1 October
Lars Bohman Gallery
Back to

Today the seagull is sitting on the top of the telephone pole, in the middle of Everything. Very annoyingly the pole ends right there, where the land and the ocean meets on the other side of the bay. At least they do when seen from my favorite spot in my favorite chair.

Somebody must have once made a mistake. It was either the man that built our terrace or the person who installed the telephone pole.

The seagull seems to be sitting there just to point out the miscalculation that has once been made.

I long for the wind.


Whatever that has to do with anything..


The bicycle is called Maraton and is just as old as I am. It was made at the AB J Benson factory in Malmö in the late 50's. Nobody has ever used it. It never got the life it was intended for.

When I found it at a flea-market in Vimmerby it was still sealed in its original folding paper, attached on it was a hand written note; “Fårhult” it said.


About the same time Maly Oudom Ma was born in the Kandal province in Cambodja. She never got the life she was intended for either. She never became a woman or a mother.

I met her gaze, still full of life but frozen in an eternal moment at the infamous Tuol Sleng concentration camp in Phnom Phen in February this year. The victims were interrogated, photographed and documented with an almost perverted accuracy before they were decapitated and left to decay in the Killing Fields.


The façade to a house somewhere in Sweden, consistent, silent and sealed.

It is the result of an idea of a brand new humanity in a brand new society: the modern society.

This is probably where I grew up, I don’t really recall anymore.


Maybe it’s like a mirror or a reflection in a glass or a window that carries another picture, another light, a different colour, a hope. Maybe it is That which binds everything together into One.

Or perhaps it is like life itself. Never one unity but more like a patch work of different occasions, encounters and impressions.

As usual I fail in my attempt to gather everything together. It just is what it is and I guess you all have just to deal with it as it is. And that, if anything, has to do with everything.


The evening has come. The moon has slowly worked its way over the mountains and all the way to the other side of the bay. The moon light has the same color as the steering pole underneath the Maraton logo.

I’m certain that Maly Oudom Ma easily would have ridden the bike all the way to the sharp edge of the horizon, had she been given the chance.


I feel the winds are getting stronger, at last.