Published on the occasion of the exhibition The Room Is the Third Pedagogue, Konsthall C, Stockholm, 29 October – 18 December 2016.

IF NOT A REVOLUTIONARY LIFE, AT LEAST AN UNOBSTRUCTED ONE
by Lars Bang Larsen

Much about Ljusbacken is the stuff of legends. Some of them tell that the hill in southern Hälsingland, where the large white building is perched, used to be an execution site and the location of a speakeasy and a brothel. Later it became a retirement home, until Stockholm hippies in the early seventies acquired the property and a plot of land around it. The commune came to crystallise the hippie and progg movements, along with their at times extreme blends of political militancy and lifestyle experiments, including primal scream therapy, yoga and meditation, drugs and sexual emancipation. Every country had a commune like this: in Sweden it was Ljusbacken. The Rolling Stones were rumoured to have visited here — just as John and Yoko visited Thylejren in Denmark — and like West Berlin’s Kommune 1, Ljusbacken for a short while epitomised a national countermodel to ‘straight’ society and the nuclear family.

Joanna Lombard’s photos of Ljusbacken, her family home from 1974 to 1983, are disenchanted, almost tabloid in their starkness. ‘Here they harmed a child!’ a newspaper headline above one of them might read. The photos, taken between 2008 and 2012, laconically unravel the rainbow and cast instead the commune’s interiors and exteriors as so many haunted memory sites, while the commune in better days leaps back with sunny group shots of smiling people.