Kiruna, cultural memory and the difficult question of what a city chooses to carry with it
Cities are supposed to stay where they are.
Buildings change.
Streets are rebuilt.
Neighbourhoods disappear and new ones emerge.
But the coordinates of the city usually remain.
Kiruna complicates that assumption.
In northern Sweden, mining related ground deformation has been transforming the city for years. Buildings have been demolished. Others have been physically transported. A new centre has been constructed several kilometres from the old one.
And the process is not finished.
Kiruna is therefore not simply a city that moved.
It is a city still moving.
But when a city changes location, what happens to the things through which it remembers itself?
Its buildings.
Its artworks.
Its monuments.
Its public spaces.
Its cultural institutions.
What does a city choose to carry with it?
Moving the church
On 19 and 20 August 2025, one of Kiruna’s most recognisable buildings travelled through the city.
The building weighs 672.4 tonnes.
It was moved intact.
Thousands of people gathered to watch.
The event attracted international attention, partly because the image itself was extraordinary.
A church was moving down a road.
But the operation was also part of something much larger.
Kiruna Municipality and LKAB had already identified culturally significant buildings that would be preserved through relocation as the old city centre was progressively affected by mining.
The decisions were informed by an analysis of the city’s cultural environment.
Cultural historical value mattered.
But so did the physical condition of buildings, their construction, the cost of moving them and whether they could acquire a viable function in a new location.
Preservation, in other words, required selection.
The artwork travelled too
Inside Kiruna Church is an altarpiece painted by Prince Eugen.
Created for the church in the early twentieth century, the landscape painting has occupied the building for more than a century.
When the church moved, the artwork became part of that movement.
In 2025, Kin Museum of Contemporary Art presented The Sun Picture, an exhibition by Matts Leiderstam developed around Prince Eugen’s altarpiece and the relocation of Kiruna Church.
The exhibition connected an artwork made for a particular building with a moment in which that building itself was about to change location.
This produces a strange situation.
The painting remains.
The church remains.
Their physical relationship remains.
But the place around them changes.
Can an object carry a place with it?
We do not have an answer.
But Kiruna turns what might normally be an abstract question about art and context into something unusually physical.
The building moves.
The artwork moves with it.
The coordinates do not.
Not everything can be moved
Kiruna’s transformation is not a process in which an entire city is lifted from the ground and reconstructed exactly somewhere else.
Some buildings are relocated.
Others are dismantled.
Some elements are preserved and reused.
These can include artworks, architectural details, historical elements and materials.
The municipality describes these elements as a way of carrying part of a building’s history forward.
That language raises a larger question.
If only part of a place can survive, which part should it be?
A city has to choose
Every act of preservation contains a decision.
Something is considered important enough to protect.
Something can physically be moved.
Something can be reused.
Something cannot.
This does not mean that Kiruna’s transformation can be reduced to a simple division between what is valued and what is discarded.
Engineering, cost, safety, construction and future use all affect what can realistically be preserved.
But the result is still a cultural selection.
The new Kiruna will contain fragments of the old one.
Buildings.
Materials.
Artworks.
Architectural details.
Memories.
Some will occupy entirely new relationships with the city around them.
Perhaps urban relocation is therefore not only a question of moving structures.
It is also a process through which a city negotiates what parts of its material memory can continue.
That is our interpretation of the documented process, not an official definition of the transformation.
What happens to public art?
The question becomes particularly interesting with public art.
A work in a museum can travel from one gallery to another.
Mobility is already part of the way exhibitions operate.
Public art is different.
Its meaning can become connected to a square, a street, a building, a route through the city or the everyday routines of the people who encounter it.
Kiruna’s planning documents recognise that artworks and other cultural values are part of what must be considered during the urban transformation.
Existing public art has been included within planning for the new city and its public spaces.
But this creates a question that cannot be solved simply by moving an object.
Does a public artwork remain the same work when the public space around it disappears?
Physically, it may.
Its material can remain unchanged.
But its relationship to the city cannot be identical.
People approach it differently.
Buildings around it change.
Sightlines change.
Daily routines change.
The artwork acquires new neighbours.
We should not assume that this makes the work weaker or less meaningful.
It may acquire meanings that did not exist before.
But relocation makes something normally invisible about public art very clear.
Location is part of the encounter.
Rebuilding a context
Greenery, water, a place to sit and a space capable of functioning as a stage are intended to carry some of the character of the former location into the new centre.
This is more than moving architecture.
An attempt is being made to reconstruct relationships around it.
Not to reproduce the old place exactly.
That would be impossible.
But to allow traces of one urban environment to enter another.
Kiruna therefore offers an unusual experiment in cultural memory.
Can the feeling of a public place be partially reconstructed after its geography has changed?
A contemporary art museum inside the new city
At the centre of this transformation sits an institution devoted to contemporary art.
Kin Museum of Contemporary Art is Norrbotten County’s museum for contemporary art.
It opened in 2018 and operates from Kristallen City Hall in Kiruna’s new centre, while also producing exhibitions and projects throughout Norrbotten.
Its geographical point of departure is the Barents Region.
