Johannes Flink's interview with Bo I. Cavefors for Tidningen Kulturen

Cavefors on Cavefors
Johannes Flink’s interview with Bo for Tidningen Kulturen.

For decades on end Bo Cavefors was, by far, Sweden’s foremost alternative publisher. As a publisher, his attitude was one of curiosity and fearless exploration, expressed in the long list of radical titles (including Mao, Nietzsche, Jünger, Dali, Lautréamont, Marx, Pound, Pasolini, etc.) edited at his Bo Cavefors Bokförlag. His own magazine Svarta Fanor (Black Flags), along with his parallel German and Swedish edition of the texts of the Red Army Fraction, remain unique and unsurpassed events in a publishing climate otherwise marked by complacence and cowardice. Educated by the Jesuits in England and ever an engaged catholic, Cavefors has constantly perceived matters from an international perspective vastly divergent from the provincial concerns prevalent in Swedish culture. Always siding with the intellect against power, always longing for transgression, he remained in some ways marginal despite the magnitude of his contribution to the Swedish book-publishing scene. However, for those of us who agree that the duck-pond is too small for our spirits, Cavefors will always remain a key figure of Swedish radicalism.

Arousing somewhat less attention, so far, is Bo’s series of short memoir books (even if they are gradually acknowledged by the critics) and the performance art he has developed over the last few years. For this reason, I wanted to ask him some questions about these subjects and to give him a chance to explain his own artistic development to a wider audience. I wanted to put his history as a publisher to the side for a while, to focus instead on the man, the author and the artist Bo Cavefors, and to ask him about his present … and his future …

Welcome Bo Cavefors! My first question is simply what you are doing right now? What I’m after, however, is not just a definition of your present activities. Rather, I would like to know if you are sensing a definitive direction in your artistic development, and, if so, a direction from what beginning to what end? What is it that you hope to explore by your recent and present activities?

Over the last years, I have clearly noted a return to my all-embracing, adolescent pre-occupations from … let’s say from my teenage years and up to my thirties. And this applies both to my writing – where it is specifically obvious in my three plays Rebellion in the Kasbah, Sade and the Japanese and The Leper in Aosta – and to the films I have written, acted out and produced in collaboration with Martin Bladh. My interest in the theatrical mode of presentation, in speech and acting as they are performed on a stage, emerged during my school years. I did my first performance in the first grade, in my Latin school in Malmö, when I was asked to read my home assignment to the rest of the class. It was a relief to suddenly stand there in front of the others and feel that they actually had to listen to what I had to say ... I guess it gave me the childish kick of manipulation… And the thing went on...>>>> CONT.>>>>>>>