The Travel Agency is the title of a film Annika Ström started working at in 2006. As the artist recalls in the report donated to the MoRE museum, it went through several phases and two productors, without never being realised: the script ”was about two women, one of which, wants to die, and one who wants to live. They contact an agency, which assists suicide. It is a Special Agency”. After a first financial failure, the project was sent to a new producer, who met the artist in 2014 and showed interest: unfortunately, as the artist recalls, nine months after the meeting, a director in the producer’s company announced in a radio interview her next film, with “thesame pitch as in Ström’s script”. The producer produce the new film. Annika Ström also states that “the producer and the director deny any plagiarism”.

The themes of fragility, uncertainty, sadness, the interest in the act of travelling and in the condition of the traveller, the focus on female protagonists, these are just a few hints we can grasp from the brief description of the artist showed here, that can also easily be found inside Annika Ström film production.
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]]> http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/3243]]> This project was proposed by Annika Ström in 2016 as a public art commission, and was supposed to take place at night in Sergels Torg Square in Stockholm. It consisted of a night concert lasting approximately 15 minutes, during which the Jönköping Chamber Choir would have sung the lyrics and music by Annika Ström. In particular, as the artist reports in the file donated to MoRE Museum, it can be considered a larger-scale version of a performance the artist the artist did in 2015 at the Jönköping city café, with the Jönköping Chamber Choir and conductor Ove Gotting, where they sang the “phrases that appeared on billboards around Jönköping and on digital road signs on highway E4 nearby.”

In Stockholm, the choir would have been introduced by “fifty loud skateboards with lanterns on their wheels and hoods.” The same conductor would have parachuted down, and when the skateboarders had moved a short distance away and fallen silent, the choir would have sung the phrases projected onto nearby building façades. The performance would have been closed by the skateboarders, who would turn their lights on once more.

A sound recording and a vinyl record were to be produced after the show.

]]> http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/3240]]> Invited to submit a project for a medieval hall in the UK, that should have been a collaboration with either local people or an organization, Annika Ström decided to present a performance based upon the idea of lonely men in their cars, supposed to be lonely dads. Fathers who were divorced and estranged from their children. Starting, as the artist states, from a reflection upon the car as a place of solitude and from her direct experience - a common trait to several of her artworks, here derived from her travels and from her recent experience of moving to England - this project was designed as a collaboration with local Father’s Rights organizations. The artist report and the preparatory collage archived here contains all the details of the performance, of the accompanying music - a popular culture quotation, playing a crucial role as it frequently happens in Annika Ström works - and of the way everything should have been filmed and documented:

“I planned to get at least 50 Dads. They would drive in to the square outside the medieval hall. One car for each dad. They would stop and remain in their car. They would all simultaneously pull down their car windows and play the same song; The very romantic Pietro Mascagni, as used as the sound track in Raging Bull by Scorsese.

When the song was finished, they were to slowly pull away, head to the motorway in a line towards Southampton, where I also had commission as part of the same project.

We were to hire helicopters to film the motorway, like a “News Copter” where the Lonely Dads would parade with their cars, missing their children.”

Reflecting upon roles and structures inside the families and in the society, here Annika Ström investigate in particular relationships, self-doubts and failures, designing the staging of a dramatic scene where cars would have invaded the historical setting.

The artist also wanted to install enormous disco balls inside the hall, but this project too remained unrealised.
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