Red House

Here’s a picture I took in the summer of 2005 of a bright red house. It was located on a rocky islet called Stakholmen which is just off-shore from one of the harbours in Karlskrona, Sweden, where I then lived. One could reach the island via a small foot-bridge. The house was neither permanent nor a dwelling-place but rather a work of art put there for a few months, an installation entitled Fårjaglov, the brainchild of a Malmö-based artist named Peter Johansson. Får jag lov means ‘If I may’ and is what one might say when inviting someone on to the dance floor. The artwork’s title, then, might be translated as ‘Shallwedance’.

The house was as bright red within as it was without. I would have liked to have taken some better shots of it – alas the Pentax Optio S4 point-and-shoot camera I had then was as limited as my photographic knowledge at the time. I didn’t witness the house’s arrival or its departure: one day it was there; the next it was gone, and Stakholmen went back to being a plain old lump of rock with the graffiti-covered remnant of an old gun-emplacement on it.