Do you have a theoretical core, concept, or principle which defines your work?

I think I could be described as floating in this respect. Or maybe I intuitively have been harboring one main thought all along: moving sideways through disciplines – and in doing so actively relating to the material, social, political, and theoretical surroundings in the work – makes the work itself stronger. I started out playing the violin and trying to compose music in the post-Arnold-Schönberg-tradition. I then went to art schools, and was inspired by philosopher and performance pioneer Adrian Piper, Marcel Duchamp, and conceptual artists Lawrence Wiener and Joseph Kosuth, who were working with written language in art. Eventually, I entered the literary world – by chance. When an exhibition at the art school I was attending was cancelled, I didn’t know what to do with my text-based performance piece, and sent it to several publishing houses instead. Luckily for me, people at the biggest publishing house, Bonniers, were active writing concrete poetry themselves in the early 60’s. Surprisingly enough they were very enthusiastic and wanted further contact!
 

What is it about working between disciplines (visual arts, literature, sound art, etc.) that compels you?

The very act of taking part in language, text, sound, spoken word or sign, varies immensely in the different contexts. When a person is reading a text in a book, as literature, this becomes a very “conservative” genre; she or he thoroughly scrutinizes everything that is acceptable within the borders of “literature”, and everything outside is labelled “random” or “meaningless”, to be ignored or abjected. When the same person is reading the same text in the art context, all the aspects of the text are activated, but when it comes to the “inherent literary qualities” of the text, this happens in a somewhat more extensive, generic, or, if you want, generous way. The “literature” now must share space with, fight with, and be fertilized by, space, gravitation, body, sound, movement, materiality, and time, but above all the specific collective habit of reading or taking part in language in an art space or context. This fluctuating and hard-to-grasp dynamic is what compels me. Putting “literary” elements into art and seeing what happens. Putting “art” elements into literature and seeing what happens. A floating, reader/spectator/listener-oriented and social approach in some ways, concerned with awareness, attention and engagement – maybe.   
 

Having one foot in the literary world and one foot in the art world, what is your experience of the relationship between these? In Sweden, or in general? 

Literature has a somewhat abstract (dwelling in a “neutral” container), normative (language as “law”) and social (based on copying and mass distribution, no “originals”) character. Art is still mainly relating to the unique piece, and the unique artist, the signature (and thus tightly connected to the concept of monetary value inherent in the single work). This elitist infrastructure of inaccessibility for the wider community leaves a lot of space for the art and artist to experiment with collectivity, anonymity and borderless immateriality. “Metaphorically”, in a certain sense, but anyway. Both the literary and the art scenes are highly problematic, but precisely this I find very exciting, and very demanding, to reflect upon and to intuitively try to integrate. In Sweden both these scenes are relatively small, which on one hand make them more raw, “primitive”, and unarticulated when it comes to theory, critique, and debate – and on the other hand more accessible and possible to come in contact with, to set in motion, and to activate friction between, than in geographically and linguistically larger communities.
 

What is it like to work with Swedish as a language in this context? What is the language like as a material? 

As I am trying to articulate above, I feel that the small lingual community make things possible. The English language is the lingua franca in art, and to a certain extent – at least in the west – in the literary context also. Its colonial past and present have turned it into an extremely rich language, a tool connecting an immense amount of heterogenous cultural expressions – but at the same time flattening them, making them digestible to each other and to the cultural forces in power. The Swedish language is poor in comparison, short, laconic, granulated – and at the same time paradoxically well-tempered and melodic in sound. I like it.
 

When making work that is both abstract and research-based, playful and rigorous, do you approach it with a concrete sense of purpose, or do you figure this out along the way? Do you have an idea of the desired effect of the work? 

I want to have the feeling that I’m figuring everything out along the way. That I’m starting off aimlessly and intuitively wandering in total oblivion. But in order to be able to do just that, I have learned that I have to be rigorously prepared. I think this has to do with the sensation that I suppose I’m aiming for above all, which is the notion that I in some way am pushing the borders of the environment or genre or rules of the game I’m involved in at any given moment – and in so doing hopefully also make room for the spectator and/or reader.      
 

What are your thoughts on the possibilities and challenges for language/writing as a visual expression?

I sincerely believe everything remains to be done. Each new piece of work in this field alters and calibrates the reading/visual habits of the spectator. The more works that are being realised, the richer the possibilities and nuances of expression and interpretation, the more autonomy and integrity of the different fields of this terrain, and the more openness, and readiness, for exchange in relation to other fields.
 

The fields of visual art and literature are littered with definitions we take for granted, in terms of what language/writing is. The purpose of this project is to challenge and broaden those definitions. What does writing mean to you?

For me writing means marking the location in the “binary” social code system of language which has the greatest potential of pointing out and activating or resurrecting a specific area, be it personal, structural, or abstract, not itself covered by language.