Faculty of Art

Sculpture/Installation

Shawn Vieron

Finns det inga “Saab-raggare” kvar? (Are there no “Saab-raggare” left?)

Raggare is a Swedish subculture of car enthusiasts shaped through cruising rituals, modified vehicles, and working-class forms of collective leisure, historically centered around imported American cars. In contrast, Saab came to signify a distinctly Swedish model of auto-engineering and national industry.Finns det inga “Saab-raggare” kvar? (“Are there no ‘Saab-raggare’ left in Sundsvall?”) is a 2015 post from Saab Turbo Club, an online forum dedicated to Saab enthusiasts. The phrase marks a dissonance between two automotive identities that were not historically aligned. This tension is approached through gestures of modification, drawing from raggare practices of customizing industrial forms. From this position, the work expands into a broader inquiry into the cultural and industrial conditions that shaped Saab’s presence, and what remains as those structures begin to dissolve.In 2011, the bankruptcy of Saab Automobile marked a significant rupture for the city of Trollhättan, where the company’s assembly plant had long structured local economies and identities. This research began during an exchange semester at HDK-Valand in Sweden, working site-specifically between Vänersborg and Gothenburg. Conversations with local residents and engagement with municipal archives inform the work, reflecting on the cultural afterlife of this industrial rupture and considering how the disappearance of a car manufacturer reverberates through communities once organized around its production.My research also turns toward the broader history of Saab AB, whose origins in aerospace and defense technologies complicate the narrative of the automobile as a purely civilian object. By placing these histories in tension, the installation asks how the infrastructures of military production and industrial labor shape the cultural imaginaries of everyday life, and how objects associated with freedom and movement may carry quieter histories of technological power and geopolitical influence.

“Exhibited at många bäckar små [where the rivers meet], Vänersborgs Konsthall. Vänersborg, Sweden. 2024.documentation: Alessandro Hsieh”