Fieldwork reflections from Malmö, Tina Askanius, 29 May 2025
Image 1: Remnants of a ‘Refugees welcome’ sticker from the 2015 solidarity protests, Malmö on 9 May 2025
Today’s walk through Möllevången (Möllan) in Malmö reminded me once again of the striking sensory and ideological contrast between this neighbourhood and many other parts of Sweden. Every step through this part of town offers visual affirmation of Malmö’s status as a “progressive hub”: stickers proclaiming “Refugees Welcome,” “Antifascist Zone,” rainbow flags, Trump and Putin mockery and Mayday protest messages of social justice alliances appear on nearly every surface from lamp posts, traffic signs, mail boxes, and electricity cabinets. Some are recent, bold in colour and message. Others, like the faded Refugees Welcome stickers from 2015 and 2016, have been weathered by time, rain and wind, half-torn and almost illegible, yet still present. Their endurance suggests to me that the idea of refugee solidarity remain fairly uncontested in this space.
These remnants, or ‘political residues’, are testament not only to past moments of mobilisation, but to a kind of symbolic occupation of public space by social justice-oriented movements. Their presence is layered, both as historical trace and as persistent declaration of solidarity and multiculturalism in this city.
What is especially noticeable is that these stickers, despite exposure to the elements and the widespread backlash against the solidarity movements in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe, have not been removed. In all cities, one expects an ongoing battle of stickers, a visual contest of placing and replacing, message and counter-message, but in Möllan, right-wing slogans and insignia seem to be largely absent, or at the very least decisively outnumbered and contested.
Image 2: Anti-pride/gender sticker from neo-Nazi group NRM, Årsta 13 May
The contrast becomes even sharper when I later go online to review the documentation gathered by neo-Nazi activists tracking what they themselves refer to as “baseline activism”; that is, the steady presence of far-right materials posted across towns and rural areas where extremist groups maintain influence. From Tomelilla in the south to Karlstad and Stockholm, there has been a consistent spread of far-right propaganda throughout all of May. Flyers urging people to “wake up,” “rise up,” and “join the resistance” have been handed out in a number of locations. Stickers and flyers include messages preparing Swedes for the immanent race war and inviting them to join what they describe as “the battle” which “requires more than words”. Blood and soil and white pride rhetoric has appeared on the walls of public schools, libraries, council buildings, lamp posts and shop windows. These so-called sticker campaigns are meticulously documented and archived online for the images to be shared and recirculated on social media by far-right activists.
Image 3: Neo-Nazi sticker, Norrköping 15 May
The dissonance between the street-level experience of Malmö and the pictures wider national picture is striking. In Möllan, one moves through a landscape where progressive values are openly on display. It stands in stark contrast to the exclusionary, conspiratorial and openly hostile messages one might encounter in the built environment elsewhere in Sweden. What emerges is not simply a geographic divide, but a deeper political and affective rift that is communicated through the micro-territories of stickered and tagged surfaces. This contradictorily landscape prompts important questions about who gets to leave their mark on the city, in a very literal sense, and how? Which violent ideas and extremist messages are permitted to linger unchallenged, and where in the country? And how do these localised visual cultures reflect and shape broader national tensions? How does this semiotic tug-of-war over the urban space play out in different locations across Europe? These are all questions that we, in WP4, will explore in our forthcoming deliverable presenting insights from our ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Vienna, Athens and Malmö.
Image 4: “Proud white youth”, Karlstad, 17 May
