Elverket has been resurrected as a venue that will offer "immersive cultural experiences". It is, of course, a matter of time. Now the art must be experienced, it must be consumed, it must offer a trick and be easy to understand. Of course, you want to dislike this. You want to think back to the time (last autumn) when you were instead standing here, under the direction of Dramaten, with a glass of red wine during the intermission of "Hamlet". Or on a theme day about Strindberg, Bergman and Norén's relationship to the Jewish. That Dramaten could no longer afford to keep Elverket and that we got this instead.
You want to dislike the fact that the first thing you encounter nowadays is a shop that offers exactly what you think it should offer: some nicely designed games and interior gadgets, small things that should signal good taste without being too showy, too niche or geeky. Books that people who don't read books put in their built-in bookshelves, objects that exist to bring harmony to a room. Here is the terminus of culture, one wants to think: as something that exists solely to signal or to (easily) entertain. A classy Yatzy, anyone?
Here, of course, you can also find posters with the opening artist, who is exactly who you think it should be: Lars Lerin. Nothing wrong with him, but with three of his own art galleries, TV programs and books, one is tempted to wonder: how much can Lars Lerin take in Sweden?
For the premiere of this giant investment, they have enlisted the help of Sara Broos (who made the documentary "För dig naken"), who created a narrative story about Sweden's greatest artist. In "The Dark Light" we get to follow Lerin as a young man in VÀrmland, the exclusion and the path to art. Thankfully, the well-made and wistful film does not end happily and it feels invigorating, a small resistance in a story and in a wider sense to today's craze for stories about overcoming difficulties, all to become a maxed out (and productive) human being.
Still, I can't shake the feeling that "immersive art experiences" are mostly a Cosmonova for adults. And really, there's nothing wrong with that - Cosmonova's film selection is really beyond all criticism when you've passed the adult stage and no longer want to see documentaries about working dogs or the secrets of the sea adapted for six-year-olds. (A little later this fall, there will also be a premiere for a more child-friendly "journey through the world of dinosaurs" at Elverket.)
The depressing thing is the feeling that it eats up another culture. That something as simple as a painting or a book is already actually immersive (at least when it's good): that it can make one forget time and space and become absorbed in something outside oneself. But it requires an attention that our contemporaries rarely have the time or leisure for.
The founders, Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson's production company Nexiko, are conspicuously humble. In the interview in this newspaper, CEO Lars Beckung says that it is in any case better than a gym, which has previously replaced cultural venues in Stockholm's inner city.
And at the same time, flexibility is promised in the future: the space must be able to be used for everything from film to theater and concerts.
The problem is probably only the demand for profitability, if this is not a display of the very patronage the bourgeois cultural policy is calling for. The interest in profit tends to reward a certain type of culture, the broad over the narrow; the familiar over the unknown.
But who knows, even scandals tend to attract ticket purchases. Maybe this is the theater's enfant terrible Angélica Liddell will splash anus on the audience in the future?
I am cautiously optimistic.
