The Ditch

Beskrivning

The Ditch depicts the story of a forgotten defense line built on Öland during World War II. The excavated ditch was intended to serve as an obstacle for tanks and divided the island in two at the height of the village of Föra. In the project, Cederqvist's photographs are combined with documentary images from the war archive, a material that was sealed until the 1980s.

The work on the defense line was based on a series of remarkable assumptions, and it was not long before things started to go wrong: the ground swallowed more water than planned, the pump was undersized, and the costs spiraled out of control. Eventually, Raoul Thörnberg, who was responsible for the project, faced a court martial. The so-called "Föralinjen" was a major failure for the Swedish military and something they preferred to forget. The traces of the defense line, reminiscent of an abandoned earthwork, are still visible in the landscape.