Conversation with the artists Alexander Rynéus and David Torstensson

The films “The Story Machine” by Alexander Rynéus and “Being Right” by David Torstensson will have their premiere during the triennial at various locations throughout Småland. At Kalmar Art Museum, they will be shown on a rolling schedule from September 2 to September 17. In connection with this, the two artists meet for a conversation about their practices, themes, and how they relate to places and people's life stories.

Alexander RynéusThe Story Machine (2023) revolves around storytelling, delineations, sorting, and preservation through encounters with various people around Hylte municipality. A drifting film that, through small events and moments in life, highlights the role of storytelling in a place with a factory that produces paper for newspapers and their stories worldwide. A film that circulates around storytelling, delineations, sorting, and preservation through encounters with various people around Hylte municipality.

Alexander Rynéus' practice often centers on a place, but perhaps more importantly on personal encounters with people and their lives in these places. By primarily using documentary film as a medium and method, he approaches the participants' individual stories while simultaneously examining the place within a broader historical perspective. He creates multifaceted portrayals in communities that are in the midst of significant changes, and the projects are often the result of multi-year processes. Through the time perspective, he inscribes himself into the films, and together with viewers and participants, a broader historiography is activated. Where there may also be space for existential and local political layers, sometimes with a situationally based underlying humor.

In David Torstensson's essay filmBeing Right (2023), a father's involvement in a small communist vanguard party is examined in relation to his free church family background. The film tests through a narrative voice how a theological perspective can help to redefine the father's political legacy. Two letters play a central role, wherein the father early in his engagement states thatto continue fighting, one must be strong, but I am not. What forces propel the father's struggle and our historiography forward? And what could it mean to instead pause at the point where our bodies request it?

Being Right constitutes one half of the two-part essay film project “Late Arrival,” which is based on individual examples of Christian and communist organization in a Småland context. During the Småland Triennial, Torstensson is working on the project's second part, called Reading Society, where he tests artistic and pedagogical strategies to measure closeness and distance to the revivalist movement known as åkianerna. The movement is said to have collectivized their farms in the late 18th century to serve God full-time.