“Don’t be a satellite dish,” my mom says to me. I know what she means. She thinks I take in too much at once. Maybe I should learn to not absorb everything, all the time.
My parents and I walk together towards Nørrebro Station. We get on the metro and travel through the city’s underground. At Copenhagen Central Station it’s time to say goodbye. We all have to move on. I give them a big hug and kiss their cheeks. “Safe travels, take care of each other. I love you, see you soon,” I say.
The train pulls out of the station and I walk to a different platform. There I meet some guys from Sweden. We get talking about where we are headed, society today, and cultural relations between Africa and Latin America.
I board the Öresund train and read a few pages in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023) by Yanis Varoufakis. I get off at Triangeln station and walk over to Malmö Konsthall. I’m there to see the Lars Fredrikson (1926–1997) exhibition and attend an accompanying seminar.
I move quickly between Fredrikson’s collages, spray paintings, and steel reliefs. One of the works in particular catches my attention. A big fly has landed in the middle of the artwork. It’s just sitting there, as if it belongs. The work, with its colour palette of black, white, and silver, evokes my childhood: forest, concrete, and alienation; the smell of steel, ammonia, chrome, and rust protection. The fly suddenly takes off and floats away.
The lectures start. I sit down, open my notebook, listen, and write:
A REINFORCED PERCEPTION – SIGNAL AESTHETICS – WHERE BODY AND CYBERNETICS MEET – PSYCHEDELIA – THE CEREBRAL CORTEX – THE ATOMIC AGE – THE COLD WAR – VIDEO CONFRONTATION – SUBVERSIVE RADAR WRITINGS – ANTENNAS – YOU ARE A SLAVE TO YOUR MACHINES – A REFUSAL OF REPRESENTATION – GRAINS OF SILVER – CALLIGRAPHIC ENGRAVINGS – PAINTING IS NEVER FLAT – AN INVITATION TO CONTRADICTIONS AND MATERIAL SENSITIVITY – SILENCE AND EMPTINESS – TEARS AND RIPS – QUESTIONING THE SURFACE – AND REALITY AS WE SEE IT IS INCOMPLETE – A SOUL IN CONFRONTATION WITH POLITICAL STRUCTURES – A SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE
The lectures end. On my way home I think about Fredrikson’s lifestyle as a Swedish expatriate living in France, and wonder whether there are any links to my own (as a Chilean-Swedish artist living in Denmark), and his approach to the Scandinavian art world. My interpretation is that Fredrikson’s practice is about questioning an incomplete reality. He experimented with light waves, television sets, and sound frequencies, and worked with uncompromising integrity. An individual who, as early as the 1960s, criticised the state, the military, and the colonial powers that engage in surveillance, control, slavery, and genocide.
Perhaps it isn’t a curse to be a kind of satellite dish. It’s a necessity.
– Javier Alvarez Sagredo (b. 1994) is an artist based in Copenhagen, educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
