Kiruna

Down under, the researchers check on the driving behavior and maneuverability at extreme temperatures of more than 40 degrees Celsius and on miserable road conditions.

In this area, there are 40 degrees Celsius as well, but minus 40 degrees Celsius on the winter testing area in Kiruna, north Sweden.

The drivers use the test vehicles as if they were their own trucks.

They sleep in the cabin and check if the truck starts up straight away after a freezing night.

When did you start to make, I was actually, what was the very first product you started with? I want to know that.

That was in Kiruna in north of Sweden when we were driving this sled of tours and My wife had a very icy track when she went on a tour and I had to make like in five hours, you know, break clothes for a sled.

So we can say that break clothes for big tourist sled was the first product that I made, which after I sold, you know, some maybe 20 pieces there locally because everybody bought them.

This thing works, you know.

and uh obviously you had that as a an idea i think and uh when did you start uh creating uh the company lumac uh and how did that start that

was uh well it was kind of very organic you know when i made that made the break closed and anchors followed quite quickly.

I got hooked up with some metalworking guys in Kiruna, and then we thought that with my current wife, that should like name something, this product or where it comes from.

And the brand was born already in 2016, but we, let's say, registered the company.

It was the last week of January and I had the solicitor's key in my glove because I didn't trust my pocket.

I'd flown to Kiruna, then hired a car that the man at the desk kept calling, a bit light for this.

He was right.

The last stretch into Jukka's Yarvy was one lane of packed snow with walls of it on either side, taller than the car roof in places.

Do not sink it.

Do not burn it.

Do not sell it or give it away, or leave it in a ditch on the road to Kiruna and Hope.

I took an axe out onto the torn and watched it go down, and I felt wonderful for about a day.

About halfway through the writing process, I decided that I wanted to go to an Arctic Circle mining city that had been wrecked by resource extraction.

So this city, Kiruna, about ninety miles north of the Arctic Circle, a place of, of just huge extremes, extremely north, extremely cold, quite remote.

There's a space center there, and then there's Sweden's state-owned mine that has mined for iron ore so intensively over the last hundred years that these huge cracks have opened up in the land and the city is being swallowed alive by the land.

So the city is moving building by building or being demolished and rebuilt five kilometers away, and it's been sort of heralded as, as the first movable city in the world.

[upbeat music]

Welcome to this artist talk with, uh, me, Marit Småne, uh, curator, Bestine Girón, Kiruna, and Carola Grahn.

That is, um, South Sámi artist that has, amongst other places, is represented in, uh, collections at the Modern Museum of Art in Sweden, and the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection.

Uh, also represented at the Sámiš Kunstmuseum.

That's one.

Another project which I would say is even further advanced is to extract rare earths from apatite, which is mined together with iron ore in the Kiruna mine.

And so in that case, if you would be able to extract the rare earths, you have already the mining cost covered because they have been mined, uh, in, in, in the sense or in the- They have been mined

As a byproduct