COLLECTED TEXTS
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In recent years, several thoughtful and evocative texts have been written in connection with my exhibitions. I’ve chosen to gather them here, allowing you to explore the varied voices and perspectives that different writers have brought to my works and projects. Each text offers its own lens, a reflection, an interpretation, a dialogue with the pieces I've created.
The Verdure of Night (2025)
Peter Stridsberg appears in every image himself. Dressed in the same t-shirt and jeans throughout, he resembles a paper doll, one of those bearing only basic garments, onto which other clothes are pinned. The artist’s lightly dressed figure, placed within wintry landscapes, makes me instinctively uneasy. Quite simply, it looks cold.
The viewer’s impulse to identify with the figure in the landscape harks back to the late 18th century, when art began to concern itself in earnest with humanity’s relationship to the sensory world.
At that time, artists would place figures within landscapes not to act or tell a story, but merely to perceive. The most famous example is Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, where the lone figure stands atop a cliff, gazing out over the mist-veiled expanse.
Peter Stridsberg’s world of motifs is nature. Northern, Nordic nature. All of the exhibited images depict snowy winter landscapes. Some are captured in daylight, others in the darkness of night. They share two common elements: the presence of the artist, and a switched-on portable spotlight.
As I study the images, I begin to search for kinship with older landscape painting, perhaps because somewhat carelessly I assume that Stridsberg is working within a Romantic tradition. His back-turned figure in the beautiful, desolate landscapes suggests, at first glance, a familiar idea: the human exposed to the spirit of nature. But this assumption proves to be careless.
Instead, some scenes are bathed in sharp daylight, while the night scenes are lit as if we are stepping into them with a flashlight. The light source is in fact the spotlight — which also appears in the daytime images. Alongside the artist’s lightly dressed figure, it produces a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, a distancing that creates a beautiful, solemn play with the landscape motif.
Carl-Johan Olsson
Curator of 19th Century Painting
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden
Times of Transition (2025)
In the exhibition Brytningstider (Times of Transition), there is no constructed scenography, only nature serves as the backdrop. On the short wall of the exhibition room, a different scene has been transferred onto a photo wallpaper that, in large format, depicts another coastline. The seaside location is Skagsudde, Skeppsmalen, outside Örnsköldsvik. Skagsudde is a weather station featured in the Swedish marine weather forecast.
A mirror placed on a cliff reflects an image of nature that otherwise would not fit within the frame. The mirror is the only prop visible in the exhibition. A white-clad, lightly dressed figure stands with his back to the camera, gazing out over the sea. He sees what we see. He helps the viewer to look deeply into the image through his own gaze. What lies out there? Is it longing? A look toward the future? The figure senses the weather conditions with his body — a physical, sensory data collection, similar to the marine weather report, but without conveying the experience further. The landscape as a motif is shown as it is — but from a chosen perspective, a selected starting point. Have we chosen our current position, placed ourselves in a situation that forces us to break away from our familiar way of life? Collectively and partly unknowingly, lacking knowledge and understanding probably yes. Brytningstider suggests that something else is approaching. One era has passed; another is coming.
What is this transition?
Today, many of us are trying to relate to climate change — to remain calm, not to be overtaken by anxiety and fear. Many of us are doing what we can not to accelerate the change — and yet it is happening. It is ongoing climate change. Now, the task is to endure. Climate change leads to climate transitions.The time of transition could represent a new mindset, referred to by politicians and the media as the green transition. The green transition is supposed to lead us to a fossil-free society — yet with the same or even increased electricity consumption. It is a time of transition, an attempt to break from what is and step into something else.
“Something else” that might be an older kind of knowledge — one that has been pushed aside by the advance of technology. A knowledge that is no longer passed down to our children as we adopt urbanized life patterns.A knowledge of nature and of how we humans can live with nature, not off it.
And yet, we small but many have disrupted nature’s systems, thrown them off balance in pursuit of growth. We have blindly captured nature, or tried to control and tame it to fulfill our striving for economic capital. Stridsberg shapes nature into a backdrop that reminds us of our relationship with it. Mining and the forestry industry are one aspect; nature tourism is another. Our approach is an expectation that nature will perform for us — give us experiences that we can share digitally with others. We expect nature to show its best side on the specific day the calendar marks for hiking or skiing.
On that day, we hope for pleasant temperatures, the right amount of wind and cloud cover, to give us the experience we anticipated. Otherwise comes disappointment. It may have been too windy, too cold — it might even have rained (heaven forbid). Clouds and fog might obscure the view from a mountaintop, and waves might crash against the rocks with water that’s far too cold. Stridsberg’s light clothing remains, regardless of the weather.In the deepest snow, the white underwear is covered with blue jeans. No jacket, gloves, or hat. The body in the cold — a vulnerable position. In the now-proposed geological epoch, the Anthropocene, it is human impact on Earth that governs the climate.
During the Great Acceleration (considered to have begun after World War II), socioeconomic trends have contributed to systemic changes in Earth’s systems, which in turn have raised the global average temperature by 1.2°C since the pre-industrial era. The rate of species extinction is accelerating, and humans — one species among many — are affected by climate change and disturbances in Earth’s systems. The marine weather report is there to soothe us to sleep with its cello composition.
What can awaken us into active change toward a sustainable future?
The exhibition Brytningstider by Peter Stridsberg was shown at Örnsköldsvik’s Museum and Art Gallery, December 6, 2024 – January 25, 2025.
Diana Berntsdotter Vallgren
https://nyavalor.se/brytningstider-en-essa-om-vader-med-utgangspunkt-fran-peterstridsbergs-utstallning/
- Ebba Lisberg Jensen, “Ecological literacy and the abstraction of nature relations in the Anthropocene,” in Kulturella Perspektiv, (2016:1), p. 20.
