Sara
Darle
Olsson

“Dreaming of islands - whether with joy or in fear, it doesn’t matter - is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone”.
- Gilles Delueze, Desert Islands (from Desert Islands and other texts)






On the Swedish west coast, slightly north of the city Gothenburg (an hour or so by car), there is a geological shift from one type of rock to another. The ground, the mountains, and the islands in the Bohuslän archipelago is of its own brand of pink granite. It reaches up along the coast, and stops just short of the Norwegian border. The pink granite reaches a few miles inland, and an equal distance out at sea. Only the small group of islands furthest out are made of a different, grey, stone.

The granite doesn’t allow much to grow and there are sparse forests with tall rocky mountains in between. The villages are spread out along the coastline, as close to the sea as possible due to the long history of fishing in the area. The first storey of all houses is built in granite, with wood on top. The houses are built close together to protect each other against the wind. The gardens are small and all have the same plants. Lilacs, honeysuckle, chives, and heather are amongst the few that thrive without hesitation. The smell is salty and divine.

Just a stone throws’ distance into the sea is another form of protection: the archipelago of a million small islands and skerries. Islands of bare pink granite surround the area completely and act as a natural wave breaker. Bodily shapes floating in the sea, rounded from centuries of ice and water weathering. Flatter, smoother, and harder to spot the further out from the coast you go. These archipelagos have been the natural defence of the Swedish coast, and a reason as to why we’ve historically been successful mariners. Not because of any significant skill in sailing, boatbuilding or navigation, but because our own territory was impenetrable for outsiders without local knowledge. Our coast is littered with shipwrecks, foreign and native alike. Because of this, many islands now host lighthouses and pilot towers. There’s also local navigational marks, built by wooden and stone structures or simply painted on the rocks, but if you don’t know what to look for even these bear little meaning.






It is a place of peace, but not necessarily quiet. The islands are deserted, but the noise can be deafening. The wind and the ocean, water against rock. A motion that never stops and never goes quiet.

I find myself dreaming of them.






Apparently, similarly pink-coloured granite, rich in potassium feldspar, can be found in many countries. France, China, India, Russia, Brazil, and even Australia. I have never seen it with my own eyes, the “other” pink granite, and part of me was disappointed to learn that this particular mineral combination also occurred elsewhere. I’ve tied my identity to this place, assuming that its landscape down to its mineral composition was a large factor of what makes it, and us, unique.

But still I have to ask: does your pink granite look the same as mine? Does it feel the same? Does it make you feel the same?

Maybe it is not about the rock itself after all, but the way the sun hits it from our exact latitude. The particular contrast it has against our colour sea and sky.

Or maybe it is all in my head.






Islands are often used as a metaphor for loneliness in literature, pop culture and philosophy.

Sen for jag hem (Transl. “And then I went home”), is the final book of a popular Swedish trilogy mainly set in the north of Sweden. This last book also explores the west coast and the very archipelago of Sweden that I live and breathe. It is represented by and as the Lonely Sad and Angry Man, the father who left his kids, who wants no contact with anyone and lives in a hut on the barren island. The landscape is used in the book as a direct translation of these emotions, and two characters struggling to relate to other humans. Depicting the stones as unbreakable, untelling, cold and ultimately alone.

Visually, I get it. The desire to use islands as a representation of one’s loneliness, isolation, or separation. From the perspective above sea, from what we see on maps, these islands are completely separate from other landscapes.

In his text Desert Islands, Gilles Deleuze defines two types of geological islands, before disregarding it altogether and claiming that the origin of the island is of little importance. Instead, what matters is that being on an island, or dreaming of being on one, already constitutes an act of separation. But he also asks a question of perspective; is the island deserted or the sea? How do we define physical spaces by their different measures of emptiness? And is this “emptiness” we’re trying to define simply the lack of human traces and marks?

As we look closer, these islands are also places for other creatures, many species of birds, seals and insects see it as their home. Not to mention the ecology that continues below sea level. There, it is clear that they are rather part of a whole, but as humans we relate to the sea level as ground zero. Anything above has a positive altitude and anything below has a negative, and as the void between the islands fill with water, they are no longer touching. This view of the islands as desolate and disconnected, is purely anthropocentric, as it only reflects the difficulties for humans to go from one to the other, rather than the connections that actually exist.






These islands are part of my history as a person, as well as the whole community of the area. I have a deeply emotional relationship with them. They make me nostalgic, they make me think about family, they remind me of summer and sunny days. When visiting in the midst of winter they seem abandoned, lonely. And at the same time calm, patient, unbothered by the cold. I find myself projecting a human mindset onto an inherently inhuman landscape.

I find myself applying Finn Werne’s concept of invisible architecture as a way of reading a landscape:

“[In our memory] We build an invisible architecture, loaded with experiences and moods. The invisible architecture is the one that we carry with us as memories and dreams, and that we continuously build upon.” (Werne, 1987)

This invisible architecture is primarily given attributes and meaning based on feelings and our individual experiences of the space itself, compared to the visual architecture which is the technical, physical existence of the place. Thus, the islands of Bohuslän are places of connection and of warmth, if not by physical materiality then by my memories and experiences of them.

Explicit memory means consciously recalling something, like the name of the islands and their position. Remembering something without consciously thinking about it, including having an unconscious, emotional recollection, is the action of implicit memory. Like knowing every step and curve of the stone and the warm feeling their memory brings even in the coldest winter. As I share these memories throughout this text, part of that experience is also translated to you, my reader. They might be made of rocks and stones, but there’s also emotion.

