Duration: one month
Time: every day in golden hour, from 3^rd of May till 2^nd of June, 2023; during Rejmyre Art Lab residency
Place: a heap of broken glass behind the Rejmyre glass factory
Materials: broken glass, silicone glue, soil, seeds, water
Action: giving a second chance to the broken glass (souls) that have been abandoned in a heap behind the Rejmyre glass factory

Photo by Lars Niclas Fasth

Photo by Lars Niclas Fasth

Photo by Lars Niclas Fasth

Photo by Lars Niclas Fasth

Context

Rejmyre is a village that was established in the 19th century. In the beginning of the 19th century, Rejmyre was built around a glass factory. It is still working today, carrying on the tradition of glass blowing. Glass is a fragile and demanding material that often breaks, so behind the factory is a pile of broken glass – mighty, beautiful and sad.

The pile of glass behind the Rejmyre Glass Factory is enclosed on three sides by a hip-high concrete fence. When I first arrived, someone had already selected beautiful pieces of glass and placed them on the edge of the concrete wall as if for an exhibition. Everything else I did was just an addition because trees, grass, meadow flowers and other plants were already growing there. This is especially noticeable in May, when everything starts to flourish and turns green.

Action

When the golden hour came, I put on a white worker’s protective overall, rubber boots that had been sprayed on with white radiator paint, white gloves, safety goggles, and a white shovel. I went to the pile of glass, climbed on it, and looked for broken glass in which I could plant a seed. The shards were sharp, unstable, and incredibly beautiful. I chose the bottoms of broken glasses, vases, bowls, bottles, sometimes just scraps that I glued together with white, sticky silicone glue. Then I poured the soil into the future flowerpot, moistened it with drops of water dripping from the fingertips of my gloves. I made a small hole in the soil, into which I carefully placed the seed. Then I covered the seed with the soil and dripped water from my gloves again. I made sure that the seed felt good in the soil and that the new pot felt good on the concrete wall.

I did this for a whole month, adding to the row of flowerpots every day and watching the sprouts gradually hatch, turn into little plants, and slowly take hold. The greenery around me was also slowly coming into force. Like the row of flowerpots, which gradually transformed from a tragic freak into a colorful, shimmering string.

Over the course of a month, the things I used gradually changed too. The white paint of the boots cracked at first like shards of glass and gradually peeled off, especially where the foot had dented the boots. The white gloves got muddier and heavier, and stretched a little. The goggles were regularly covered with dust, scuffed with silicone glue, and scratched a little. The white protective overall gradually took the dust and also my blood as I cut myself 2 times (on the 14th day I cut the index finger of my right hand as it was raining, and the skin of my hand became soaked and more sensitive. On the 21st day I cut the same finger again in almost the same place and found out that I was dangerously picking up broken glass at one specific moment in the action.).

Every newly planted flowerpot and planting time meant something to me and was connected to something. I wrote it down in my diary. Over time, I noticed that words like calm/soothing, friend, unobtrusive, fragile, trustworthy, kept recurring.

Continuation

The performance continues after this month when I’m away. The flowerpots and plants remain on the concrete wall, and a friend captures their now independent growth once a week. Or the dying. As in life, when someone who cares must move on, the newly born ones that remain must now have to grow for themselves. Good luck to them!

This performance was created as a part of art residency at the Rejmire Art Lab.(http://www.rejmyreartlab.org/)