Life of Johan Fornäs
The work of Johan Fornäs can be read
against lots of different contexts: institutional as well as intertextual. But
it is also linked to the personal life in which he struggles to construct
himself as an acting subject, always connected to shifting constellations of others. This is an effort
to briefly tell his life story through some formative moments. It is possible to go directly to any
of the main sections:
Childhood
Johan Fornäs was born 7 March 1952. He
spent his childhood with a younger sister Anna (born in 1953 and today a
graphic conservator at the National Archives of Sweden) and their parents Evert
and Marianne Fornäs at the people’s high school of Lunnevad near the village
Sjögestad, between the cities of Linköping and Mjölby.
His father Evert was born in 1924. His father Leon was an engineer from Göteborg who
worked abroad at that time. Evert was therefore born in Hull, UK, and then also
lived in Neuss near Düsseldorf in Germany before the family returned to Sweden
in 1933, to live first in Sjöbo and then back in Göteborg. Evert’s mother
Helfrid (1904-1929) died in her bathtub in Germany on her 25thbirthday
on 7 March – which happens to be Johan’s birthday too.
Evert, who
was just four years old, was the one who found her dead. He and his
younger
brother Rune soon got a stepmother, the German Hella, and a younger
half-brother,
Bengt. Evert suffered badly from an authoritarian upbringing, resulting
in a migraine that prevented him from fulfilling his education and
fully enjoying life. Evert always had artistic
inclinations, but as his father wanted him to become an engineer, he
made the
compromise of becoming a people’s high school teacher in
mathematics, physics
and chemistry, teaching visual arts and theatre on the side. He was a
beloved and
active teacher who always took his pupils seriously. For instance, he
once
wrote a letter to Albert Einstein, asking about some detail in his
theories of
relativity, and Einstein kindly replied – a fascinating
testimony to
his open mind and generosity. He was always organising fascinating
events, both
around the natural sciences and in the artistic field, with amateur
theatre,
pottery, etc. But he never really liked the school life, and in 1970 he
broke
away, moving with the family to east Skåne in south Sweden where
they in 1965
had bought a summerhouse – a converted farmhouse in Heinge
near
Lövestad. Actually, they first lived in Malmö a couple of
years, before they
had renovated “Heingehus” and moved there for good.
Johan’s mother Marianne was
born in 1929. She came from a small farm called Tatorp, south of
Söderköping in East Sweden. Her mother Ingrid (1900-1983) was
from a family of “statare” (a problematic Swedish system of
agriculture labourers receiving
allowance in kind, finally abolished in 1944). As a maid
(“piga”) she married
the farmer’s son, Agdvar Ionzon (1889-1974), and they raised four
children:
Gunnel, Curt, Marianne and Lars-Erik. Marianne thus was firmly anchored
in a traditional Swedish rural and agriculturally based culture.
She
only had the basic school education but studied a year at Lunnevad, where she fell in love with the new teacher Evert,
whom she
married.
Tatorp was
immensely important to Johan, Anna and their cousins. Tatorp’s contrast to
Evert’s childhood family couldn’t be bigger, and Evert loved it immensely, as
did Johan. It was an open and vivid place, with lots of people streaming in and
out, chatting vividly, enjoying Ingrid’s coffee and food, and playing card
games like “priffe” (a Swedish variant of whist). Marianne’s brothers were
inspired musicians: Curt on the piano and accordion, Lars-Erik on the violin
and the recorder. They moved seamlessly between Mozart, Handel, Swedish folk
music, tango and modern popular songs of the time, in a great playful spirit.
Marianne sang with them and became a teacher on the recorder for children. She
also was a skilled lace-maker and taught that too at Lunnevad.
Living at Lunnevad was also a rather unique experience for a child. It was kind of a
haven in the flat countryside, with lots of young adult boarding pupils and
lots of cultural events all the time: concerts, visiting theatre groups and art
exhibitions, Christmas parties and festive term endings, etc. Lunnevad had
special courses in music and visual arts, but also organised events with
visitors from the outside, as well as collective visits to drama and concerts
in Linköping and Norrköping. It was good to be a child there, until the teenage
years made the geographic and social distance to people of the same age more
deeply felt.
Johan learnt playing the recorder and the
piano – almost only playing from (classical) music. He also copied
records and radio programmes on tape and thus collected some 2-300 filled
tapes. He was good at school, which he started at six, one year earlier than
normal. He was mobbed by other kids in the first years of school in Sjögestad
village, but managed better from the 7th grade in Malmslätt and in
the Katedralskolan gymnasium in Linköping, where he was active in the very
traditional student society for natural sciences Naturvetenskapliga Sällskapet,
working in vain for reforming its rituals and allowing women – an early
expression of a feeling for social justice and gender equality. At the end of
the gymnasium he and another boy in his class were the only ones who refused to
wear the traditional white student cap. He had the best points, and the world seemed
to be open. He had in fact managed to finish his mathematics, physics and
chemistry courses individually by himself long before that, but wasn’t allowed
to continue to the university before the whole exam was done, so during the
whole gymnasium period, he had plenty of free time top spend on reading,
writing and thinking, since he had already been examined in almost half of the
subjects. He became increasingly interested in politics and culture, longing
for a more independent adult life, as there was no return to the happy
childhood games anymore. Early on, Johan wanted to become a researcher –
with mathematics as the main interest. He collected mathematical problems
boasted of having solved one of the allegedly unsolved problems he found in a
book, and was part of the Swedish team at the Olympic Games of Mathematics in
Budapest 1970. Music and culture was just a hobby for him at that time.
