North by Southeast Residency: Sam Smith on Gotland Island #2, History Lessons

Sam Smith is currently working with the community of Gotland Island in Sweden, as part of the Spaced North by Southeast program.

Sam Smith currently lives and works in London. Upcoming exhibitions include: Ways of Looking, Gallery of Contemporary Art, E-WERK, Freiburg; and Glasgow International 2016 at The Telfer Gallery. Recent projects include: Centro de Artes Visuais, Coimbra; Screen Space, Melbourne; De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam; Australian Centre for Moving Image, Melbourne; Sandefjord Kunstforening and Larvik Kunstforening, Norway; Jupiter Woods, London; and insitu, Berlin (all 2015); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; The Artists’ Film Biennial, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; The Royal Standard, Liverpool; and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (all 2014). He was selected for FOKUS 2015, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2015) and Les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid (2014-2015). From 2013 to 2014 he was part of the International Studio Programme at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.

Here, Sam shares an update from Gotland Island.

My second week at Baltic Art Center was spent laying ground work by diving into the deep history of this island. The first stop was the Gotland Museum in Visby. Here, the display is split over three levels and charts important periods in the island’s past starting with its ancient formation from sedimentary deposits during the Silurian age (443.8–419.2 million years ago) when the landmass was situated on the equator. Rooms cover topics including: the Bronze and Iron ages; Viking age; Hanseatic League; conversion to Christianity; civil war; and the bloody Danish invasion by Valdemar Atterdag in 1361.

Housed in the museum is the Spillings Hoard – the world’s largest Viking treasure find unearthed in 1999 – which consists of 67 kg of silver and 20 kg of bronze artefacts. Among the silver items are about 14,000 coins, mostly Islamic, which show the expansive trade routes of the time. There is whole room devoted to Viking picture stones, giant stone slabs filled with symbolic engravings that scattered the island as memorials to the dead.

The next day, after joining the local library and checking out a number of books on Gotland I started exploring the coastline immediately south of Visby. I took a long walk through the nature reserve Södra Hällarna, down the cliffs and along the pebble beach below. Inspired by the fossil displays at the museum and talking to Anna at the residency (herself an ardent fossil hunter and collector), I decided to devote the rest of the week to exploring some of the most fossiliferous parts of the island. I started at Rövar Liljas håla, a cliff face named after a famous 18th century felon where huge section of the bluish-grey marlstone cliff has broken away and large boulders litter the shoreline. Within these boulders, thousands of fossils stuck, exposing the history of life millions of years ago. Next, I drive about 35 minutes north to Ireviken and later, to the small fishing village of Lickershamn. Here I walk down the coast past Jungfrun (The Maiden), the tallest seastack on the island, and stumble across the Stuklint WWII bunker high up on the cliffs.

-Sam Smith