Everything here is fine only I fell out of a tree the first hour I was here and I also cut my thumb

A story about intimacy and connection through six generations of women from my family, that brings to life how generations change but that our behaviour and our needs do not.

Meeting my 18-year-old grandmother was the start to this long-term project. It struck me that her voice and her behaviour were the same as the grandmother that I had known. It made me realize how time doesn't change who you are but that it is your role, the part you play in life, that changes: from being a child, to being a mother, to being a grandmother. I dissected and reassembled fragments from letters and photographs of six generations of women in my family and playfully explore our differences and similarities, our intimacy and connection. It showed me that we are the same, that we love and we play in the same way and even time, 80 years, cannot change that.

“Everything here is fine only I fell out of a tree the first hour I was here and I also cut my thumb” tells this story through six generations of women in my family.

“Knowing if I tell you everything everything will be all right,” my eighteen-year-old grandmother writes in a letter to her mother in 1944. The war is in full swing and I read that she has an independent character, that she is poetic, dramatic, messy even but also madly in love. She is also pregnant and unmarried. A complete correspondence follows between my grandmother, her mother and her grandmother. With the letters in my possession I fall headfirst into my young grandmother’s world, a world which is surprisingly recognizable. The way the women communicate with each other feels familiar. I could have written the letters too, with my mothers and daughters. What follows is an exploration into six generations of women in my family. I literally zoom in on letters and images of all the generations, I photograph, I play, I unravel and cut things up until I find what I was looking for: connection and belonging.

All images and details are taken and made by me, from photos and other archival material shot between 1906-2024 and involve six generations of women in my family. (In the book this is echoed in quotes/ fragments from letters written between mothers and daughters and grandmothers written between 1944-2024).

As a photographer, and previously as a theatre director, I have a love for the daily things which make us so human: namely the playful and tender aspects of our behavior. Trust, connection and belonging are the most important themes in my work and my subjects are often people closest to me. I explore our individuality and that what binds us. Everything here is fine only I fell out of a tree the first hour I was here and I also cut my thumb has been self-published in 2025 and is my second book.