Swedish sparkles / A hopeless position

Today: Diana Moskovitz, investigations editor, writer, and co-owner of Defector; and Amy Chu, artist and publisher of Camoot.Journal.

Issue No. 199

A Night at the ABBA Museum
Diana Moskovitz

Film Review: No Other Land
Amy Chu

A Night at the ABBA Museum

by Diana Moskovitz

I’ve been in Europe for two and a half weeks researching my book about Alice Milliat, the French woman who got women’s athletics permanently into the Olympics. Which is how I found myself in Stockholm two days after the U.S. presidential election. I had been excavating the archives of J. Sigfrid Edström—president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, who would go on to become Olympic president—a man who spent years working to kill Milliat’s movement. 

I’d been plowing through Edström’s letters—letters in which a wealthy and powerful man moans frequently to his wealthy and powerful male friends about a certain kind of woman. In one of them, Edström wrote of Milliat’s federation, which was running low on cash and asking for assistance: “We should like the whole thing to disappear from the surface of the earth.”

Days of this, bookended by the ambient sound of Swedish news discussing the U.S. election, and I needed a change. I needed bright light, glitter, and unrelenting joy. I needed ABBA.

I am not an ABBA superfan. I am simply a person who thinks this Swedish quartet has a grand amount of great songs. “Waterloo”? Total banger. “Lay All Your Love On Me”? I could listen to it all day, along with “SOS”, “Take A Chance On Me”, and “Voulez-Vous.” “The Winner Takes It All?” One of the greatest breakup songs of all time. And Mamma Mia is a fun movie that I turn on sometimes. My research hours left me time for one fun cultural activity and when my husband mentioned that there was a shrine to one of Sweden’s biggest global cultural exports, I stopped him right there and wouldn’t even let him list the other options. It just seemed obvious. 

Aboard the tram to the museum, the stops were announced in Swedish, but the announcement for “ABBA Museum” came loud and clear and that’s when many of us exited, giggling and chatting in various languages. ABBA THE MUSEUM greeted us, offering anyone willing to put their head through a cut-out poster board a chance to join the band. Inside, the messaging was not subtle. Plastered on the walls, walkways, and touch screens was the message, “Walk in. Dance out.” 

Though called a museum, the experience is built around specific mood lighting and participation stations for each section, each one like a little movie theater or concert hall. It’s less stuffy than a traditional hall of exhibits, a more immersive experience for a digital age. The light tells you where to look. 

First came a montage video of ABBA’s greatest moments, followed by a large walk-through display about ABBA Voyage, an ongoing “virtual concert residency” in London in which “ABBAtars” of ABBA perform their songs. From there, the museum briefly, and I mean briefly, takes visitors through the history of the group’s formation, explaining where each member grew up, how they fell in love with music, honed their talents in the Swedish music scene, and found each other. There’s one such personal history board for each member, and they cannot help but raise questions—wait, Anni-Frid was married and had children before she met Benny, and Benny also had children from a prior relationship before ABBA? And tell me more about the Swedish folkparks!—but no, this is not a museum for context. This is a museum in which you turn the corner and suddenly have the desire to scream OH MY GOD IT’S WATERLOO!