K.G Westman: The Suit Maketh the Man (2024)
Ongoing Research project & Performance Series

In the autumn of 2023, I bought a blazer from a second-hand store in downtown Stockholm, Sweden, that turned out, according to a tailor’s label, to have belonged to a “Professor K. G. Westman”. I was curious about him, I wondered who he was. This set off a frantic research journey that led me to uncover Westman’s complex and morally ambivalent life and actions.

K. G. Westman was a national councilor to the Swedish Government during both the First and Second World Wars, Minister for Foreign Affairs, and later Minister of Justice. He had been a member of the Agrarian Party, where he advocated for suffrage reform; during the Second World War he became a contributing factor to Sweden’s neutrality. Westman supported censorship of the free press as well as the rewriting of history books, forced deportations, and the sterilization of those deemed undesirable. Editors were imprisoned, and newspapers that criticised Hitler and the Nazi regime were confiscated — all in the hope of preserving Sweden’s independence and neutrality. This neutrality, in turn, accounted for supplying Germany with 43 percent of all of it’s iron ore between 1933 and 1943. Sweden saved itself from the occupation suffered by Denmark and Norway, and even made a profit, all by feeding the German war-machine.

A collaborative performance lecture with the artist Aron Fogelström on K.G Westman was performed twice: once at Handelshögskolan with the SSE art initiative and on Kulturnatten 2025 at Kulturhuset with the poetry publication L’amour La Mort for the launch of their 18th publication: Problemet/Lösningen. I told the story of K.G Westman’s life and actions in Swedish while Aron live-translated what I said into English. But here was the catch: Whenever I said anything critical of K.G or his policies, Aron mistranslated in an a-la minute censorship of the critical. At Kulturhuset a secondary performative installation called UNCRITICAL SCORE (2024) took place underground. Visitors were invited to apply K.G’s logic: use a bottle of tippex on a book of poetry to blot out anything they found to be critical. The mirror is turned on the audience: they have agency, a choice in relation to the historical censorship that enabled a world war and a genocide.