A Private Collection

I have long had a fascination with collections. A chaos that spreads and grows, until it finally suggests order. Objects that gain a new narrative simply by existing in a shared relation. Objects that acquire the possibility to create new stories, help understand old ones, and, in many cases, fascinate our imagination.

I encountered such a collection in a house in Hammarlunda, Lund, Sweden. The house itself carries history; it was once a potato starch factory, later transformed into an indoor pig farm. In an attempt to collect insurance money, the owner set fire to the house. Afterwards, the municipality of Lund seized the property. This is where Lennart entered the picture, the next owner of the old potato starch factory. Lennart was an architect and professor of architecture at Lund University. He initiated a discussion with the municipality about conserving the building, but the proposal was rejected. Determined not to let its history be lost, Lennart bought the half-burned structure himself. From then on, Lennart began rebuilding the house, without a clear purpose other than preserving its existence. Over 30 years, he worked on it with hired help, his own hands, and by involving his students from Lund University, giving them the opportunity to work at a 1:1 scale. Today, when you walk through the house in Hammarlunda, you can still read these layers of history in its walls. The workshop floor bears the concrete feeding troughs where pigs once ate. Large gears remain scattered from the potato grinding days. And finally, the some what questionable craftsmanship of the new roof and second floor reveals the hand of inexperienced architecture students.

I came into contact with Lennart through my friend Asta, who knew his granddaughter. By then, he was getting older and, over the past ten years, had become less and less able to keep up with the maintenance the house required. On top of that, he filled the house with objects, ranging from chairs and books to cars and unattached doors, until much of it had become little more than storage. Lennart reached out to Asta, and then to me, to ask if we might be interested in helping with the maintenance of the house. In return, we would be able to use it as much as, and as what, we liked. 

When I first entered the house, I was both intrigued and inspired by the quirky building and the endless number of objects that inhabited the space. Every drawer was full. There were around thirty loose doors, about forty different lamps. If you needed anything, building materials, screws, machines, wires, there was a good chance you could find it hidden somewhere in the house. In a way, the house felt generous. Every time you moved one object aside, another would appear, and you never knew what you might find: a drawer full of metal fittings, or a box of hand-drawn sketches. We could not resist organising, one room at a time, evaluating the objects for their usefulness, their aesthetic value, or something entirely different. We threw out mouldy textiles, dusted off old carpets, and washed chairs in the garden. 

This led to my first step into archival thinking, and I started to form an idea of creating an archive on location in Hammarlunda to preserve the story left by Lennart and the house’s earlier inhabitants. Unfortunately, Lennart’s health was deteriorating and both his vision and mobility were so bad that he no longer was able tovisit the house on his own. This led to a hard but reasonable decision of selling the house in late summer of 2025. Even though the house was no longer available, my interest in collections and archives remained.

What had drawn me to Hammarlunda, and what stayed with me after the house was sold, was a broader fascination with collections, with how physical objects can tell stories and how, through sheer quantity and accumulation, they can take you on a journey and spark a curiosity you did not know you were looking for. I had felt it in the house in Hammarlunda, but I had felt it before. In the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, where objects were stacked on top of each other and scattered across rooms in a way unlike any museum I have visited before or since. Walking into overcrowded antique shops or going through drawers and boxes in my childhood home’s basement. It is a feeling of curiosity, the sense that something might be hidden between the quantity of objects, a feeling of looking for something unexpected.

Through building this interest in collections and archives, I have had discussions with a close friend, Isaac .Like Lennart’s house in Hammarlunda, he too has a home filled with objects scattered around, and as a friend I have often questioned their purpose and his reasoning for keeping them. To some extent, I saw him as a hoarder. One example is an assemblage of four bricks. Isaac is in his late twenties and lives in Copenhagen, which means he often has to move from apartment to apartment. And every time I visited him in a new place, I saw those bricks. Both to myself and to him, I questioned why he brought them along. I did not really ask him directly; I more indirectly mocked what I saw as an illogical decision, to carry a bag of bricks to each new apartment, when for me they seemed so easy to discard. When doing this project, I for the first time questioned not why he moved them from place to place, but why he kept them in the first place, what narrative the bricks hold. I asked Isaac directly, and he began to tell me their story. In his own words:

“Jeg havde ledt efter et par gamle og slidte mursten i noget tid, til at have i min vindueskarm, da jeg fandt disse mursten i en container, ved en renovering, ved Østerport st. En gammel og slidt mursten har for mig den samme værdi, som et gammelt og slidt stykke fortov, idet at tiden slider dens yderste glanslag af overfladen, og den bliver ru på en måde, så den ligesom absorberer sollyset, frem for at reflektere den. Når det sker, åbner der sig for mig et lille landskab i dens overflades ujævnheder, små sten dukker op som bjergtoppe, og byens forurening, som med tiden har fået sit virke og givet dybde i dens røde nuancer, bliver levende, idet den belyses af solen. At se på et gammelt stykke fortov eller mursten i sollyset fik mig til at føle en nærhed med livet og verden. Alle de mennesker, som har gået på det stykke fortov, alt det som denne mursten har set, alle de historier de bærer på, som ligesom blomstrede i lyset og fremskyndede en følelse i mig af en samhørighed med verden, med livet, med sollyset, og gav mig en følelse af at være tættere på alt det, jeg ikke føler jeg kan nå. Men jeg tænkte, at måske ved at have murstenene i sollyset i min vindueskarm ville jeg føle, at jeg kommer tættere på. Jeg skilte mig af med disse mursten i sommers, efter jeg var begyndt at miste forbindelsen til denne følelse, til dette drømmelandskab, lidt efter lidt med tiden, og murstenene var endt nede i min vens kælder. Efter at have båret rundt på dem i alle de år, fra sted til sted, fra kælder til kælder, uden næsten længere at kunne huske hvorfor, skilte jeg mig endelig af med dem. Det var trist at gøre og efterlod en følelse af tomhed, hvor de drømme plejede at være.” (Isaac, personal communication, 2026)

When diving into Isaac’s collection, other stories kept coming up. A poster advertising a Van Gogh exhibition he had seen at his childhood train station, and later found available to take down in another part of the city, reflecting back to him another time of his life. A religious icon received from a nun while visiting a monastery with his workplace, the story of her life told beforehand still present in the object. The objects each held a narrative, some larger, some smaller. What Isaac had done, across all of these objects, was what Pomian might describe as the transformation of utilitarian things into semiophores: objects removed from practical use and embedded with symbolic meaning, mediating between the visible surface of the object and the invisible world of memory, experience, and feeling that each one had come to carry (Pomian, 1990).