Russian Bang / Ryska smällen
”Language is the boundary to our mind,
just as history and memory
is the boundary to our reason.
Ludwig Wittgenstein expressed this
limitation in the following manner:
We cannot think what we cannot think,
therefore we cannot say what we cannot think.”
Johannes Wahlström, 2012
Russian Bang / Ryska smällen is a series of photographs reflecting upon the occasion of the bombing by the Russian Airforce over Eriksdal in Stockholm in 1944. There are disagreements regarding the reasons behind the bombing, an almost unknown historical event remembered only by a few. Nobody was severely injured, although buildings and trees in the neighbourhood were damaged. In this photographic series, the trees are portrayed as they stand as eyewitnesses of an event that has been erased from our collective consciousness.