Marit Kapla

Critical tourist as Mary Wollstonecraft (2021/2026)

In the summer of 2021, I walked from Kungsbacka to Halmstad. I followed roadside verges and hiking trails, moved through residential areas and nature reserves, across fields and along sandy beaches. I swam in the sea, in lakes, and in the swimming pool of a spa hotel. It rained, the sun was shining, geese honked, and the wind howled.

The walk, and the text I wrote about it, were part of the residency Other Choreographies, New Spaces. By quite literally re-choreographing the way I usually move through Halland, I ended up in places I had never been before. Suddenly I found myself in a small grove beside the E6 motorway, watching cars rush past like projectiles.

Critical tourism was the theme of the residency. It can be understood as travelling with heightened sensitivity – becoming more attentive to one’s relationship with the surrounding environment. When the British writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) travelled to Sweden, it was with precisely such an intensified awareness.

In the summer of 1795, Wollstonecraft landed on the island of Nidingen off the coast of Onsala. She stayed in Gothenburg, travelled back and forth to Norway, and then made her way south through Halland by land. The following year she published Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, in which she describes how she encounters her new surroundings with openness of mind and feeling. During my walk, I carried her book as both an inner and outer map.

For the exhibition Markings – 10 years with Art Inside Out, I have chosen to visualize the walk and the text in collaboration with sound artist Helena Persson. Her sound waves bring the weather and winds of Halland into the exhibition space. Observations I made along the way coexist with the sounds of the landscape—of humans, animals, vehicles, vegetation, water, and even the space above the hills and plains.

The walker meets the world with their whole body. Air rests against the skin, sounding against the eardrums. The distance you walk becomes part of you.

– Marit Kapla

Marit Kapla is an author and cultural journalist based in Gothenburg. She made her debut in 2019 with the critically acclaimed Osebol (Teg Publishing), which won awards including the August Prize, the Borås Tidning Debut Prize, and the Publicist Club’s “Guldpennan” (Golden Pen) award, and was translated into several languages. Her second book, Kärlek på svenska (Teg Publishing), was published in 2022. Marit Kapla’s latest book is titled Barnsäng (2026, Norstedts).

https://www.norstedts.se/marit-kapla

In the residency Other Choreographies, New Spaces (Kungsbacka and Halmstad municipalities, 2021), five artists adopted the role of “critical tourists”—individuals who spend an extended period in a place getting to know it, yet maintain an outsider’s critical perspective to discover and perceive new contexts, overlooked histories, and details.