The Landscape of Tomas Tranströmer: In Conversation with Gabriella Ceom Cederström

“It happens rarely

that one of us really sees the other

a person shows himself for an instant

as in a photograph but clearer

and in the background

something which is bigger than his shadow.”

– Tomas Tranströmer in The Gallery (translated from Swedish by Robert Fulton)

Born in 1931 and translated into over 60 languages, Tomas Tranströmer was one of Sweden’s most well-known and acclaimed poets. In their exhibition Pendulum of Memories (June 3-5, 2025), director and producer Gabriella Ceom Cederström and photographer Marie Thorin guided visitors on an audiovisual journey through the landscapes of Tranströmer’s poetry. By combining Tranströmer’s poems, diary entries, letters, and other writings, and conversations with his wife Monica, with film, photography, and music, the exhibition became an immersive exploration of both the poet and his work through which the complexity and clarity of Tranströmer’s language could be experienced in its fullness.

Gabriella Ceom Cederström at the Pendulum of Memories exhibition, June 2025.

When I met Gabriella at the exhibition, she told me that her love for literature and poetry was an entrance into different parts of the world; a way to explore history, and the dualism in life and identity. She connected with Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry in particular due to his love for nature, his ability to describe reality in the context of his surroundings, and his interest in meeting other human beings, not just in passing, but being able to see them properly. 

In 2011, the year when Tranströmer received the Nobel Literature Prize, Gabriella began working on her and Marie Thorin’s project on Tranströmer’s work. She describes meeting Tomas Tranströmer and his wife Monica at their place for the first time as a warm and welcoming encounter that felt like coming home. This first meeting was followed by more meetings and long conversations about poetry and its different layers until 2015, when Tranströmer passed away.

Tranströmer’s death meant not only a loss for his family and friends, as well as for the Swedish and international literary world, but also raised questions about the continuation of the project. It was a difficult moment, Gabriella remembers, since it felt like she had just started to get to know Tranströmer. The project, however, continued through meetings with Tranströmer’s wife Monica and fellow writers who had known the poet. 

“Every time, I told someone about the project or wrote about it, it was a little different because the project kept evolving and new things came up,” says Gabriella. In her account of the project’s development, it is clear that the work leading up to the Pendulum of Memories exhibition was a journey not only through Tranströmer’s poetry and the physical and mental landscapes he inhabited, but also a personal journey. Tranströmer’s blue cottage on Runmarö in the Stockholm archipelago was a place that the poet always returned to throughout his life. It was his center of gravity, a place to find stillness and peace of mind. For Gabriella, this place evokes memories of her uncle’s cottage in the Polish countryside, which, surrounded by nature, has always been a meeting place for friends and family. 

“With poetry, you either completely connect to it and become immersed in it, or you don’t and move on,” Gabriella paraphrases Tranströmer’s words from a letter he wrote. “In his poetry, it is like I can feel those moments [he wrote about] or words.” She describes poetry as a meeting with the reader where the poem becomes something new. Rather than being a text that is to be interpreted, poetry thereby becomes alive and evolving. “It is something that Tomas said: Read it as if it belongs to you. It is yours, if you feel it, make it yours.”

Just like any engagement with a poem is a creative encounter, Gabriella describes her collaboration with other people, using different forms of media, including film, sound, and photography, as a conversation; a process of seeing each other’s way of seeing, but always with Tranströmer’s poetry at the core. As an example, she describes how her and Marie Thorin’s different ways of working came together in the project, combining Gabriella’s linguistic and dynamic approach with Marie’s background in still photography that brought calmness into the project.

Through their exhibition, Gabriella and Marie have allowed others to explore Tranströmer’s poetry on a journey that is more immersive than interpretative, and on which music, voice, and images interact with the visitor and the space they are in, slowing down the present moment to bring attention to Tranströmer’s language. And the journey might not even end there. “There is a lot of material still there that isn’t part of the exhibition,” Gabriella tells me. “The plan is to turn it into a documentary [on Tomas Tranströmer and his poetry].”

Article and cover photo by Merle Emrich.