The Latest at Goethe

Kiruna, Sweden is the home of 18,000 people and under the city lies the world’s largest iron ore deposit. Yet now the city is threatened with collapse and there are plans to move it. It is a decision with great economic and social consequences. An artistic viewpoint will have much to reveal. By Anne-Kathrin Lange

Kiruna is situated 120 kilometres north of the Polar Circle making it Sweden’s northernmost city. In the summer, the sun shines for 50 days without interruption; for 20 days in the winter it never drops below the horizon. The city is a prime example of the cold, inhospitable north. The landscape in which it lies is characterized by grazing reindeer herds and endless expanses. Kiruna is not only a town in an extreme location; Kiruna also has the world’s richest iron ore deposits.

Such an iron ore deposit is a piece of luck for a mining company. The iron lode measures on average 4,000 by 80 metres and reaches to a depth of up to 1,500 metres. The state-owned enterprise Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara AB, LKAB for short, has been mining iron ore in Kiruna since 1900. Every year it mines 26 million tonnes of the ore and plans to increase this amount in coming years. At the moment, there is something standing in the mining company’s way, though: the city itself.

Photo gallery: A city undergoes change

Due to the massive mining operations, the ground to the south and north of Kiruna is already so gravely undermined that crevices have formed on the surface. These crevices are approaching Kiruna at a rate of five centimetres per day. As early as 2013, first structures will be acutely in danger of collapse. The only solution for LKAB: Kiruna has to be moved an entire four kilometres.

In 2003, LKAB made this proposal to the city in a 15-line letter. There were ensuing debates, civic participation and a number of different plans were made, but LKAB is and remains the region’s biggest employer and the inhabitants of Kiruna are dependent on the fate of the company. In 2007, a decision was finally taken to move entire neighbourhoods and their populations four kilometres away to a location outside the danger zone. But, because LKAB expects to find new ore deposits in many places, the debate about the new position of the city is still underway.

The various options for moving the city take little consideration of the fact that Kiruna lies in the middle of the traditional cultural region of the Sami people. The Sami are the indigenous people in the north of Scandinavia and live primarily from reindeer herding. “Modern technologies, whether iron ore mining or space research, are in conflict with the traditional cultural and economic regions of the Sami,” explains Rainer Hauswirth, head of the Goethe-Institut in Stockholm. “While the technicians and engineers gush about the broad, empty landscape, the speaker of the Sami Parliament showed us a map of the centuries-old reindeer paths. This dense network looks like a map of the Autobahn in the most densely populated region of Germany – but to southern eyes it is invisible.”

The plans for the city’s transformation with all of their utopian content motivated the Goethe-Institut, together with the Stockholm Konsthall C and Kiruna’s local cultural administration, to invite ten international artists to investigate on site and deal artistically with the results of their research. The title of the project is Kirunatopia. “Many art projects in recent years focus on big and megacities. We chose the opposite with Kirunatopia. Here in this remote town, the histories of its inhabitants and the conflicts between the stakeholders confront us with the major unsolved issues of our time,” according to Hauswirth. “There is no more obvious place than Kiruna where one can experience the shift of political power to economic actors who obey global market mechanisms. Here, artistic explorations and artistic insights can reveal a great deal.”

Lina Issa is one of the artists involved in Kirunatopia. She was born in Lebanon in 1981 and has lived and worked in Amsterdam since 2003. On 8 September she will rally 800 residents of Kiruna to form a three kilometre long red rope made of all sorts of red scraps of fabric along the line of the crack for a tug of war. “To me, the people in Kiruna are like a rope in a tug of war; they are being pulled back and forth between the interests of the city council, the parties and the LKAB. In the same way they are pulled back and forth between preserving the past and creating a new identity,” says Issa.

During her investigations and meetings with the people in Kiruna she learned a great deal about the fears of the population. “In the district of Ullspiren, which will be entirely evacuated and torn down, I met an elderly lady who told me of her concerns. She has to leave her house without knowing whether she can afford a new house. She doesn’t know if she will ever be able to pick flowers again on the meadow of her childhood.”

She is not alone: Lennart Lanntto, Kiruna’s cultural secretary, provided housing for the artist residencies in the scope of Kirunatopia and supported the Goethe-Institut with his contacts. His sphere of work during the transformation of Kiruna is, as he says, “everything having to do with art and old buildings.” In 2016, however, he himself will lose his workplace. The landmarked city hall in which he works cannot be moved for financial reasons, declared the LKAB. He, too, will have to move to a new building, three kilometres away from the old city hall.