JOHANNES BERGMARK

Biography as a surrealist

b 28th of November, 1963, Stockholm, sweden

Came to surrealism around the time when the group in Stockholm began to form in 1985. Surrealism seemed to him as the solution to a personal dilemma: the apprehended conflict between a political engagement in trotskyism at the time and an interest for music making. One of the co-founders of the surrealist group in Stockholm in 1986. Quit work and studies in 1988, took a bank loan and went to see the surrealists in Australia with Bruno Jacobs in 1988. Primarily engaged in music making, exploring the parallels between free improvisation in music and surrealism's “pure psychic automatism”. In the beginning playing music with some others in the group, especially Christian Werner, then increasingly engaged in the circle of improvising musicians in Stockholm. Writer in the surrealist (and some other) magazines on the topics of music, politics etc, inspired a.o. by writers Herbert Marcuse (critical theory), Hans Peter Duerr (anthropologist), Christopher Small (music sociologist) and for a while the deep ecology movement. Also wrote an article about parallels between surrealism and butoh, the japanese avantgarde body art, in which he also engaged for a few years in the 90's under the direction of Su-En. Occasional drawings, sculptures, stories and poems, the latter often in the form of sound poetry. After having met Hal Rammel, then in the Chicago group, in 1987, began to make his own musical instrument inventions and using different objects as instruments. Engaged in different music games on a group and international level in the surrealist movement and gathering information about the history and theory of surrealism and music. From around 1997 engaged in Fylkingen in Stockholm, an artists' organisation for “radical and experimental new music and intermedia art”, and active in the studio Electroacoustic Music in Sweden (EMS), making text-sound compositions and electronic music. He sometimes goes in the direction of performance art, and he's also done some sound sculptures. Engaged in the skeptics' movement since 2006, which he thinks the surrealist movement can partly learn from, although they operate in very different fields. Although he travels very much, performing, organizing and collaborating with different artists and visiting surrealists wherever possible, Stockholm can probably be regarded as his home town and he doesn't regard himself as neither swedish, polish, artist, musician, professional, marxist, trotskyist nor anarchist but a surrealist, an anti-supernaturalist and a revolutionary socialist.


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Updated the 14th of June 2012.