On This Day

On This Day revolves around two archives. One is the Beijing Silvermine, founded in 2007 by Thomas Sauvin which consists of 850,000 photographic negatives to date collected from recycling stations around the Beijing region of China and covering the years following the Cultural Revolution, from the introduction of the compact camera in 1985 to the introduction of digital photography in 2005. The other archive is the Euro-American database onthisday.com, which maintains a daily register of selected world events. The artists have paired the date-stamped images from China with events of that day from the database.

Excerpt from essay by Daniel Palmer in the book On This Day from 2021: “Every image suggests a story. But Sauvin never wanted to be the sole author of the archive, and constantly seeks new perspectives on it in collaboration with others. Swedish artists Klara Källström and Thobias Fäldt are logical collaborators, given their publications have also sought to excavate complex layers of history and explore the gaps between what is visible and knowable. (…) By using the date stamped photographs to drive their investigation, one readymade archive driving the other, they force together two incommensurable sources of incomplete information about the world. ‘Two inadequate descriptive systems’, as Martha Rosler might say, the gap between them complicating the self-evidentiary claims of each other, revealing their obvious omission and biases.”

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On This Day
A project by Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt and Thomas Sauvin
Photographs: Beijing Silvermine
Selected by Thomas Sauvin [2021]
Text: On This Day
http://www.onthisday.com/ [2021-02-11— 2021-02-17]
Essays by Daniel Palmer and Johannes Wahlström
Design by Axel von Friesen and Michael Evidon
100 pages with 100 color plates
Full color offset
Bound with brass fasteners
Soft cover with silk screen printing
First edition: 500

Wikiland 23 June 2017 / Sunny 16 Rule

The third part of the project is set in 2017 when Swedish Prosecutor Marianne Ny dropped the investigation into rape and applied to revoke the European arrest warrant. On Swedish Midsummer, 23 June 2017, the brightest day of the year, Källström-Fäldt, again among few invited photographers, visited Assange in the Embassy of Ecuador in London, equipped with analogue medium format cameras and a few rolls of film. In accordance with the Sunny 16 Rule which is a method in photography of estimating correct daylight without a light meter, they took ten portraits of Assange. However, as the light conditions in the room were so poor, the portraits turned out to be completely dark. The last frame was used with a flash and the resulting image only revealed Assange’s silhouette. Once again, his portrait remains elusive.

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Wikiland 23 June 2017 / Sunny 16 Rule
Photographs by Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt
Preface by Johannes Wahlström
Design by 1:2:3
Light protection pouch 24 x 32cm
Text sheet 42 x 59,5 cm
Contact sheet 24 x 30 cm
Negative 6 x 7 cm
Cardboard box 25,4 x 31,7 cm

The Last of the Lucky / You Can't Always Get What You Want

In the spring of 2014, Klara Källström and Thobias Fäldt travelled from the US to Cuba in the spirit of visiting the country before it would change. They had brought along analogue camera film that they feared was damaged by the x-rays of the security controls, so they went searching for new film. In the streets of Havana, they accidentally ran into one of Fidel Castro’s former private photographers. He took them to a camera shop, where despite the general lack of photographic equipment in the city, there were three rolls of film bearing the inscription “Lucky”. The salesman handed over the rolls and said: “These are the last rolls of Cuba.”. The expiry date on the unexposed “Lucky”-rolls was marked to 1994. They were sent to Cuba from the Soviet Union as part of the former Soviet-Cuba trade agreements that subsequently ended in the 1990s. (...)

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Photographs and editing by Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt
Text and research by Johannes Wahlström
Design by 1:2:3
64 pages with 32 color plates
& 120 pages with 101 Tweets
29.7 x 41.7 cm
& 14.8 x 22 cm
Full color UV offset
Soft covers and craft paper case with silkscreen printing
Unstapled & stapled
Edition: 500
ISBN: 978-91-980069-9-5

25 Lemon Trees, No Gardeners

In 25 Lemon Trees, No Gardeners, Källström-Fäldt follow up on the media depiction of the Greek crisis. The vantage point is a fake news story published by a number of major European news outlets. The headlines exclaimed that the Evangelismos Hospital in Athens had 45 employed gardeners but no garden, and this came to be a perfect metaphor for a stereotype of Greek wastefulness, one of the presumed reasons behind the Greek economic crisis. The truth of the matter was that the hospital indeed had no garden, but neither did it have any gardeners. Upon closer inspection, it did however have 25 lemon trees.(...)

