This publication documents and discusses Tensta konsthall's experimental multi-year project "Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden" that ran from 2013–18 in Tensta and beyond. By pretending to be a museum, the project created a richly contrasting patchwork stretching over six years, in which manifold interests and expressions together formed a narrative with tensions and conflicts erupting around questions like "what history and heritage?," "to whom do they belong?" and "what about the present?"
The Stockholm suburb of Tensta is dominated by a late modernist housing estate, built on old farmland with traces from both the Iron Age and the Viking era, where today nearly 20,000 people live, a majority with a trans-local background. More than fifty artists, architects, local associations, performers, sociologists, cultural geographers, philosophers, and other practitioners contributed artworks, research projects, seminars, guided walks, workshops and much more, reporting on the past and present of Tensta. In this way, the project produced concrete images of what can be described as the New Sweden—a place with people of vastly different backgrounds, where economic and social divides are intensifying. Tensta Museum also engaged with the concept of cultural heritage and the complicated matter of how it is used in Sweden and elsewhere.
