I traveled thirty minutes out on the Blue Line, to look at the subway station art of Rinkeby. The art was installed in 1975 and based on the Viking finds excavated in that area. Sven Sahlberg created gold leaf, mosaic tiles to represent the finds, and Rune writing- used a thousand years ago in Sweden for the Rinkeby station sign.
The station is one of the more striking ones, each station has an art feature, but some like this one are deeper down and the natural form of rock that was blasted away to make the train line is striking to look at, and enhanced by the artist's use of the natural form.
This suburb is now infamous for its immigrant population, and walking just a few blocks of perimeter from the station was indeed very similar to being in Thomastown, Victoria. By the time the train reached Rinkeby, each of us in the subway carriage, had dark hair, and I was the fairest and least conservative dressed.
Upon returning to T-Centrallen or the center of Stockholm, I was once again outnumbered by the fair haired and the tall of stature.
I don't suppose a person visiting Stockholm would have much cause to travel so far out of the city when there isn't a tourist destination located there.
If one did, their impression of Stockholm would definitely be skewed from the norm of town.
2 comments:
Lovely photos CC! I do wonder what it must be like for the locals that live there and use the station regularly. Do you think after a while you would stop noticing? Also - (I am disheartened to think this) the apparent lack of vandalism is amazing. Those art works would probably not survive 10 minutes in Thomastown station.
Actually some of the walls had tagging on them- graffiti that obscures art, or on natural rock walls (that happens a lot here) really depresses me. So I edited out those photos- I even climbed up an extra wall to avoid the tagging...
From what I can tell very few people care about the subway art.
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