Starur & Hysteria at Liljevalchs vårsalong

Liljevalch’s Vårsalong is Sweden’s major art exhibition, featuring 177 artists from Brösarp to Boden, selected from four thousand applicants.

The women’s choir Hysteria from Öland has been invited to Stockholm to open the exhibition with their interpretation of “Frukostrast på en liten syfabrik på landet”, a poem set to music by the poet Marianne Flodin, who like many artists had a “part-time job”, her in the textile industry at the time the factories still existed in Sweden. A song about opening a window, stopping and pausing, watching the fabric dust sink in the sunlight, breathing in “grass clippings and forest”.

We enter the ancient institution on Djurgården with all the sincerity and strength that has grown in the Women’s Choir Hysteria under the direction of Saga Björling and Lisa Johansson. Soloist is Tove Folkesson. And we end with an extra sweet springtime cry, as a greeting from our mighty whitetip forests that will soon bloom again.

Photo: Tindra Englund