And so God divided the sea
And the kingdoms agreed on their border
And Linnaeus categorized nature
And the librarian sorted the books
And so it continues

We experience the same thing
don’t we?
We do!

(2023)
Karlstad City Library

The work consists of 8 sculptures and a text developed for the City Library in Karlstad

During the first quarter of 2023, I was a resident at HIAP Suomenlinna. It was something very confrontational with my own self-image to be in a place that in Swedish still is called Sveaborg - A fortress built by Sweden to establish Swedish power over Finland. When I traveled there, I took some materials with me, including “Värmland’s stone”; Kyanite quartzite. When I arrived in Suomenlinna, I read about how the Swedes transported stone from Stockholm to symbolically take part in the construction and capture of Suomenlinna. In the light of that knowledge, my Värmland stones became both slightly unpleasant and poetically human.

At the same time, another personal story came to mind. My father comes from Övertorneå, in Tornedalen on the border between Sweden and Finland. When I was a teenager, I learned that his mother tongue was actually Meänkieli - Tornedalen Finnish - A language in the meeting point between Finnish and Swedish. But it was forbidden when my father was growing up, so dad and his siblings only learned Swedish, and so did the rest of the family, a language was lost. During our time at Suomenlinna, my 2-year-old son attended a Finnish-language preschool. One day when I picked him up, he met me at the door and said something in Finnish, the staff had to translate into Swedish for me what he said. And I shed a tear, both from joy and sadness.

I began to find materials on the islands, and weave them together with the materials I brought with me. Stones from Suomenlinna met stones from Värmland.