Youth
For some, youth equals the teenage years.
Johan felt his real youth life started when he began at university at the age
of 18. As his parents simultaneously moved to Malmö, he chose the honourable
Lund University, where he first studied mathematics and then added theoretical
philosophy (with a specialisation in logics) – in line with his
previous inclinations. With these subjects he took his BA in 1973, but then
also added a year of musicology, mainly in order to be able to do political
work in parallel.
He first lived in a student
corridor on Michael Hansen’s Collegium, but spent much time in a
left-wing collective called Herkules, where he also lived during his
last Lund year. With these new-found comrades, who were about five
years older than him, he engaged in a socialist anti-militarist
organisation and edited a highly alternative little journal called
Fotfolket (Swedish for foot soldiers, literally “foot
people”). This soon became more and more competently edited and
designed, and transformed into a general leftist cultural magazine. The
group soon was swallowed up by a non-Leninist antiauthoritarian new
left organisation.
In 1974, the collective
dissolved. Many
moved to Västerås, but Johan and his friends Anders
Frenander and Christer
Wigerfelt chose to move to Sweden’s second largest city
Göteborg on the west
coast. The first year, Johan lived in a collective with Margareta
Widmark whom
he had met in Lund 1973, his sister Anna and a good friend called
Karl-Axel “Bobo” Nordin. Margareta and Johan separated and
the collective dissolved in
1975, and Johan got his first “real” own apartment on
Såggatan 21 in the part
of the city called Majorna.
The
first Göteborg year, Johan got “proletarised” and
worked in the steel press of the big Volvo factory in Torslanda. Due to
frequent interruptions in the production line, he managed to read one
book each day that year – half novels, half theory texts! The
second year, he was chief editor of the left-wing book shop Barrikaden,
but he took part in the anti-Leninist opposition called
“Feskeläget” (Göteborg slang for fishing port)
when the organisation decided to start building a party, and therefore
left the organisation and the editorial job to go back to industrial
work, this time at the smaller Fix factory, making window and balcony
door locks. With Christer, Anders and many other old and new friends he
continued being active in the independent local socialist association
for sports and culture, Fotfolket (same name, different organisation),
with gymnastics, public festivals, excursions and increasingly lively
study circles. Johan wrote pedagogic introductions to all three volumes
of Marx’ Capital, and examined more than 100 participant in those
circles, moving also into circles on cultural theory, public sphere
theory etc. He also was a voluntary activist for the leftist book
publisher Röda Bokförlaget (today Daidalos).
Johan was all the time also a diligent
photographer of everyday life. He continued to listen to music, and much
enjoyed the Swedish alternative music movement. This led to him working a year
for its magazine Musikens Makt (“Power of
Music”) 1978-79, and as an activist in the local youth music house
Sprängkullen, where punk music made him dare play by the ear in a strictly
amateur (and never performing) rock-punk group whose participants varied
extremely in age.
But back in December 1976, he decided to
re-enter the academy, in a completely different field than before. In autumn 1977, he
thus finished at Fix and became a student of musicology at Göteborg University,
with the music movement as a primary object of study. The 1985 dissertation was
an analysis of its climax, the so-called Tent Project from 1977. See his CV for
further details on the rest of his academic career.
In 1980. Johan met the kindergarten
assistant Ulla-Britt Viibus (a.k.a. Ulrica Fråst) and her 4 years old daughter Frida. They formed a
family for three years, living at Amiralitetsgatan 24 in Majorna, though the relation had its cracks. Life continued
with basically the same ingredients for a while and Johan may be
said to finally have reached a kind of adulthood.
Adulthood
But then, 14 May 1983, Johan met Hillevi
Ganetz at a Marxist weekend conference in Stockholm. They fell in love, and
already in August, Johan moved to Stockholm. The two lived in a series of
different second-hand apartments before they settled in Aspudden and then moved
to Södermalm. For some years, they also formed a rock band with some other friends, rehearsing
first in the youth house Puss in Farsta, then in a cellar in the Old Town, and
finally at the new big youth house Fryshuset. Hillevi sang, Johan played
keyboards, but they never managed to perform for any audience.
Johan made his dissertation in 1985 and got
a research project funding together with his old friends Ove Sernhede from
Göteborg and Ulf Lindberg from Lund. He participated in seminar activities
around popular culture and when he got a postdoc research job from the leading
state research council, he attached himself to the Centre for Mass
Communication Research, which later merged with the journalism education into
the new Department of Journalism, Media and Communication. But again, this
story belongs to the CV, as does his growing involvement with Linköping
University up to the present job as professor of mediated culture at Tema Q in
Norrköping, as well as his likewise growing involvement in the glocal field of
cultural studies, including directing the Swedish ACSIS and being vice chair of
the international ACS.
Keyboards still belong to the
leisure
activities. Johan has a Yamaha Clavinova digital piano, and in December
2006 also bought
a nice Bugari Armando accordion. Other work-free activities include
Sunday walks and regular
explorations of foreign countries with his beloved Hillevi. They got
married 11
February 2006, for practical reasons, but took the chance to make a
cool
celebration. Their home in a 1906 house on Fatbursgatan 18A in the
centre of Södermalm is a beloved basis for intellectual travels on
the PowerBook, work travels on train to Norrköping and holiday
travels for sightseeing and walks at various destinations.