The museum therefore exists inside the new urban structure while simultaneously examining the histories and conditions of the territory around it.
In recent years, those conditions have entered its programme directly.
The Sun Picture engaged with the movement of Kiruna Church and Prince Eugen’s altarpiece.
From November 2025 to April 2026, A Hole in the Real: Dora García, Pablo Picasso, and the Legacy of Mining returned to another extraordinary episode in Kiruna’s cultural history.
In 1965, more than one hundred works by Pablo Picasso were shown at Kiruna City Hall.
The exhibition was organised to mark LKAB’s seventy fifth anniversary and was made possible partly through support from the mining company and Kiruna Municipality.
Sixty years later, Kin returned to that history while examining the relationship between art, mining and the conditions through which cultural institutions develop in a mining city.
The connection between art and extraction in Kiruna is therefore not new.
What changes is the way that relationship is examined.
Kiruna has already become an artistic question
Artists and architects have been investigating the transformation of Kiruna for years.
In 2020, ArkDes in Stockholm presented Kiruna Forever.
The exhibition brought together more than one hundred works by architects, urban planners and artists and examined Kiruna’s transformation from its industrial history into its uncertain future.
Its questions went beyond architecture.
What happens to identity when homes disappear?
How should cultural heritage be valued?
What are the limits of natural resources?
How does urban transformation affect the Indigenous Sámi population?
The exhibition included artists and practitioners whose work engages directly with Sápmi, land, extraction and northern geographies.
Kiruna was therefore already being treated not simply as an engineering project, but as a cultural question.
That distinction matters.
Moving a building is an engineering problem.
Deciding what the building means after it moves is not.
The landscape that cannot be relocated
There is another perspective without which this story would be incomplete.
Kiruna exists within Sápmi.
Particular concern surrounds the potential future development of the Per Geijer deposit.
These are not questions about whether a building can be transported.
A grazing landscape cannot be loaded onto a platform.
A migration route cannot simply be reconstructed five kilometres away.
This is where the spectacular image of the moving city becomes more complicated.
The church and the land
That tension became especially visible during the relocation of Kiruna Church.
While thousands watched the building travel towards its new home, representatives of Gabna sameby publicly used the moment to draw attention to the effects of mining on Sámi land and reindeer herding.
Their criticism was not directed at the engineering achievement alone.
It questioned the priorities made visible by it.
A culturally important building could receive enormous resources to ensure its survival.
The surrounding landscape was undergoing another kind of transformation.
These situations are not identical and should not be presented as though one simply cancels out the other.
Preserving a church and protecting reindeer herding land involve different legal, cultural and political questions.
But their simultaneous presence in Kiruna creates a difficult question for any discussion of heritage.
Whose heritage can be moved, and whose heritage depends on the land remaining connected?
That is our question.
It is not a conclusion attributed to Gabna sameby, Kiruna Municipality or LKAB.
Contemporary Sámi art in the moving city
The question is also present within Kiruna’s contemporary art landscape.
From June to August 2026, Kin Museum of Contemporary Art presents the first Sápmi Triennial.
The triennial has travelled through several locations within and beyond Sápmi before arriving in Kiruna.
Its presence matters because the cultural geography of Kiruna cannot be understood solely through the history of the mining city.
There are overlapping geographies here.
The municipality.
The mining landscape.
Norrbotten.
Sweden.
Sápmi.
They do not always describe the same territory in the same way.
Contemporary art does not resolve those differences.
It can make them visible.
What can be preserved?
Kiruna has already inspired one of the most extraordinary experiments in cultural preservation taking place in Europe today.
Buildings travel along roads.
Architectural details wait to be reused.
Public artworks acquire new surroundings.
A church crosses the city with its altarpiece still inside.
A museum in the new centre examines the cultural history of mining.
Artists question extraction, landscape and memory.
And the transformation continues.
In 2025, the expected impact area expanded again.
The question of what should be preserved therefore has not disappeared.
It has become larger.
Kiruna Municipality itself acknowledges this uncertainty. Following LKAB’s updated deformation forecast in August 2025, a substantially larger area is now expected to be affected, and decisions about which additional buildings and environments should be preserved have not yet been made.
The archive of the future is still being selected.
What does a city carry with it?
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Kiruna is not that buildings can move.
Engineering has demonstrated that they can.
The more difficult question is what moving them preserves.
A structure?
An artwork?
A memory?
A relationship between people and place?
Kiruna shows that these things are not interchangeable.
An object can travel.
A building can travel.
Even some architectural relationships can be partially reconstructed.
But territory is different.
Context is different.
Memory is different.
The transformation therefore makes visible something that exists in every city but is rarely confronted so directly.
Cities constantly decide what survives them.
Kiruna simply has to make those decisions while the city itself is moving.
And contemporary art has become one of the places where those decisions can be examined.
Not because art can decide what Kiruna should save.
Not because artists can resolve the conflicts surrounding mining, land or development.
But because art can ask what preservation actually means when preserving the object does not necessarily preserve the place.
Perhaps the question is therefore no longer simply:
What happens to art when a city moves?
It is:
What can a city really take with it?