Ilja Karilampi
SweSh Zpress


The worlds fastest train connection between Sweden & Switzerland opens its temporary portal to a parallel universe. When Herr Monjaret emailed me after buying my novel "The Hunter in the Armchair" last year we talked about taking the metro to Amsterdammertje Bijlmer and getting lost around the ArenA. Everytime I am in CH everyone manages to be in three cities in one day, have breakfast in Basel, make UV prints in Zürich, visit the lover in Lausanne and enjoy an expensive Gauloises in the evening back in Baloise again. When I was watching the Eurovision Schlager Song Contest in Göteborg and tweeting whats Good for Öresund is good for the whole region after Denmark took the first prize in Malmö, in my imagination I was back on the airport train crossing the expensive bridge seeing the countries almost making out from above the skies just like how I left my favourite Skåne newly kissed but aware of the fact that the relation was never ever working anymore but I sat on the bus to Berlin having a beer talking to a Bangladeshi embassy employee next to me who was doing his version of the European Grand Tour.
We were shortening the distances and unifying a shattered Europe by our fraternising of friends and partners in every country and taking every possible way of transport to the fringes of our inner and outer worlds and voids, watching the skies in an ecstatic way of joy, compressing time into ultra-fine pockets of liberty and aestethic poses.
On the way to Schlieren we passed gigantic mountains of white powder, the SBB-CFF-FFS and SJ combinations that seemed to make us tick in the right way. I almost solely used my bike to get to the idyllic stone house where I lived and worked, while I did have a seasonal ticket for all of Zürich, I dreaded the lonely distance from the dobbeldecker station in the countryside so it was more of a pleasure to cycle along the Limmat with the company of Jim Jones & Juicy J in the mild summer breeze. I regretted never getting a Halbtax karte so in the end I didn´t make it to the dirty south; Geneve, Lausanne, maybe Bern.
Yngve once told me about the lavish ruthless lifestyle of Vienna, and especially one anecdote that stuck with me as a strange metaphor for something; being on a bike in the street and braking it with the soles of your new Prada shoes, thats how you treat them and thats the attitude to the nicer things, a laugh to the bank or maybe a cocky attitude to afford to ruin such things in the right way.
By now I am convinced the SweSh Xpress brake system consists only of such shoes, licking every wheel, and they reincarnate every time we have passengers, and re-materialize as the smoke that linger in front of our eyes as we crank into hyperspeed, into the opening between the two countries that start with an S that I have found, which we will keep open as long as possible, just like the muffled club music and short soundtracks between the acts of our play at New Theater that shortened a months time into ten seconds and placed a city within a city no oceans too far no tunnels too hard to dig.
Every fare is 3 CHF and the money goes straight back into maintenance of the line, and the dark dark blue Miltec army-wear-for-civilians fishers vest that I got as the ultimate clubbing gear not having to wear a man bag, will be the uniform for the squadron on the Fringes that will operate it.
The crimson crime red plexi pieces uniquely cut with laser to utmost precision and only existing in this form once, a troll sign of information where the gaps create the substance, and the large logotype hanging on its own like a VIP corporate lounge where you´d think you need a card to enter to become a leech on the side, a pipeline under the Berliner Mauer digging in on Kippenbergers global subway system that since long is closed. The Italian futurists was obsessed with the sound of the machine but I think they interpreted it wrong and anyway it was war times and they became fascists later bcoz they only saw the agression, the negative aspects of the future and blazed away on their stupid metal sculptures.
Meanwhile, Kurt Schwitters Norwegian cabin was removed from its original location and created as a replica at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter and looked like a dead portal to happy summer memories and closed off space experiments that you could only access by physically entering it, on the border between dream and reality.

Ilja Karilampi
1983, Göteborg, Sweden
Lives and works in Berlin & Sweden




  Ilja Karilampi, Marbriers 4, Geneva
  http://marbriers4.ch