Härifrån och dit och tillbaka igen/
From here to there and the other way around
From here to there and the other way around
Exhibition at Galleri Syster, Luleå (SE)
There is no ideal point of view of the world. No image, no book, no tale, that would give the complete experience of a place. There is only authors, that in a specific context, speaking from somewhere, sometime, gave us a testimony of their experience of this space. Ways of seeing, ways of describing.
Some of them, didn’t mediate it, and kept it in the enclosed spaces of the home: family pictures, diaries, account books,collections. On the outside, objects as clues, that needs to be linked together in order to reveal events that would otherwise stay invisible to our sight. This process requires time, observation but also distance, that distance that would determine the position from where i speak.
I am myself born in Luleå but have spent all of my childhood and adult life in France. Luleå, Norrbotten, Norrland, this regions and localities in the north of Sweden have been for me the foreign.
In 2011 i began to travel regularly to Luleå and gather pictures, postcards, newspapers, exploring archives and libraries, flip through family albums, read existing fictions and photograph the landscape i saw. This resulted in four books, four parallel tales of what a life in Norrland could be, how centuries of fictions molded our way of seeing it but perhaps also how Norrland lives outside of Norrland, as an idea: Là où je vis/ Där jag bor, The author’s journey, Entering Norrland and A family history.
Now as i live here, i would probably do it differently, maybe wouldn’t i do it at all. But would i live here if i hadn’t done it?
There is no ideal point of view of the world. No image, no book, no tale, that would give the complete experience of a place. There is only authors, that in a specific context, speaking from somewhere, sometime, gave us a testimony of their experience of this space. Ways of seeing, ways of describing.
Some of them, didn’t mediate it, and kept it in the enclosed spaces of the home: family pictures, diaries, account books,collections. On the outside, objects as clues, that needs to be linked together in order to reveal events that would otherwise stay invisible to our sight. This process requires time, observation but also distance, that distance that would determine the position from where i speak.
I am myself born in Luleå but have spent all of my childhood and adult life in France. Luleå, Norrbotten, Norrland, this regions and localities in the north of Sweden have been for me the foreign.
In 2011 i began to travel regularly to Luleå and gather pictures, postcards, newspapers, exploring archives and libraries, flip through family albums, read existing fictions and photograph the landscape i saw. This resulted in four books, four parallel tales of what a life in Norrland could be, how centuries of fictions molded our way of seeing it but perhaps also how Norrland lives outside of Norrland, as an idea: Là où je vis/ Där jag bor, The author’s journey, Entering Norrland and A family history.
Now as i live here, i would probably do it differently, maybe wouldn’t i do it at all. But would i live here if i hadn’t done it?
