Elin Wikström in Scotland

Elin Wikström’s work The Need to Be Free contained among other things a fortnight’s tireless going up and down on an escalator in a shopping centre in Dundee, to the beat of Funcadelic’s old hit Free Your Mind and Your Ass will Follow. Thus an act was staged that can be regarded as being extremely compulsive and repetitious and also as being an expression of uncompromising freedom.

Elin Wikström’s The Need to Be Free was carried out in Dundee, Scotland – one of the old industrial towns that the British powers that be in the past years have decided to give a face lift. Dundee’s renovation includes both a new arts centre – DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts) – and the Overgate shopping centre. Naturally both places offer widely different activities, events and not least ideologies. But in the same way as people use the shopping complex as a meeting place, the DCA’s café is also a popular place. And as is well-known we adjust to the patterns and unspoken rules of the surroundings, where what does deviate can trigger all sorts of reactions.

Elin Wikström’s work draws attention to the fact that the smallest act can make the biggest difference – the act that is hardly noticed but consistently carried out. For a fortnight, from morning to night, she and her assistant Elin Strand went up and down the same escalator in the Overgate shopping centre. At the same time they let the surveillance cameras register and record the act on video, and then it was shown with, an hour’s delay, on a monitor in the entirely escalator free DCA. For the DCA-visitor who wanted to know how it all hanged together – and how it didn’t – were among other things presented with the explanation through a re-mix of Funcadelic’s Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow where sounds from escalators and bag pipes had been added. The shopping people in Overgate stood before another kind of challenge when they finally noticed the two young women going up and down the escalator, seemingly aimlessly.

Elin Wikström and Elin Strand answered to the direct questions from the audience that they had chosen to vacation for two weeks on this particular escalator, a choice which sets off the monotonous and highly regulated act against conceptions of freedom and free choice – about being free and feeling free and if our dreams are our own or other people’s. The scheduled going up and down on Overgate’s nicest escalator meant 300 rounds a day and it was seen by an audience bigger and more miscellaneous than in any imaginable arts institution. Approximately 5 000 people saw and participated actively in The Need to Be Free during these two “holiday weeks”. Elin Wikström brought with her home 84 hours of film and comments from unusually outspoken spectators – and the “Wikstromian” research about what freedom really means will with all certainty continue.