Few texts have made me truly reflect over the way I represent my birthplace Astrid Ardagh in her interview for Filmkrant, about her film set on an island in northern Norway, which she finishes by saying:

“It was very important to me not to portray the island where I come from as an absurd, deprived, sad place like you often see in films when it comes to remote places. I wanted to make the people who live there proud.”

I, too, want to.

The basis of this text is the archipelago of Bohuslän, Sweden. Specifically Bottnafjorden, the water outside of the small town of Bovallstrand where most of the memories that I’ll share in this text are from. I know these islands by name, as if they’re childhood friends of mine. We used to be so close, and now we rarely get in touch.

Growing up with them, I was always comparing my smaller body to a massive geological body. Something soft against something solid, something warm against something cold. I’ll tell you all about them, but how do you even begin to describe a geological lifetime through the experience of a single human life?

Human history happens in chronological order. We think of and perceive time as consecutive events, with the standard lifetime as the main point of reference. It affects the way we measure and count our years, grouping them into millenia, centuries and decades, and how we recount said years, with cause and effect lined up in a neat row. This is the anthropocentric view through which we are used to seeing and reading the world. Yet, space and time are happening all at once all around us. As such, stones, and islands, and islands made of stones, and their non-linear perspective can be used to explore a theoretical archipelago of ideas. Together, we navigate between islands of thoughts, sometimes interrupted by smaller skerries along the way.

My friends will join us, one at a time. Some we see from a distance, from a zoomed out perspective reaching across the world. Some we observe up close in detail, down to their mineral structure. Some exist purely as a representation of something else.






What would you bring to a deserted island? A knife, a book, or a game? Swimwear, sunscreen, or a hammock? A weapon, a box of matches, or a fishing net?

It is a commonly entertained scenario. The islands imagined are tropical, warm, full of exotic fruits and animals. It might not be so bad after all, our break to the deserted island. Finally, we find ourselves in a disconnected place to rest. It becomes an idea of escape, to finally read that book, to remove ourselves fully from societal expectations and stresses, when in fact the island’s existence is entirely different from the dream of it. As described by Judith Schalansky in her Atlas of Remote Islands:

“The island that has been the focus of so much yearning often turns out as might have been expected - to be barren and worthless [...] Paradise may be an island, but it is hell too.”

It is a form of cruel optimism, dreaming of a quick escape and being disappointed when it won’t live up to its expectations. Projecting our hopes and dreams onto something unobtainable. We see these islands as disconnected extremities, outliers from the system that simply exists on its own accord. They are deserted only because of the lack of humans, not the actual desolate rock itself. They are used as a symbol for escapism, a leisurely life in a desolate paradise. A paradise, which in itself is a romanticisation of nature and the isolated experience of it. A paradise rarely shared with anyone but ourselves.

And such is commonly the problem with our modern perception of nature and wilderness; that it is simply there for us to escape to when so pleases us, as a choice. For many, such a paradise is only a paradise when there is also a way out from it. The line between blissful privacy and inescapable isolation is thin.

Finn Werne also touches upon it in Den Osynliga Arkitekturen, describing how it is necessary to leave a place in order to miss it, and fully experience emotions of personal connection to that place. “Only as we’ve physically removed ourselves, we become conscious of our identities dependency on where we’ve been”.







As the sun sets on them, they shine bright pink, their glowing bodies raging against the deep blue waves. And the same wave that hits one rock, also hits its neighbour, and its neighbour, and its neighbour. The water that flows between the islands used to be the ice that shaped and formed them. The same water that once met similar granite on the other side of the world. It hits. It hits. It hits.






To tell you the truth, these islands are not as far removed from human life as I’ve made them out to be.

As a nation shaped by its relationship to seasons, we can only resist our paradise for the half of the year that is too cold and dark to leave our boats in the sea. When summer arrives, so do people. The village population triples during June, July and August with “summer guests”, the weeks of 28, 29, and 30 being the most hectic. To salvage every minute of sunshine we spend most of our days outdoors, and ride our small boats to the islands, hoping to escape the crowds for a moment of peace. Of course, the islands are full of like-minded escapists. Your neighbours, your cousins, your friend from the other side of the country who you meet year after year but only during these three weeks. The same islands that go untouched for months at a time, are touched by a person the second they’re also touched by the sun.

The title of “guests” indicates a temporary visit, but as the people come and go steadily over decades, even centuries, there is a permanence to the rhythm. There is a constant flux between crowded and desolate, six months is forever and no time at all, depending on how closely you count the seconds.

Stories about stones and islands and rocks are always told from a human perspective, from a human lifetime, yet its lifetime is incomparable to human references. It’s lived through ages beyond human comprehension. The long months that we experience are simply brief moments. What shapes them is not the singular footstep or lack thereof, but the constant streams of water and rain, the waves that continuously hit and hit again, the ice that reigned for ages beyond human comprehension. The human life present in the area represents 0.19 of a second in their 24 hour day. We are but a hair out of place.

This is discussed in the chapter Time in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. He writes that “stone challenges small, linear divisions of human history through its aeonic insistence […] Geological scale diminishes the human.”

One definition of desolation implies isolation with complete separation from the rest of change. Stone is part of the earth's foundation, and has seen everything thrown at it. Can it be lonely and desolate when always surrounded by the constant change of everything else around it? Or is that loneliness at its core, appearing to stay constant as all your friends grow around you?






The islands are bodies in themselves, soft, round shapes made of solid bone. Laying on the rock you can feel yourself becoming a part of it, merging into one as the colour of your skin melts into the blushing colour of the stone. You fit inside the island's hold. In the caves, the cracks, the cavities carved out by ice and other rocks. Settling your body into the curves of the landscape, and finding it’s made just for you.