Leif Persson (Sweden)

Exhibit : Geography outside the box

When I’m not collecting, I’m a carpenter, working on cultural-historical projects. I live in Stockholm, but mostly love being in our old house in the country.

I, like many others, collected matchboxes when I was a child in the 70s, and got together a pretty nice collection compared to my friends who also collected. I guess I was a little more involved, and I also had a mother that was a prominent collector. But everything was shut down for a long time, until one day I took the boxes out of the basement, back to the world.

Today I’m a diligent collector and hobby researcher in the field. My driving force is not to have a complete collection of anything, it is to find the stories that the labels tell, either in themselves, or as all together, and what they then show about their time. The labels are keyholes through which I can look at history, they are preserved time capsules.

For this year’s BMLBS exhibition, I have put together a contribution I call “Geography outside the box”. A story about odd places, about countries that have disappeared, that perhaps never existed, about countries that have been created, or just wanted to be. A journey around the world, outside the box.

Click here to return to the Exhibition Catalogue.