Kosmos III
2008, wall drawing in black lacker paint, 2.4m x 1.4m, private house at Hisingen/Göteborg
”Kosmos III” is a 25.000 ton whale-oil factory ship, which was built in Göteborg’s biggest shipyard Götaverken around the year 1949. I found a picture of the ship in a tourist folder about Göteborg in my brother’s new house, which was also built during the fourties, at the island Hisingen. Göteborg, with Hisingen separated from the city by the river Göta, is a geographic location where ship construction has been one of the main industries since 1845. This thrilling past, with an industry fundamental to the region but also precarious, intrigued me. To work in the harbour and shipyard was a dangerous and heavy job, as late as during the sixties and seventies workers went there on a day-to-day basis, with poor wages and low social security. I was asked to make a work in the house, and thought that a wall drawing of the ship was a good way to connect the shared, public space and history of the area with the domestic, publically disconnected intimate sphere of the home. The name of the ship, which belonged to the at the time widely known ”Nimbus” series (a group of ultra fast cargo ships built by Götaverken for the Transatlantic Company of Göteborg) also opens associatons to early space-romanticism and technological dreams about the future. Today these ideas seem outdated and a bit naïve, and contribute to a certain kind of melancholic aspect
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