(Reportaget finns på svenska här)

There’s something missing in the fields on the road towards Färingsö, an island in lake Mälaren just outside Stockholm. The meadows and fields somehow feel empty.

Suddenly we pass by an old car dealer. Rows of Volvo cars are lined up; it’s like stepping 30 years back in time. Any moment a huge and rusty robotic machine could appear out of the forest clearing, moving with giant leaps.

This is where the twisted world of Simon Stålenhag begins.

Here everything seems to go a little slower, time doesn’t pass by as quickly. Dressed in wellies and a coat in the well-known orange colours of the old state telephone company he greats us at the fence to the horse paddock.

– The horses are my closest neighbours. Well, sometimes they are so close they’re more like lodgers, he says.

His book “Ur Varselklotet”, or Tales from the Loop, which is its English title, and his pictures from an idyllic Sweden have attracted attention from all over the world. It began with an article in The Verge in August of 2013. After that the ball just kept on rolling. The first book was barely finished in time for the annual book fair in Gothenburg in 2014. Now it’s completely sold out.

Because regardless of where people live in the world they’re lured to his alternative 1980’s. Despite not knowing a word of Swedish they still bought the book. Inquiries for an English edition kept coming in. With his publisher they decided to turn to Kickstarter to get the funding for a translated version, and book number two. That project ended last week.

– I was a bit sceptical at first, would it really work with a book? When I think of Kickstarter I imagine games or movies. And there could potentially be problems with that. “We want to make this cool movie, give us money”. Then you owe people, and it’s hard to make a movie. So there’ll be a lot of anxiety. But that wasn’t the case.

No, that wasn’t the case at all. As it turns out it was actually a rather good thing, to make a book at Kickstarter. Calling it a success would be an understatement. At the end of the project, after 30 days, they received 321 680 US dollars, 32 times more than they asked for.



He rents the cabin in the meadow from the mother of a childhood friend. This is where he finds his inspiration; several of the views in his pictures are from the area. The book Tales from the Loop depicts an aging 80’s Sweden. Book number two, Swedish Machines, Lonely Places, picks up some years into the 90’s, when something all of a sudden changes.

– In the first book I explored a country that was rapidly aging, the Sweden in the days of the state telephone company. My idyllic childhood. It becomes more serious in the second book, the time of the privatized Sweden. They started to tear down the old high-tension lines. It becomes natural to see your childhood being torn down, he says.

In 1994 Simon Stålenhag was 10 years old. Internet was on the edge of its major breakthrough and a new era was waiting around the corner. About the same time his parents divorced and his father moved to Kista/Husby outside of Stockholm. Childhood stories that haven’t yet been told. From the time when information society took off.

– It’s connected to the time when the information society became common knowledge. And that change came from Kista, where all the major companies had their offices. I was playing a lot outside on my own. I remember the office of IBM and their big logo on the lawn. That’s interesting, how that looks in my twisted world.



The pictures are real, but at the same time an escape from reality. On one hand Simon’s pictures are closely linked to the Swedish 80’s. Volvo 240, state enterprises, food cooperatives. On the other hand there’s something universal about the desolate that makes people from all over the world recognise themselves.

– On the surface it is science fiction art and it’s very escapist. It’s something people enjoy, it takes them away from reality. I want them to be closer to reality. It becomes extra fun when people say that a robot reminds them of when they where kids. They go towards reality instead of away from it.

It’s difficult to say when a picture really becomes a picture. Simon often wanders around with a camera, capturing his surroundings. His own archive is now so large, and covers so many years that it in itself has become a time marker.

It’s like taking notes, instead of writing them down or sketching. The photos often become a reference to his illustrations, sometimes he keeps the scenes the way they are. Or he transfers them to the ocean or the mountains.

Like he transferred the road to Färingsö, which winds between the fields and farm. In Simon’s world it turns into a mountain road, a road that rolls forward between massive hulks.



Together with screenwriter Karin Arrhenius his illustrations soon may become real. They’re working on a TV series based on the stories and pictures from his first book. A possibility to explore other parts of his twisted reality. What’s happening between the people in the pictures?

– It will be a deep dive into the human psyche. In a TV series you can get up close to people, a deeper analysis.

So far all the attention hasn’t changed Simons life. The biggest difference is that’s easier to get jobs. More important though is the response from people.

– This is how the world feels like to me, the things that are in my mind. Is there anyone who feels the same? And then a million people say yes! That’s big. You don’t expect it to be global, that’s rewarding, he says.

The success with the book did make him want to try other ideas.

– One picture I’ve done is an old computer and a lot of floppy disks; it’s actually my desk in there in the bedroom. A large robot and a teenager fixing it. That’s my 90’s, after 1994. I wanted to test: do you remember this: Prodigy and Megadrive and all the other things we where doing? With a robot twist.

Outside it’s started to rain, the cowslips in the window smells of tea and milk. In the bedroom there’s an air of the 90’s. A computer from the early 90’s, a pile of floppy disks. On a shelf a Gameboy. A collision between country life and information society, not unlike Simon Stålenhag's twisted reality.