I left London eight years ago today. It was time to go. I was completely exhausted by the job I’d been doing — running the concert programme at Café OTO — and couldn’t really imagine finding something better to do there whilst simultaneously being pushed further out of the city by the crazy cost of living.

Stockholm seemed to be the best option. We could get somewhere affordable to live. I got a grant that paid off my debts. And so we moved.I always rejected the idea that I would start some kind of OTO-equivalent here in Stockholm, but that hasn’t stopped me trying to imagine what such a place could be. There is a special confluence of things that makes OTO work in its own strange way and there is little point in trying to copy it. But one thing I keep coming back to are the windows onto the street. Everything that happens there is visible (and often audible) to the outside world. There are no secrets. The windows suggest an opening to and connection with. That it is possible to participate.

I decided that my fantasy space would also need to have such windows out to the street and it would be called Fönstret (The Window). A physical space will remain fantasy, but I decided to make Fönstret real, to make space via a series of online and physical publications, and do if but a small cut of the work that a physical space might do.

At the same time, I’d been reading Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, trying to think through the meaning of such spaces and the meetings and relationships they facilitate. How informal, unaccredited knowledge is made through these connections and what/how much that means for how we live in the world (as artists, as people). For the first of these missives, I made three short ‘portrait’ films where the subjects talked about someone else or some place else: Lisa Ullén about Fylkingen, Leif Elggren about Lennart Af Larsson and Raymond Strid about Roland Kejser.

I also asked a whole stack of people I felt have some connection to Stockholm if they could write something along these lines. It should be someone or place they knew personally rather than a remote influence, but that otherwise they could be as loose as they liked with the brief. 29 people took me up on the ask and these contributions have finally been collected in a book — a mix of memoir, oral history, love letters, and poetry — a small window into a small part of Stockholm. Forever grateful to everyone for their honesty and for trusting me with their texts and happy to now make them available to the outside world.

John Chantler, Stockholm.
24 November 2022