha’s head – for a Buddhist from south-east Asia that must be a blasphemy on a par with a drawing of Mohammed for a Moslem (though I can’t imagine any Buddhist trying to murder the artist in retaliation). Religion overthrown. And yet something remains – half buried, still the Buddha’s meditation is undisturbed.

When we got to Pilane on Saturday, (it was an outing for my wife and a friend, too), the car park was filling up, but at no point did the exhibition seem crowded. The sculptures are widely distributed, (though each is in line of sight of at least one other), so there is never a feeling of being crowded. Although I sometimes had to wait for people to get out of shot, if I chose I could easily take pictures that placed the sculptures in a wide, empty landscape.

Inevitably, I find myself drawing comparisons between the efforts to showcase modern sculpture at Tjörn and in Borås. Both are displaying monumental sculpture in open-air settings, one in the countryside, one in a town. Both have abstract and representational sculptures, both have sculptures in stone and bronze. Both have a really big statue as a feature.

So what’s to choose between them? Borås is free, but you have to make a paid phone call for each statue to get more information; Tjörn’s exhibition costs 40 Swedish crowns a head, but you get a little illustrated booklet (in Swedish), to take with you. Tjörn’s exhibition has a very nicely made Internet site, text in Swedish, with lots of pictures; Borås has an internet site, but it’s not very extensive and a bit boring. On the other hand, the recorded messages on the telephone for the Borås exhibition give some of the artists an opportunity to talk about their work, which is a nice touch.

No, the real difference it seems to me is that the Borås exhibition is just nowhere near as visitor friendly as the exhibition at Tjörn. I paid 40 crowns, but I saw all the sculpture at Pilane. In Borås, I saw less than half of the sculptures, and even though I didn’t have to pay anything, I still felt cheated!

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!