Full Documentation shot of the Installation, including 11 Silver Gelatin prints suspended on Fishing Line, a multichannel projection, including mapped projection onto a found object, three poems in tandem, culminating in 8 minutes of length, image printed on organza
The sculptural altar, the focal point of the installation, is built from a tree branch and stump twisted into the shape of a woman dancing. On my first day in Björkö, I was struck by the fog that filled the terrain, a density that carried with it folklores, legends, and hauntings. By the third day I had learned the myth of the Skogsrå, and it immediately read to me as a mythos for trans and queer folk. A woman who fronts as one thing and is hollow or tree-like from behind? That screamed our story to me; what is a presentation, what is a desire, what is a hiding? I began writing a series of poems of her encounters with islanders, conquerors, and residents, weaving her into the history of the Great Pillage of 1720–1721, when Russian forces invaded and burned every building to force Sweden’s hand in signing the treaty that ended the Great Northern War.
Upon the altar is a projection of waterways, evoking where the Russians most likely landed before setting buildings and fields aflame. A single piece of image laid and printed across sheer fabric that rests above her with the only image I managed to take while fleeing the Los Angeles fires earlier this year. I wanted to tell a history in duopoly, creating two installations in one, one found and one brought. Above, a projected series of text tells a speculative story of the Skogsrå’s first enmeshments with a human from one of the villages on Björkö. On each side of the sheer image, represents thoughts and private moments; on the left that humans hidden thoughts, and on the right; the Skogsrå’s.
The photographs act as witnesses. Strung together with fiskelina, the first Swedish word I learned here beyond hello and thank you, they form ties and constellations across the space. I came to see each photograph as a truncated poem, a line or stanza circling the Skogsrå. What is land to her, to them? What persists as memory or movement? Nothing is held in permanence, only in persistence. The sequence of images asks how we might summon places that shift within us, and how to compose constellations from landscapes that hold too much.
Close up of projection mapped onto the body of the Skogsrå
Detail shot of projection mapped onto the body of the Skogsrå
Close up of projection mapped onto the body of the Skogsrå
Images scanned from 120 negatives that held the red heart section of the book, and were lifted in memoriam upon Fishing line in the installation
