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(from "A future that might have worked", text by Nada Beros for "Delayed on time" Catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. December 2004 ) Between indecision and optimism: Johanna Billing The criticism of the institutionalised nature of Swedish social democracy, where consensus is always privileged over conflict, is present in an emblematic way in the work of Johanna Billing, a kind of spokesperson for the generation that grew to maturity in the nineties. She belongs to a generation that is very frequently accused of passivity and disillusionment, as opposed to the generation of their parents, who were actively engaged in the sixty-eight's revolution. Billing is interested in the behaviour of the group, actually in the behaviour the group of the young, and the relation of individual and the set. The characteristic situation that Johanna Billing portrays is a situation of indecision ­ between activism and waiting, hope and loss of illusion. While as the founder of a small record company she is oriented to activism, in her films the central place belongs to the moment of delay and postponement - Project for a Revolution, 2000, Missing Out (2001), Where She Is At (2001) - which is why these films are formally organised as loops. Evading telling a linear story, she keeps us constantly in the present. Individuals in the group are treated as objects that the artist slots into a certain visual rhythm, the ultimate effect being close to the pattern of abstract painting. It is true that in Missing Out and Project for a Revolution the individual does appear to break this monotonous set rhythm and seek a personal answer, which without doubt stirs the audience from its lethargy, arousing unease and anxiety. More or less at the same time, on the radio the artist heard a pop song of American singer-songwriter Roky Erickson You don't love me yet and the news that Sweden had the greatest number of single-person households in the world. Brought up at time in which it was almost indecent to be dependent on anyone, not only emotionally but also economically, she realised how much Swedes value their independence. The art project You don't love me yet is based on this very idea; it started with a whole-day concert in Index, Stockholm, in October 2002, where a hundred local pop, rock and alternative musicians gave, at the invitation of Johanna Billing, their own version of Erickson's song of 1984, a love song which in spite of the lamentable tones reveals a certain amount of optimism. The key word is yet, which makes the end open, pushing through from the present into the future. The film You don't love me yet was made in July 2003 and is a kind of mixture of music video spot and documentary. The artist insists on a film filter emphasising that the film is staged and that fiction and reality are mixed up. In the same way that in the film Project for a Revolution she draws on Antonioni, in You don't love me yet she makes references to Bo Wideberg, combining the language of film and video, documentary and staged. The individual performers are now replaced by the collective appearance in the Stockholm Atlantis Studio, consciously recalling the band aid groups of artists that were often to be heard in the nineties collecting money for various charities, for those with AIDS to child victims of famine in the Third World. There is a certain ambiguity in the performance, the community of the performers in the studio together with the isolation imposed by the headphones. Unlike the previous films, You don't love me yet is not conceived as a loop, but as a whole project (concerts and tours) put on as an endless repetition, an incantation as it were, but each time in a different form, depending on the local context. Nada Beros 2004 <<<