I would like to tell you about the most scary location that we ever chose for filming and why at the end, we changed our mind...
Our photographer friend Stephanie and specialist of abandoned places that we had met in Hedemora had made us a list with GPS coordinates of amazing (and abandoned!) places where we should go to record…: We pinned this list at the entrance of our caravan and it gives us an idea how to plan our route for the last week left in Sweden… Number one: The old Paper Fabrik that we found in the middle of some woods, was an experience that we didn’t “enjoy” until the end.
After a long drive through the dense forest, we saw from far two red stoned chimneys starring out of the trees. That must be the fabric!!
Finally arriving at the place, we felt quite abandoned ourselves… For sure, there hadn’t been anyone since a long time and the huge old building was partly fallen apart and nature was slowly entering the building… A rusty barbed wire fence was surrounding the property and it was impossible to enter. Except one hole that we found walking a bit… We managed to pass the “entrance” and soon we stood in middle of huge stone walls covered with graffiti, one half-destroyed building next to another, like a big labyrinth. I had to take Ivan’s hand because it felt like in a horror movie and I must admit that I was a bit scared… Anyway, we felt not only scared but also inspired and continued our walk in the forbidden terrain. No noise, no traces of humans except broken glasses on the floor, rotten sport shoes, a bucket full of paint spilled and dried out, old cans deformed by time and weather… Some of the windows had broken and million pieces of glass covered the entrance part of the fabric, the windows that hadn’t broken yet, were covered with thick cobwebs! Walking outside was one thing, but entering the fabric was something else.
We missed Stephanie, she seemed to us like woman without fear and I’m sure she would have made us self-confident in this Hitchcock scenery! For recording, we thought about the inside of the fabric, because of acoustics and light. We were planning to record Mozart here, it is part of our project to connect different styles and this graffiti - surrounding seemed to connect perfectly the craziness of Mozart! We took all our courage (and for sure, Mozart would have liked the
place!) and entered the building! Impressing! Even more graffiti, old and rusty machines, a historical blue working coat, chairs and tables spread randomly on the floor.
It was abandoned and lifeless, but closing my eyes, doing a 50 - years- time– travel, I could suddenly see thousands of labourers, standing behind the machines, working day long, chatting, laughing and giving life to this place in the middle of Sweden! Opening my eyes again, I looked on the ceiling, half of the second floor was hanging in the air! Although it looked very stable and like a huge piece of art, we decided that the horror movie should end here and to record would be way too risky. Who knows if the fabric would fall apart in the last chords of the Mozart piece and we would have to stay forever in this mysterious paper place in the heart of the endless width of Scandinavia:
nobody would ever find us except the ghost of Mozart…
