Award-winning Swedish photographer and film-maker John Skoog returned to his roots for his first commission for a UK public gallery. He travelled to southern Sweden’s flat farmlands to make the short film Värn, which will premiere at Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery as part of its spring exhibition Redoubt.

As a child, the young Frankfurt-based artist used to take day trips from his home in Kvidinge to the Scandi-navian countryside with his parents. On being asked to create work for Towner, with its strong collection of landscape work, Skoog remembered the impressions those adventures and the stark vistas made on his younger self.

So he took his camera – and his Polish cinematographer, Ita Zbroniec-Zajt – to make a film around an apocalyptic-looking farmhouse built by lone wolf Karl Goran Persson.

Skoog, who describes Persson’s home as “like a 1980s post-minimalist American macho sculpture”, built the film from one 15-minute tracking shot, which pans the landscape. Persson, a farm labourer, had been born in the late 19th century. He lived alone after his parents died in the 1940s, and when the Swedish authorities distributed pamphlets warning residents to be ready should war come from over the Russian border, he began fortifying the farmstead with junk.

“He was afraid. He reinforced it with anything he could find. He started to build a bunker out of concrete then put in buckets, spring beds, potties, nails, bicycle parts, old farming tools from other farms.

“It’s like a time capsule, a haunting museum in concrete.”

A farmer who bought the land after Persson’s death in 1971 tried to tear the edifice down but realised the land was worthless. “He left it alone, so now there is no road, just this concrete bunker in the middle of a rye field. The walls are deteriorating, bits of metal are coming out – it looks like it has been frozen in time.”

Skoog says everyone in the area had an anecdote about Persson, a character who brought everything to the farm on the back of his bike, and many of these are spoken over the film.

Whispers from the past

“It’s an oblique narrative. It’s not a documentary. It is more like you can see the house is whispering things, and you feel these stories coming from different far-away farms and disappearing again.”

Skoog calls war an undercurrent to the piece – despite the fact the threat of violence from Russia in the late 1940s was real.

“I am not making a political statement in that way but of course it is in there. It’s not centred on his fear of war, rather it’s a proposition that everyone can live their life as they want, which is another political statement, but in a different way. I am saying look, he decided to do it in this way.”

Critics often compare Skoog’s work to cinema greats such as Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, but he prefers to cite Swedish literary giants Birgitta Trotzig and Gunnar Ekelöf as important to his oeuvre. As well as Värn, Skoog has picked another short film, Sent på Jorden (Late On Earth), which is a portrait of a place and its people, to show as part of Redoubt. He has also rehung the gallery’s permanent collection to dovetail with the films, which he says feels like “a storyboard for a thriller”.

  • John Skoog: Redoubt, Towner Gallery, Marina, Eastbourne, January 25 to April 6.
  • Open Tuesday to Sunday and bank holidays 10am to 5pm, free. Call 01323 434670.