I will show you how the mountains move under
our feet when the clouds stretch from the cloud
cover's unfiltered light gaze (2024)
Fascinated by how the concept of landscape has evolved over time and the way it influences how we see and feel a place, Peter Stridsberg reflects on the physical and mental dynamics triggered by the encounter between human and natural dimensions. In the installation conceived for this exhibition, the artist combines his artistic practice with his explorations of recent years, where human beings, the landscape and mountains meet. Seated on the sofa, the temporary inhabitant of this room can turn his/her gaze to the mountain landscape present in the video, or the one portrayed in the photograph. In doing so, the fictious encounter between the urban dimension and the natural context is evoked.
The work directly brings into play the condition of forced isolation experienced during the pandemic period, the sense of the impossible and, equally, the perceived need to be in direct contact with natural and outdoor environments, such as mountain spaces or city parks. In this sense, his work makes reference to two highly topical themes: “nature-deficit disorder” and “solastalgia”, both negative reactions generated by biological annihilation and the progressive extinction of experiences with nature. These conditions are part of the wider universe of those that have been indicated as “psychoterratic mental conditions” to describe emotional disorders – such as eco-anxiety and global fear – deriving from the sudden change in the state of health of the Earth and its ecosystems.
Anxious about Climate Change
The climate crisis, one of the greatest challenges of our time, is raising increasing disquiet and concern. In psychology and the social sciences, these emotional reactions have been analysed as an expression of eco-anxiety. Eco-anxiety is defined by the American Psychological Association as a chronic fear of environmental doom and a generalised sense that the ecological foundations of human existence are collapsing. It is a complex feeling that stems from the perception of an increasingly unsustainable future that creates uncertainty. Fear, worry, guilt and anguish are just some of the emotions associated with eco-anxiety. Although this type of anxiety is not identified as a real pathology, many empirical studies show that it can have major impacts on mental health, especially among younger people (18-35 years old), women and in those countries of the Global South that are already significantly exposed to environmental catastrophes.
In our region as well, where the effects of climate change are already visible, there is fear of extreme weather events. In a joint research project, Eurac Research and the Provincial Institute for Statistics ASTAT have analysed the emotional reactions of the South Tyrolean population to the climate crisis. The results speak clearly: also in South Tyrol, people are dealing with eco-anxiety. Indeed, 70% of the sample stated that they are afraid, 80% feel concerned, 39% feel guilty and 67% feel powerless. The South Tyrolean population is particularly worried about risks related to droughts, water shortages and floods.
How can eco-anxiety be addressed? Firstly, and most importantly, governments need to take more ambitious measures to tackle the climate crisis, also by involving the population through participatory processes. This could reduce the widespread feeling of powerlessness related to policy inaction. Secondly, it might become more important to develop new emotional skills to deal with eco-anxiety, as it is not going to disappear anytime soon. Therefore, psychological support services should be implemented that acknowledge the effects of eco-anxiety on mental health and help people transform the disabling feeling of eco-anxiety into a proactive attitude for social and ecological change.
Ilaria De March, Felix Windegger, Christoph Kircher
Center for Advanced Studies, Eurac Research – Bolzano (BZ)
More texts about the work you can read here
Here can you see more images from the installation
What do we know about tomorrow? (2022)
Not much, in fact. The seven photographs in Peter Stridsberg´s series Forecast Diaries are accompanied by weather forecasts – a way of predicting the future – from SMHI (the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute). The forecasts are for the specific site where the photos are taken: the island Tjörn on the Swedish west coast. Forecasts are read on the Swedish radio every day and while they are important information for many people, others hear them almost as poetry.
People have been trying to predict whether it is going to rain tomorrow, or not, for thousands of years, but it was in the 19th century that the science of weather forecasting truly began. The British Royal Navy officer Francis Beaufort developed the wind force scale and his colleague Robert Fitzroy set up 15 land stations which used telegraphs to transmit daily weather reports – and he developed weather charts which he described as “forecasts”. In 1861, the first daily weather forecasts were published in The Times. Nowadays, forecasting techniques use supercomputers analysing data relating to pressure, air speed, precipitation and temperature from around the world. But still there is much uncertainty in the predictions.
Tinni Ernsjöö Rappe
Executive director
SSE Art Initiative and Literary Agenda
Excerpt from the exhibition text for Blicka
Umeå Konsthall (2022)
For Peter, it is more about a combination of romanticisms depicting of the sublime and the more concrete study of light and landscape found in en plein air painting, giving the images a completely different expression and tone. The figure standing alone in the picture gazing out is not standing in a enveloping forest, but in an open rocky coastal landscape, where the sky and the looming horizon creates air and space. Every image in the suite Forecast Diaries is accompanied by an excerpt from the marine and coastal weather forecast, which is broadcast every day on Sveriges Radio. The factual listing of locations at sea along Sweden’s long coastline – along with the meteorological observations and prognoses – becomes a pragmatic poetry that seeps into the images:
In the Gulf of Bothnia and the Baltic Sea intermittent rain or showers with moderate to reduced visibility. Otherwise mostly clear visibility. Gale warning issued for Skagerrak, the south and southeast Baltic Sea, and the Gulf of Finland. Forecast for tomorrow morning. Skagerrak, Kattegatt western wind circa 8–13 meters per second, on eastern Skagerrak up to gale 15. Somewhat declining winds during the night.
In the meeting between the image summoned by the title and the photograph itself, something bigger than the sum of the two parts emerges. Interestingly, this expansion happens between.
Niclas Östlind
Professor of Photography at HDK-Valand