Ten years of planning the future. Three weeks—and counting—to put one afternoon on the record. Following Minna Hellström’s criticism on Ålands Radio, a little protokoll bingo opens onto a larger question about power, institutional comfort and what happens to criticism after everyone has been thanked for contributing. The paperwork has done its ten thousand steps. Power has not left its chair. What, precisely, is being sustained?
Perhaps the strangest thing about making a home somewhere is how quickly the extraordinary becomes ordinary. The landscape fades into the commute. People become their roles. Institutions become explanations for themselves. Then someone arrives with an unfamiliar accent, an impertinent question, or delight in something you had stopped noticing—and the world briefly returns in full colour. Such encounters aren’t always comfortable. They may restore something we love; they may change what we can bear to overlook. But I have never wanted belonging purchased at the price of seeing less.
I went looking for the history of ÅHS and found a repertory company. Think Ålandic Blackadder, with more organisational charts and a remarkably durable cast. Doctors become politicians. Journalists become board members. Each decade brings a change of wardrobe and a cunning plan to resolve the difficulties created by the previous cunning plan. Hippocrates and Montesquieu are summoned to an argument neither lived long enough to regret attending. The lawyers get repeat business. The rest of us get another premiere. Somewhere beneath it all lies a question we have been reorganising for thirty years: how do you get an institution full of people who know better to work better together?
I may be the only person on Åland untroubled by the missing job advertisement. Why make strangers audition for an occupied chair? What interests me is the resources attached to it, the council assembled to bless it, and the difference between being allowed to do something and exercising good judgment. The recruitment theatre was cancelled. The coronation appears to have gone ahead.
The story behind the newspaper clippings: five short video clips about my writing, Åland’s government, UN-Habitat, and what happened when I expected to be credited.
