Visualization of the LGBTQI + monument on the Esperanto Square
Photo: Jonas Carlsson / New Order architecture and Conny Karlsson Lundgren.
It is now clear what Sweden’s first LGBTQI monument in Gothenburg will look like. “Our private lives and intimate desires have been exposed and turned into politics,” argues artist Conny Karlsson Lundgren about the design of the work.
In 2018, the City of Gothenburg’s LGBTQ council, together with members of the City Council, submitted a motion to Charles Felix Lindberg’s donation fund to create Sweden’s first LGBTQI monument. Now the monument will take the form of the really signed artist Conny Karlsson Lundgren and is planned to be inaugurated next year.
The LGBTQI monument “Gläntan” will stand on the Esperanto Square and will function as a place to meet, remember, mourn, dream and manifest.
The monument is in three pink layers, all of which represent a room from Gothenburg’s LGBTQI history. One layer is the dance floor at the historic gay club Touch. The second is the kitchen of the feminist collective at the top. And the third is the mysterious bedroom in Josefina’s apartment where gay men met before decriminalization in 1944. At the top, heated marble pillows will be placed as 3D-scanned from LGBTQI Gothenburgers’ own pillows.
The monument is framed by a brass line that winds around and over the work while trees surround the site.
– For many of us who are part of any of the communities that make up a shimmering LGBTQI + spectrum, the least common denominator is that our private lives and intimate desires have been exposed and turned into politics, in the fight for equality and human rights, says artist Conny Karlsson Lundgren and continues:
– The tree trunk should give a feeling of a glade. It may be a place that in its secret nature feels like just yours, but is still part of the public domain. The line in the ground ends where it begins and signals an understanding of time as both labyrinthine and circular – that the struggle does not end.
Article first published by QX
