How I spent my summer – Angelika Ann Kammerer

Mowing, exhibitions and deep grief

Even though I know from experience that summers here on Öland go by extremely fast, I’m always amazed at how much I planned to do and how little I actually accomplished—one of those things was writing 2-3 entries on Substack. I didn’t write anything at all… and I didn’t paint either. I guess I’m an optimistic planner (here in Sweden, that’s what you call someone who’s always running late).

Endless Mowing
Between Midsummer and mid-August, it’s tourist season here on our island, and my husband Kex and I run a small garden café on our property. During the winter of 2020/21, we transformed the café room into a 2D-design, and we became the first 2D-café in Sweden. We’re still the only ones in the country and we’ve since then extended the design into the other rooms.

The café is called 2D-Café Kex (after my husband’s nickname), and we sell homemade cakes, sandwiches, pancakes, wraps and salladbowls. Kex bakes and prepares the meals, while I handle the counter, take orders, serve, and do whatever else needs to be done. At first, we were open 7 days a week during the touristseason, but since 2021, we take Mondays off. Well, “off” is the wrong word because we both have other tasks, even in the summer: Kex mows lawns for about 60 customers every two weeks (I handle the smaller properties with a walk-behind mower). Normally, we finish this work by the end of July because the many hours of sunshine and wind usually turn most lawns into brown patches of straw. But this year, it kept raining, and the grass is still growing, so Kex is still mowing and mowing and mowing… and here we are in mid-September.

Paula
Another thing that marked my summer was that we had to say goodbye to Paula at the end of June after nearly 15 years together. Our little dog wasn’t just a pet; she was a family member, a dear friend, my beloved little ”Trollkind”. Two days later, we reopened the café, and I swallowed my grief—there wasn’t any time for it left—and it’s still stuck in my throat today. Paula is still missing: everywhere.

Artistically, this year has been very good
Although I haven’t done any art since around March, I’ve still achieved a lot as an artist: until mid-May, I continued attending a weekly training program at Capellagården (in the south of Öland), which I started in September 2023. At a holiday weekend in May, the third edition of “Konstlandskapet Öland” (”Art Landscape Öland”) took place. During 4 days our 137 km long island is dedicated to art and around 80 artists’ studios open for visitors. I’m one of the initiators and part of the organizing committee for this island-wide event. I also organize the group exhibition for about 10 local artists in my gallery during this event, so there’s always a lot to do.

In early June, I traveled with two fellow Öland artists to Bornholm (a Danish island in the Baltic Sea) to attend the opening of an art project exhibition. It’s an artistic collaboration between four countries: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Estonia, called the “Baltic Sea Art Project.” We are 12 artists from 4 islands in the Baltic, and the goal is to expand our networks and look beyond our cultural borders. In June, the joint exhibition (4 works per artist) was shown in Svaneke, Denmark. I exhibited three pieces from my human rights series and a refugee sculpture. In August, the exhibition came to Öland, and we hosted the other nine artists as our guests. The preparation for this visit (right in the middle of the tourist season) took us local artists about half a year: booking accommodations and tables at restaurants, planning the 4-day visitor program, organizing the funding, answering questions from the art hall staff, arranging a speaker and musician for the opening reception, and much more. Now, the artworks are in storage in Copenhagen and will be shown in Finland and Estonia next summer—we’ll be traveling there for the exhibition openings, too.

This year, some of my artworks were also selected for regional competitions, which are exhibitions you have to apply for (often with a fee) and then hope that one of your works gets chosen. These exhibitions are usually prestigious and highly competitive (the most elite is the so-called Vårsalongen at Liljevalchs Museum in Stockholm, where several thousand artists apply each year and only about 40 get selected). This year, I got my prejudice series into “Art Öresund” and my two stray dogs (oh yes, I had forgotten, I also created them this spring) were accepted into “Sydosten United.” Overall, I applied to six competitions and one creative Universityproject on plastic, so seven applications, and two were accepted—that’s okay, especially since I’d previously applied to both exhibitions without success. One step at a time… And for the Harvest Festival here on Öland (a huge event called Skördefest), I’ve been asked to do a small solo exhibition in an art barn, explicitly with my socially critical works—which I’m grateful for.