Yesterday, an exhibition opened that features a bunch of local comics creators in order to highlight Malmö as a comics city. Including me and Kinga Dukaj, as representing Hybriden and Fanzineverkstaden. You can find the exhibition at Norra Parkgatan, along Folkets Park in Malmö.
The description I got for my entry was that it should both represent me as a comics creator and the part of the comics culture that I’m part of, in this case CBK and Tusen Serier. So I made a collage creature out of cut-up cover images from CBA and various Tusen Serier books, and gave it a dialogue with my recurring character, the Angry Animal, called Arg Kanin (Angry Rabbit) in Swedish.
The theme of my comic was provoked by some of the latest outbursts of stupid neonationalism from the politically brown part of Swedish politics, where they thought that busdrivers should only be allowed to play purely Swedish music. Not because they normally play music on buses but because it was an opportunity to make a point designed to appeal to anyone who feels uneasy when they see a busdriver that is anything other than super White, or when they happen to hear music that was made in another country than Sweden (or USA, UK, Denmark or whatever else they count as Swedish/familiar/safe).
And also the general tendency nowadays for politicians and people to want to illegalize anything that doesn’t fit into their narrow tastes. Nationalism really doesn’t promote any kind of intellectual growth. It’s truly a culture of inbreeding.
Here’s my contribution to the exhibition:
Animal: If they get things the way they want, I guess the only music that’ll be allowed will be Ultima Thule* and folk music.
Hybrid: As if they even like folk music.
Animal: It’s all such obvious bullshit. The only thing they like about it is that it’s mostly made by white people.
Hybrid: Look at my face! It contains traces of Poland, Bosnia, Chile, Chine, Croatia, Mexoico and Sweden.
And there’s even more in my body! How is that supposed to be wrong?
*Ultima Thule is an old Swedish band from the white power movement with connections to the Sweden Democrats…
And by that I don’t mean trans people who stopped liking Harry Potter. I mean politicians who want to ban not only clothes and art but also people.
Hybrid: The kind of people who want to solve social problems by adding more cops and security guards on every street corner, and cameras in every apartment building and probably every home as well…
Animal: But some people don’t give a shit because they just want to be able to get rich and not have to see anyone who doesn’t look like them.
Inbreeding politics is what it is!
Animal: All according to the principle: “No one can call you a racist as long as you pretend to just talk about culture or religion”.
Hybrid: As if we’d fall for that? As if we didn’t recognize that they talk about Muslims now in the same way the Nazis used to talk about Jews. And we already saw how that went.
Animal: Fucking racists.
Don’t forget to visit Hybriden, check out the exhibitions, webshop etc!
The project that this exhibition is part of is called Seriestaden Malmö (Malmö, the comics city). Seriestaden is a concept that’s been around since the late 90s, just before the comic school was started, and we who are active in the Malmö comics scene have used it now and then as a way to highlight the great variety of comics, cretors and comics-related projects, collectives, associations, publishers and activities that are around. So this is the latest in that line, this time organized by BID. BID is an association of landlords in the area and is a concept borrowed from other countries. Their purpose is to make our streets ”safer”. In many cases that has meant a combination of repression, gentrification and cultural work. So let’s hope the Malmö variant focuses more on the cultural projects rather than the repressive gentrification stuff and that they understand that making an area more expensive doesn’t help the people living there, only the owners of the buildings. This exhibition is a good start by supporting the local comics culture.