Speaking about Radical Sweden or Radical Swedes may sound like an oxymoron, but it is real. In the Swedish welfare state many people like to believe that all that counts is goodness in Sweden, while in fact this concept of Swedish goodness has denied the radicalization of its society; racism, the existence of antisemitism, islamophobia, even sexism; and that it’s social democracy’s global flagship is under threat due to the country’s ongoing Neo-liberalization and the rise of the far-right, against the backdrop of economic decline and arrival of migrants.
And yet – against, and due to the troubling and complex background of a Radical Sweden – a new progressive radical responsibility of Radical Swedes starts to emerge thinking the climate, the economy, the common, humanity, living, work, nature and free-time otherwise. It has to do with a need and desire to recover and deepen democratic values, and to recognize and care for the social nucleus present in our societies; how a renewed idea of the common and private can be constructed towards a renewed idea of democratic and ecological imagination. It concerns a radical transformation of our global contemporary society as a whole; how through its paradoxical community’s; where we all have become foreigners – another Cosmo-Political reality can be thought and constructed.
The projects documented in this book make difference relate, foster the radical inconsistencies of possibility, situate an otherness of unexpected places, displacements, and interrelationship of people and things that in potential allow new relationships of citizenship to emerge. What the projects situate is a new beginning, or in other words concerns a radicality of ideas, of organizations and its articulations; is about an aesthetics performance that shifts the social, the economic and the political of our doing and thinking, now that the failure of Neo-liberalism has become apparent.
Radical Swedes. Towards a Cosmo-Political Outlook: Studio: Celebrating Diversity. Roemer van Toorn, Sangram Shirke and students, UMA School of Architecture. UMA Press Publication, 2019.
