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Norrbyskär is an island outside of the city of Umeå in Northern Sweden. In 1895 the Swedish industrial magnate Frans Kempe founded a large sawmill on the islands. He was attracted to the remoteness of the place and constructed a community around the factory, modeled after his own utopian ideals. He provided his workers with modern homes, gardens, schools and healthcare. In return they had to lead a sober and God-fearing life, and were forbidden to engage in Unions. Norrbyskärs’ community and sawmill operated for decades, until shutting down in the mid 1950’s. Presently, the worker’s homes are used as vacation homes, and the island is largely used for leisure activities. Remnants of the island’s past can be found scattered around the island and in a museum on site.

This industrial heritage of the island and the utopian ideal it once represented, offered a starting point for the project. Utopian visions have always come with a price, leading to the question of what serves as a utopian vision today? How can we connect the foundation of the Swedish welfare society laid by the Swedish lumber-industry with issues that concern contemporary Europe, such as the refugee crisis? 

The intention of the project was thus shaped to synthesize, through design, the complexities of such issues: the local context represented by the island’s history, connected to national discussions on the decline of the Swedish welfare state and the global issue of the refugee crisis. The intention of the project became to use design to place visitors within these perspectives on utopia and the pressures they endure. The past was employed as a lens to look at the present, and vice versa, thereby eliciting individual reflections on one’s position in both the physical, local landscape as well as the political landscape. 

Charged Utopia was curated around a series of themes related to the tension between current societal challenges and the notion of utopia. More specifically, such themes were: trips vs. borders, groups vs. negotiations, the place vs. home, identity vs. passport and, finally, designing the utopia. 

The participants were invited into the role as active co-creators of the event. Every transition was built around space, triggers through design and storytelling and a personal reflection from the participant. The journey of the participants was a metaphor for an imagined immigration process to enter an utopian community and dealt with the risks and costs of such process. 

The event was held for one day in August 2016 on the island of Norrbyskär. Participants to the event included inhabitants of the island, tourists exploring the island and the museum, and finally a group of approximately 70 invited guests from local institutions (including university, government and local industry). In what follows, we briefly describe the different components that together formed the Charged Utopia event. 

The Experiential Path 

The Charged Utopia experience started on the ferry that carries visitors to the island from the mainland. Upon arrival at the quay, visitors were handed a branded piece of driftwood from the island. This “passport to utopia” depicted a stylized image of a laborer and a migrant. On board of the boat, visitors were confronted with banners displaying poetry that started to reveal the themes of the event, inviting them to ponder their own journey as they travelled over the sea. 

Arriving on the island and stepping out of the boat on to the other side, visitors embarked on an interactive path leading up to the museum building. Along the path, seven interactive stations were placed. The stations were built using materials found on the island, many of them embodying the island’s industrial heritage, such as rusted cast iron barge shackles and driftwood (See Figure 3). Each station was constructed around one of the themes above mentioned, preparing the visitors to the final experience of the exhibition space inside the museum. 

These issues were posed as questions and printed onto strips of cloth tied into the stations. To read the questions, visitors were required to physically engage with the stations and co- operate within their group. For example, one installation required one visitors to pull on a rope to lift a heavy beam, triggering a mechanism that allowed others to view the banner.

The participants were encouraged to give a response to each question by stating: yes, maybe, I don’t know, not really, or no. They were also encouraged to color a portion of their individual passports accordingly, with crayons that were part of each station. Each of the questions raised a type of wicked problems, raising issues around the cost of one’s own personal idea of utopia. The multiple- choice answers were deliberate: they reduced the complexity of each question to discrete categories, caused friction and deliberation amongst visitors as they expressed and discussed their individual points of view. 

The Museum Space 

The destination of this initial journey was enclosed in the space inside the museum. The former machinery room of the sawmill was the scenario to build the final moment of this experience. The design concept that we chose, revolved on the aesthetics of points of view: depending on where one stood, fragments of history, fragments of memories and fragments of possibilities became evident and perceivable. These fragments were physically structured and contained. A geometrical composition defined the whole space, floor and walls were drawn with a new pattern, defining at the same time the spatial organization and the sequence of the journey and its moments. 

Upon entering the space, visitors were asked to split their passport in two. They were allowed to keep one part as a souvenir, while the other half was displayed at the entrance to the space. This, in a way, exposed their points of view on the statements as recorded by the colors on the passport. 

The space itself housed four interactive installations and one interactive sculpture. These were organised to echo the themes treated in the path. The four interactive installations involved live and recorded audio and video projections that communicated different stories, weaving together the history of the island, current social challenges such as the refugee crisis and the making of the project itself. By physically moving tree trunks within the space near the installation, visitors would trigger different content to be played. The audio played poetic narratives, written specifically for this exhibition, touching upon subjects and impressions stimulated by the island and its history, which could also refer to contemporary human situations. These narrative excerpts were also recorded using two voices, one in Swedish and one in English. The audio was played through directional speakers, meaning that the narratives were only audible for one or two visitors at a time, as they were required to stand in a particular spot of roughly half a meter in diameter. In one of the areas, instead of recorded audio, actor Hans-Ola Stenlund performed live. The videos projected in the panels of each area were produced using a type of dystopian aesthetic: nonlinear, erratic cuts to further strengthen the concept of fragmentation. 

 The central area of the gallery, dedicated to the themes of trips and borders, was dominated by a large driftwood sculpture. It was constructed of several hundred pieces of driftwood, hung on a matrix of nylon threads from the ceiling. A fan mounted to the side of the installation set the pieces in motion as visitors moved closer. 

The constant interaction, analogue and technological, was a way to involve the user with the content displayed and structured to trigger questions, reflections and to recover and rebuild the identity of a place.