One month later, in march 2002, I visited Gothenburg with some friends. Everything I knew about the city was connected to the protests against the EU-Summit in June 2001:
I remembered when I first heard that the police had shot at demonstrators - there were differing rumours on the net, noone knew if someone had died. The news opened with pictures of the burning EU-flag on top of a barricade.
With these images still present, I got a guided tour by some local people from Gothenburg. They showed the places that I had only seen on indymedia and the corporate news.
Some months later, people involved in the protests told me in interviews that they could not manage to bring together the different images and realities during and after the protests. They could not believe that the same familiar street was the site of riots where they would now sit and drink coffe again.
The only trace left was where one of the police bullets
hat scratched a light pole...
But some of the activists said, that no real change had happened... -
that just hidden faces of violence and repression had come to the surface
during the protest. The riots and the police violence had destroyed the
image of the 'good' sweden, thus performing a visualization of ongoing
struggles in society.
