Girl, Battle

The long term photographic project Girl, Battle is born out of my own experiences as a devoted and committed handball player in my adolescent years. When I was on my physical peak at the age of seventeen my body collapsed, due to the physical pressure. I left the sport. Today, as an adult and artist I begun remembering the sport as quite brutal. I also started to think of the (sport) hall as a closed space. A box, where we, the girls in the team, shared girlhood, intimacy, closeness and violence.

By re-visiting my past I began involving a team of fifteen year old handball athletes in my previous home village, situated the in rural areas in north of Sweden. My interest in the athletes is observing the dynamics of team sport at this crucial age - between adulthood and childhood - in relation to identity, body, intimacy and violence, and in relation to how girlhood and subjectivity is formed through such experiences.

Through staging and freezing movements taken from the sport I photographed the athletes with an analogue large- and middle format camera. The aesthetics in the photographs is referred to Baroque paintings. It is a way of giving value to the motifs - in relation to representation and class. To highlight the beauty and suffering within the sport, extended to life and growing up as a young girl.

I've been working intensively with Girl, Battle for more than a year, during my master studies in Fine Art at Konstfack (Stockholm). The work also contains video and sculptural objects and is ongoing.