alf norberg

It gives me great pleasure to welcome all of you to this exhibition and I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to Anna-Klara Tidholm and Alexander Reichstein who has created the exhibition were about to see,

Alexander is the reason that i am speaking in english, beacuse he doesn´t speak swedish.

I hope that this exhibition will attract, not only all of you here today but also, children from schools and kindergartens and entice them to wanna learn more about how we lived our lives back in the 19^th century and even a part of the 20^th century for some people in these parts of Sweden.

In the beginning of the last century people in the peripheral parts of Hälsingland still lived their lives without electricity, their houses in the countryside were heated by wooden-stoves and tile-stoves

In the 19^th century a big part of the population earned their living by working in Agriculture and forestry and sawmills.

I am nearly fifty years old, not yet! But nearly...

When i grew up my family lived in a small croft without electricity and my father worked in forestry and in his uncles farm, my mother helped them with milking the cows and with the haymaking and such things, and that was in the early sixties!

You can draw two different conclusions of that....

One is that for the last fifty years a lot of things have happened, the other an less trustworthy conclusion is that i am getting old......

I want to say something about handicraft-traditions to,

The handicraft traditions goes back a very long time in this part of Hälsingland, and those traditions is still alive!

Last year we had a very interesting exhibition in our county called "kalasfint" and that is hard to translate.... Maybe something like ..verynice?

Anyway, that exhibition was made by people with a lot of knowledge and skills in the old handicraft-traditions in Hälsingland.

But the took these old traditions and placed them in a modern context.. and it worked!

Old handicraft from Hälsingland in a modern 21^th century design, and it was very interesting.

But let us for the next hours concentrate on the old traditions and how people in our Surroundings lived their lives in Hälsingland.

The exibition also tells us a story about life and death, every house tells you a story, it's a journey from the cradle to the grave and it´s about growing up in a very different world with very different basic conditions! It is also about growing old in a time when people grew old much earlier than today, the average lifetime i the beginning of the 19^th century was 37 years

So once again very welcome and I hope you will enjoy this exibition!