North by Southeast Residency: Sam Smith on Gotland Island #3, 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.

As I swung around the half way point of my time on Gotland I started to drive further outward from my central Visby vantage. The landscapes moved under my feet and past the windows of the little BAC van, droving under extreme opposites: bright sunshine and heavy snow storms.

Easter brought quiet to the BAC building with Helena and Anna both on holiday. But by contrast there were more and more tourists on the island, not enough to make a true difference, but I glimpsed some of the madness of summer when I’m told around half a million people swarm here. On the Thursday before Easter, it’s a local tradition to march through the streets dressed as witches, donning headscarves and painting on freckled rosy cheeks. I went out to watch some of the estimated 5,000 people walk down the cobbled streets to the park near the university at the bottom of town.

I drove up to Snäck to discover a Brutalist looking apartment building facing the sea. A few tourists on mopeds snapped pics of the view and the limestone cliffs loomed overhead. The beach and swimming peers, obviously summer attractions, were desolate and closed up. About 15 minutes inland I strolled around one of the few mines that has been turned into a public swimming pool. Again, there were no signs of people and it was hard to tell if the mine was actually back in action.

At the end of the long weekend I ventured south east to the opposite coast, my first time on that side of the island. I found an old limestone kiln next to a disused mine and walked along the coast at Sysne and Grogarnsberget nature reserve, looking for fossils and passing three different WWII bunkers. At Folhammar there is a large cluster of limestone ‘sea-stacks’ which the Gotlanders call rauks, these ancient geological formations rise at various points along the coastline. On the drive home I stopped at Gålrum Viking grave field where boat shaped groups of boulders outline the old grave sites.

-Sam Smith