Umeå stands alongside Riga as one of two European Capitals of Culture for 2014. Since its introduction in 1985, when Athens served as the first official European Capital of Culture, the designation has been variously awarded to one or to multiple cities each year: one city was the rule until 1999, but after nine cities were afforded the title in 2000, two per year has been typical since.
My partner and I visited Umeå in February, as a year’s worth of cultural events – film festivals, food markets, exhibitions at the city’s Bildmuseet and Västerbotten Museum, and international performances of music, opera, and dance – got underway. The inauguration ceremony for Umeå 2014, which took place on 1 February, was hosted atop the frozen Ume river. Titled ‘Burning Snow’, and introduced by a young choir, it saw a light spectacle, music and interpretive dance woven about a series of speakers.
The speeches of the officials who took part were overlong and replete with gratuities; and elsewhere the ceremony’s focus on Sami culture both reduced that culture to a bland stereotype, and seemed ill-suited for what is, up in the north of Sweden, a very European city: driven largely by its university and hospital, and with cultural attractions including its longstanding jazz festival, the Norrlandsoperan, and the Bildmuseet, an architecturally pristine offering of contemporary art as part of the arts campus on the banks of Umeälven. While some of the light displays were novel, those of the gathered crowd who lingered late into the ceremony were there primarily for the firework show which was its culmination.
The year’s events continue unabated. A European film festival will commence tomorrow, in Väven: Umeå’s new culture house/’creative space’, which finally opened just a couple of weeks ago, and to which the city library has been relocated.
The sixteen photographs above begin in the centre of Umeå: showing a slide sculpted out of snow; the city’s central station; several reindeer; and one of the small pavilions which ran along the Rådhusesplanaden as part of the ‘Fair City Expo’ during first week proper of Umeå 2014. We find ourselves next at Lindellhallen and the university library; then back down to the city’s central church and park; and finally one with nature around and about Nydalasjön. On a day’s excursion to Jokkmokk for the yearly winter market – which takes place about this time each February over a long weekend – I photographed a diner, the Bio Norden cinema, and Jokkmokk’s church. The final photo finds me back in Umeå, and set to slowly and strugglingly ski.
