Anja Örn och Tomas Örn

Vortexrope (2026, Video)

We examine the connections between architecture and nature, decisions, and their consequences. Following the decisions along the waterways, from the first power station Porjus in the Lule River and Vattenfall’s first headquarters in Stockholm, to the Lagan hydroelectric expansion that started in Knäred, where its initiator August Schmitz’s statue also stands. With only a few years between them, major transformations of our landscapes began, from north to south. Industries were to be electrified and to grow; the ability to create electricity from running water was considered crucial.

Today, electricity is invested with a similar hope in the push for reindustrialisation.

During and after the residency The Listener, we have visited Knäred several times and have become increasingly rooted there. We have walked along the reservoir above the upper power plant, further down, along the canal to lower Knäred. Seen the water move in one way before the turbines, and in another way afterwards, when it has given up its gold, its power.

We encountered Elma Danielsson while learning the story of August Schmitz. Elma, who worked in one of his wool factories, the one that existed in Malmö. When August Schmitzs’s building in Knäred was finished and the wires were laid all the way from Knäred in Halland down to the factory in Malmö, Elma probably encountered electricity, when it was first installed in the factory.

But in Elma’s notes we read nothing about revolutionary electric power. There, we find a different story. She writes speeches and gathers the wool workers, like in the note from May 1, 1910: Every single product that we humans need can be followed through a series of work steps back to the raw materials they are made from, and these raw materials in turn back to all the other extensive raw materials the earth, which no one individual produced and which should therefore belong to us all.

Elma Danielsson’s speech stands in contrast to the private property rights that go back to the medieval land laws: He who owns land, owns water (Hälsinge Law 14th century).

The film Vortexrope touches on the contemporary collisions that arise between those who reap the profits and those who need to reshape their living spaces. It’s a film about a changing landscape and about which forces are claiming the right to make change. We see losses in the landscape, as well as in both nature’s and humans’ need for slowness.

During The Listener residency, we collaborated with researchers from Luleå University of Technology to study the movement of water as it passes through the power plant’s turbines. The sculpture Vortex became a sketch of the water’s swirling motion in Knäred; formed from steel tubing, it appears to rise out of the water. If one could trace the path of a single water molecule, its movement might well draw such a shape—at some point, somewhere in Knäred’s beautiful canal. The film Vortexrope expands upon the perspectives and questions we began exploring during the residency.

– Anja Örn & Tomas Örn

Anja Örn and Tomas Örn, from their base in Luleå, work artistically both together and with their individual projects. They are also part of the Norrakollektivet together with Fanny Carinasdotter where their work engages with forms of production and extraction in the northern landscapes.

https://ratdragonproduction.se/

Residency The Listener (2025, Hylte Municipality) asked what it means to listen to nature’s own voices. What sounds, choruses, tones, wills and stories emerge then? What stories do the forests and seas themselves draw up, and what do they say about us? In Laholm and around the world.