After visiting the insurance company in Trollhättan, I set off for the coast, to Ramsvik in Bohuslän. I’d spent a lovely holiday there years ago with my husband Hajo. I walked along the paths we’d taken back then and was overwhelmed by memories of those days gone by. I spent the night in the VW Multivan and, after breakfast in the glorious sunshine, set off for home. At the swing bridge on the Sote Canal, just past Ramsvik, I stopped for a break and watched the spectacle: how the bridge swung to one side, how the sailing boats with their tall masts squeezed through the narrow canal, and how the bridge closed again. Then an information board caught my attention, describing the history of the Sote Canal.
The Sote Canal is a technical intervention in the landscape – and at the same time a concentrated reflection of how history, labour and nature are portrayed in Sweden.
Notes on the canal bank
Standing in front of the Vägverket (Swedish Transport Administration) sign, somewhere between the summer light, the motorhome park and the archipelago breeze, the first thing that strikes you is the tone. It is the familiar blend of optimism about progress, technical objectivity and nostalgic imagery: explosive charges, excavators, survey teams, alongside seabirds, seals and pleasure boats – everything seems to fit seamlessly into the success story of ‘road safety’ and ‘Skyddad led’ (a protected route).
We learn that Ramsvikslandet became an island in the first place as a side effect of the rationalisation of shipping traffic, as if this intervention in geology and ecology were thereby automatically justified.
Work, Crisis, Employment Scheme
The workers appear amongst the drawings: staring faces, caps, coats, a physical narrative hinted at in just a few strokes. The panel refers to the Sotekanalen construction site as ‘AK-arbete’, a state emergency measure during the crisis in the stone industry in the 1930s – employment policy in granite.
What sounds like welfare is, historically speaking, also a form of discipline: unemployed stonemasons are enlisted in a major project that simultaneously reshapes the landscape, property relations and coastal ecology.
The narrative on the plaque reframes this history of crisis as a story of heroic triumph – 212,000 man-days of labour, culminating in the royal inauguration in 1935.
King, Canal, Coastal People
Naturally, the monarch is not absent: Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf opens the new waterway, whilst newspaper quotes evoke a day of celebration and jubilation for the ‘Bohuslän coastal people’. The ‘coastal people’ appear as an undifferentiated mass of beneficiaries whose interests coincide with those of the state.
The conflicts, expropriations, environmental impacts – and the question of who could actually afford the new, ‘protected’ route through the archipelago – remain invisible.
Today, according to estimates, around 50,000 boats pass through the 4.8 km long, 4.5 m deep and 15 m wide passage each year; Leisure mobility continues the history of labour, but with a different audience.
Nature as a backdrop
Amidst all the technology, animals are depicted: seals, seabirds, fish – they appear like friendly pictograms intended to demonstrate that nature has come to terms with the canal.
In fact, the text mentions ecological consequences only in passing, whilst the map meticulously charts zones, water depths and bridge heights.
It is a typically modern way of looking at things: flora and fauna become a backdrop for infrastructure, the ‘rock-rich’ coastal area a resource that can be transformed into safety, growth and holidays with the help of explosives and bulldozers.
The Politics of Memory on an Information Sign
Why does this sign fascinate me so much that it has made it into the newsletter?
Because it exemplifies how infrastructure becomes a medium of memory – and how closely technical history, social invisibilities and national narratives are intertwined in the process.
An entire narrative is conveyed on just a few square metres of wood and printed ink: the state as a caring employer, technology as civilisation, the landscape as a malleable stage, the population as a grateful collective.
What is not told are the perspectives of those whose labour was exploited, whose ecological livelihoods were altered, or who had no access at all to this form of mobility.
When I read such information boards today, I read them as an open-air archive: as condensed documents of a particular modernity that believes it can overcome every obstacle with dynamite and planning.
At Dalslands Studio – on our own historically significant waterway, the Dalsland Canal – I am interested in how we can design different kinds of plaques: multi-perspective, sensitive to conflict, open to questions rather than ready-made answers.
Perhaps a future project could involve designing such ‘counter-signs’ together with you: for canals, factories, care homes, clinics – places where technical rationality and vulnerable life stories intersect.
Would you be interested in a joint workshop on ‘learning to read infrastructure’ – here in Dalsland or in a hybrid format?
Please do drop us a line with your thoughts at info@dalslands-studio.eu