The Museum of Klämrisk

Why?

Klämrisk signs are an important and iconic (although not as iconic as it should be) element of Swedish culture and, I don’t know, I just like them.

2022-11-13 18:11:15

Klämrisk sign found by an elevator of an apartment building near Ruddammsparken in Stockholm. For some reason, no sign was present on the ground floor. An interesting thing to note about this sign is that the illustration features a woman instead of a man or unspecific human, which is somewhat unusual.

I find this one particularly unnerving since the lady looks realistically lifeless while also not looking entirely like a diagram. The combination of her clearly having lost conciousness and being drawn like a concrete representation of a person rather than the abstract idea of a person is undeniably (to me, shut up) unsettling. Compare her lifeless pose to the 2021-05-21 picture, and the difference is obvious.

2022-10-28 08:40:32

This klämrisk was found on an elevator for wheelchair users. I’m quite fond of this one because of its not-so-appropriate cartoonish artstyle as well as the sheer terror the man is experiencing. Given his slightly more realistic and less diagramy appearance it makes it easier to assume things about him. Had he seen a klämrisk sign before he became the subject of one? Perhaps there was one outside the very elevator he’s now stuck in. Perhaps it was this very sign he saw before he walked inside. And to think that mere seconds prior he was joyfully whistling while just taking out the trash. Might something good have happened before this? He was certainly in a good mood.

Despite the terror he’s experiencing and the fact that a particular character is being depicted, it’s much sillier in intended tone than the typical klämrisk. The bin isn’t suffocating him, nor is his stomach or chest being violently compressed, but instead he’s simply lodged in there, with the bin conveniently stopping before reaching his face.

2022-09-09 20:26:22

Elevators aren’t the only things that can squish you! So can this machine I don’t know the name of which was sitting in a laundry room. The implication in this image is that a child could get its fingers stuck in the machine, but I’m pretty sure my fingers would get stuck too.

Despite being very clear about the existance of a danger, it’s much too vague about the nature of the danger. If I knew how to operate the machine I might say something like “it says not to touch it but I have to do that to use it”, but I don’t know how to use it so instead I’ll put it in quotation marks and put a little excuse around it, which you’re reading now.

2021-05-21 15:17:15

This particular sign is at Östra Station and is about as close as you can get to a “canonical” klämrisk. Sure, some versions will show more detailed neck breakage and some use a diagram showing a white figure with a black outline instead of a plain black silhouette, but in my opinion, this is the standard boring regular klämrisk. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, every artistic field must at any point in time have something that can be considered default, and for klämrisk this happens to be it. If there was nothing usual there would be nothing unusual.