I am Viskan’s daughter. I whisper my grandmothers’ names. And my own.
The Viskan,  the river that runs through this town. Once she was called wisca.

Mist of tiny droplets.
Water hovers in the cold air.
Water comes in many forms, like you, like me.
Steps along the Viskan.
Then and now, what does it matter.

Red velvet chasubles, dyed to invoke Christ’s blood, to scarlet garments for royalty. The color red has long symbolized authority and wealth. Red was the ultimate sign of power.
Red dyes were used for military uniforms, in religious vestments and royal velvet robes, and for women’s lips and red silk stockings: a sensuality regulated by codes.

Brazilwood, cochineal, and madder were used. Cochineal from Mexico, used as currency in the Spanish Empire of the 1700s. Export volumes: tons shipped to Europe, even to Borås. Brazilwood, which gave Brazil its name, was extracted through deforestation and the exploitation of people.
Red became one of the most coveted colors in history.

Kermes (Kermes vermilio), a red dye from a scale insect on Mediterranean oaks. Used in Europe before the 1500s, but quickly displaced by cochineal, cheaper and ten times stronger.

Brazilwood and cochineal resist standardization; they change with water and time.
Saffron, a pigment, exclusive, so valuable it was stored in the powder magazine (armory).
Blood, tree, flower, all pressed into color.

Red, from lichen on the rocks, and roots from the earth.
Lichen grows millimeters per year.
Red stains the apron, as if dyeing the blood.
Quiet!

Böttelet
A colour for red, not for the rich, but for our steps along the Viskan.
For our breath with the soil,
between hunger and red.

The color that came with work,
Böttelet, an echo of Borås dialect.
The color women’s bodies carried, and that carried them.
Estate-tied, near-serf in-kind laborers (statare) and immigrant hands.

That stayed.

Something stayed.

Who remembers?

Borås is tied to Brazil through the rasp houses (rasphus), those almost forgotten rooms of forced labour where men rasped brazilwood into dye. In 1874 there were five rasp works in Sweden. One of them was in Borås, here it was called a “bresiljekvarn,” a mill There they rasped Paubrasilia echinata, a consecrated tree, now endangered.

Madder, the dried rhizome of the genus Rubia, yielded a red dye with good light- and washfastness. It was cultivated outside Borås.

Turkey red. Spanish red.
Whose red would prevail?
Those who named the color controlled its value.
Kardal – Rovra – Indrød – Rövud.

I create new words for color!

Cookbooks flourished.
Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 1754: “the good housewife”,  refreshing drinks with lemon, wine, and spring water, with the addition of crimson, sugar, and rosewater.
Cochineal gives many reds. Carminic acid — blood.

Red with a dynamic structure in solution. Splits into thin edges.

Spreads, contracts, and stains with residues from a pregnant body.

Sphagnum mosses, living prismatic carpets of color,
covering the ground of the fen,
the wetland that gathers peat, a mineral’s memory.
Moss regulates water,
binds through resistance and sedimentation.

The Viskan’s quieter body
where the water thickens, where the color lingers,
and where plants converse in a lower register.

Little Red Riding Hood wears her red cloak, who was allowed to wear red? At what price? She walked through the forest with paprika in her basket. Paprika,  a fugitive red, edible and colonized. Kin to the same red carotenoids as chili, a heat that stains the nervous system from within. Whose color made it into the archive?

Borås was an active node in a global network of exotic plants and dyes. Dyehouses were expensive to build, and the dyeing craft in Borås was governed by guild statutes, by men.

Plants, come to me! Myrtle, horsetail, and lingon, subtle familiars, let me use a little of your essence? Reed and many kinds of grasses, some plants are more talkative than others.

Red, originally sacred,  tied to ritual, blood, birth, and transformation,  is used today to trigger hunger, stress, consumption, and warning systems.

In the early, liminal hours I meet the physical.
In this place, to the beat of my heart
I gather color. I breathe in the tiny droplets of water.
In the aesthetics of the air I braid my hair
and my grandmothers’.

Deep in my archaic bones rests knowledge
of relationship to this ground,
to the plants and the beings.

Barefoot, with my naked skin,
wading out into the Viskan,
I whisper your name, Wisca.

Stones touch one another.
The sound calling. Flowers in the sun — RED.
I press them between finger and thumb.
Soft red liquid.
Come, come,
lick the fragrance from my skin.
I am the caterpillar in the wind.