On 12 September, the fourth Dals Långed Village Festival will take place. For one day, the village will be conceived not as a single central festival site, but as a map of many activities, both large and small: open houses, music, food, flea markets, workshops, walks, art, conversations and things you might otherwise never have noticed.
This is now the third Byafest I’ve celebrated here. What I love about it is that you’re not just attending an event. You wander through Dals Långed, crossing paths and bridges, peering into courtyards, rooms and gardens, meeting people who’ve prepared something, and discovering that a place is so much more than its high street or the buildings you see every day. It also gives Dalsland Studio the chance to introduce itself and let people from Dals Långed catch a glimpse of our work and our building.
The shared Google Map is therefore not just a tool for organisation. It shows how Dals Långed is spread out on this day, whilst at the same time bringing the community together. Each marker represents an idea, an initiative, a club, a shop, a group of neighbours, or people who are opening their doors for a few hours. The programme isn’t put together from above, but emerges from many individual contributions.
Byafest: by residents, for residents
Dals Långed’s Byafest began in 2023 on the initiative of Studio Växt. At the time, the team took on project management, developed the programme together with other stakeholders and created a festival area between Studio Växt and Folkets Hus Mustadfors.
Even the very first Byafest was based on a simple yet far-reaching idea: everyone can contribute something. Food, theatre, a flea market, open studios, stalls, workshops, music or guided tours – what happens during the day depends on what the local people themselves want to organise. Anyone who registers an event also takes responsibility for it. The Byafest is therefore not a ready-made cultural programme, but a day created collectively by the community.
After we had to postpone our island flea market (ÖA-Loppis), originally planned for 29 August, due to bad weather, we have decided to take part in this year’s Byafest with the ÖA-Loppis. From 11.00 to 14.00, Fabriksvägen will become a venue for a flea market, books, coffee and music.
A Loppis is more than just a market for second-hand items. It is a special form of local circulation. Things change hands without having to be produced anew. A lamp, a tool, crockery, fabrics, picture frames or an object whose original function nobody can quite remember may well prove useful again in another household.
Of course, you don’t always find exactly what you were looking for. But that’s precisely part of the appeal. A ‘loppis’ is about finding something you weren’t looking for in the first place – or letting an object remind you of a possibility.
In a place like Dals Långed, where many people work with their hands – renovating, designing, collecting and repairing – this practice is almost a natural part of everyday life.
Our neighbour Lena’s Steneby Antikvariat complements the flea market in a different way. Books are also second-hand items, but they often still carry traces of their former readers: through dedications, notes, old price tags, forgotten bookmarks or simply through the fact that a book sat on a shelf for years before resurfacing.
Music at Dalslands Studio
At Dalslands Studio during the ÖA-Loppis, there’s coffee, pastries and music from a ukulele band that also performed last year. The ukulele is a modest instrument: small, easy to carry, not particularly loud. That’s precisely why it suits this setting so well. It doesn’t require a big stage, but instead creates a sense of intimacy. Music can emerge in a room where people are drinking coffee, chatting to one another, taking an interest in the treasures on offer, and pausing now and then to listen.
For us at Dalslands Studio, taking part also means opening up our own space. During the Byafest, it becomes a public living room for a few hours: with fika, pastries, music and time for conversation.
BRUK 2026: Sound in the old factory
On the evening of 12 September, BRUK 2026 opens at Långedsverken, the old factory next to Dalslands Studio, for a special art and music experience.
This experimental, cross-disciplinary event combines an exhibition, a performance and a concert within an old industrial setting – not as a sequence of clearly distinct programme items, but as a single, atmospheric experience in which the audience spends the evening moving through the spaces and sounds.
This time, the focus is also on Andreas Hellkvist’s *Quadrophonic*: a spatial work for Hammond organ and four Leslie cabinets arranged in a square, whose rotating loudspeakers produce a shifting, ‘wavering’ sound. The old factory hall itself becomes part of the instrument. Following on from the ÖA-Loppis and the Byafest during the day, BRUK is taking the idea further that the former industrial buildings of Dals Långed need not merely serve as reminders of past production, but can remain spaces for new forms of art, sound and shared experience.
