13 January 2007

the loud silence







If you take a car.
Drive for ten hours to the north from Stockholm.
Then take on your cross country skies.
And ski for about one hour, mostly up hill.
Then cross some creeks,
pass some scooter trails,
some sleeping bears.

If you do that.
And you are still alive.
You might end up in this place.

Here where the silence is more present than anywhere else.
Loud even.

Here it is just traces of civilisation
It is almost like one of those diseases,
one of those where the body is repelling a part of the body.

This is the repelled part.
A lost limb.

The place where our civilisation said:
–Hey, no one could possibly want to live there anyway…
We outsource it to somewhere closer.
And call it Skansen or whatever.
Then we have it within reach.
Safe and packaged.
Served.

But just like the sandwiches wrapped in plastic.
It doesn’t taste quite as good.
Not quite the same.

So every year
I come here, by car and skies.
Visiting the repelled part.

And I listen to the loud silence.



Photos and thoughts: christofer grandin

7 comments:

F said...

Yes, the silence can sometimes be really loud. You have really captured the essence of silence in the woods here. great!

/mats

Anonymous said...

I'm one of those that really enjoy the silence. You've captured it all so well, C!

Anonymous said...

You are the one Yngve to tell these
stories. Great stuff indeed.
I once drove 300km or more between Pitå and Jokmokk to Gällivare.
I met five or six cars and a dozen of raindeers. Thats all.
A huge part of Sweden is wilderness and forests. We could be 90 million here instead of just 9 million.
-urbano

Anonymous said...

Wonderful photos, I grew up mabye exactly there. Or somewhere around the corner.

Anonymous said...

ah, silence . . . .

this is my world and what I love, and I'm always so happy to see it captured so well. Many people can take this huge quite and make a noisy photograph from it. Ansel Adams comes to mind. God, I hate his photos. These are much better :)

Anonymous said...

pure and helpfull in presented loneliness...

Jeanette said...

Chris - have you ever thought of making a book - a combination of photos and poems? I might tell someone who have a publishing house - he could like it???

The load silence i know of, from where i come from the aurora speaks and can be heard clearly cause of the silence. I like it a lot but the Lapland melancholy takes over after one week ;)

Beautiful images

jeanette