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Photographs by
Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt
Final art by Mane Radmanović
Text by Kajsa Ekis Ekman
Text editing by
Johannes Wahlström
Design by KK+TF
(first made for EGAA by 1:2:3, 2011)
Edited by KK+TF
48 pages with 46 black and white plates
20.5 x 30.5 cm / 8.1 x 12 in
Black and white offset
Soft cover and case
Stapled
Edition: 300
ISBN: ISBN: 978-91-980069-8-8
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Who Is Salt?

Similarly to the film The Fifth Estate, the movie Who Is Salt? also deals with the notion of the Military-Entertainment Complex. A collaboration between Hollywood and the Pentagon was revealed through email conversations found on IMDb and in the Sony Pictures hack of 2014 where the US State Department proposes a movie which would help stear public opinion and political narrative in favor of the US.

The movie Salt 2 is an example of this co-operation, and the conversations reveal that Angelina Jolie had allegedly long been dreaming of playing Martin Scorsese's Cleopatra and would be offered the role if she agreed to play Evelyn Salt, a CIA operative accused of being a Russian sleeper agent, once again. This is a moment of documentary photography where Källström-Fäldt have kept track of the the conversations that took place, and the rumors that flourished.

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A Project by Johannes Wahlström,
Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt and 1:2:3
Text and research by Johannes Wahlström
Photograph by Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt
Design by 1:2:3
22 x 15,5 cm acrylic case
32 pages
B-B-B-Books #11
ISBN: 978-91-980069-6-4
Publication date: November 2015
B-B-B-Books
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Village

Village was created during an Artist-in-Residency that Källström-Fäldt were invited to in Quebec City in Canada. Together with a research group based in Quebec, they adopted an equal parts photographic and linguistic perspective to search for displaced cultures in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, areas which, like other places with a colonial past, bear their cultural blind spots visible in language. Källström-Fäldt followed the names of places in search of a forgotten history. With one foot in the history of photography and references to Robert Frank's The Americans, they spent three months in a car, photographing specific sites and pairing them with their indigenous names, rather than their current names. They used the photographic caption as an artistic method. The indigenous names of the places they visited were translated into French and English which are the current official languages of Canada. In the composition of image and caption, Källström-Fäldt searched for the conflict that arises when text and photography resist describing each other. Instead, something else emerged; an image beyond the immediately visible.


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Photographs by
Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt
Design by 1:2:3
256 pages with 121 color plates
240 x 300 mm / 9.4 x 11.8 in
Full color offset
Hardback / Clothbound
Edition: 500

Wikiland 2007-07-12 - 00:59:46

The project then evolved into an inquiry of the entertainment complex. The focus is now on a so-called gun-camera video from July 12, 2007, that was leaked by American soldier Bradley Manning (now Chelsea Manning) showing how civilians and Reuters photographers were gunned down from an Apache helicopter in Baghdad, a video which later came to be known as Collateral Murder. The video was published by Wikileaks on 5 April 2010, and Assange was hailed a brave activist. But less than four months later, the focus shifted away from the war crimes in Baghdad. The world media now turned its gaze towards Stockholm and the rape accusations against Assange in August 2010. Three years later, Collateral Murder re-occurred but this time in the 2013 Touchstone/Disney feature film titled The Fifth Estate in which Assange is portrayed as a dubious character, rather than a whistleblower revealing war crimes. An hour into the film (00:59:46 to be exact), the artists pressed ‘pause’, taking a photograph of a stained computer screen showing an image of actor Benedict Cumberbatch playing Assange. The core of the project is to highlight the film industry's capacity to render harmless leaked documentation of war crime.

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Photographs by Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt
Design by 1:2:3
Edited by KK+TF
32 pages with 29 color plates
Tabloid 29 x 38 cm / 11,4 x 14,9 i
n Poster 59 x 95 cm / 23.2 x 37.4 in
Cardboard box 20 x 30,5 cm / 7,8 x 12 in
Edition: 250
ISBN: 978-91-980069-4-0
Publication date: September 2014
B-B-B-Books

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A Beach

A Beach consists of photographs taken along the beach in the Arab city of Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, Israel. They are presented with a photograph from the same place taken by French photographer Félix Bonfils in 1880. The buildings that are visible in Bonfils’ photograph are now demolished to the ground to make way for a modern boardwalk. The construction is a result of the occupation of Palestine and is part of the gentrification and expansion of Tel Aviv. The only sign of the missing houses are pieces of mosaic from floor tiles found on the beach in Jaffa.

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Photographs by Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt
Text by Johannes Wahlström
Design by 1:2:3
B/w image of Jaffa 1880 by Félix Bonfils
28 pages with 21 color plates
134 x 180 mm / 5.3 x 7 in
Full color offset
Accordion-fold binding
2 folded inserts
Hard cover
Edition: 300
ISBN: 978-91-980069-3-3