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Swedish Town Relocated
May 25, 2020

This 125-year-old Swedish town has relocated, buildings and all

“Kiruna is on the move,” says Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, curator of the new exhibition Kiruna Forever. Kiruna, a 125-year-old Swedish town that sprouted around the iron mine of the same name, started an official relocation process in 2018 after decades of discussion with the state-owned mining company LKAB. Today, as the expansion of the mine destabilizes the ground surrounding it, nearby buildings are being demolished or loaded onto flatbed trucks and moved to the new city center nearly two miles east.

Despite Kiruna’s remote location (the northernmost town in Sweden, it lies in the Arctic Circle), the value of iron on the global market defines the town’s choreographed retreat eastward. As the price of iron goes up, the speed of extraction increases. And as the mine removes the equivalent of a 12-story building of material from the ground each day, the city sinks at a rate of two inches each year.

Kiruna’s beloved city hall cracked under this pressure. A chunk of the stunning (now demolished) wood-and-brick building was relocated to the warm halls of ArkDesSweden’s national architecture museum in Stockholm, for Carrasco’s exhibition, which runs through the end of 2020. Visitors stand behind the hall’s podium and, in a brilliant moment of curatorial anachronism, come face-to-face with a contemporary video work by Ingela Johansson, which remixes archival footage taken at the same location during the 1969–70 miners’ strikes.

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