Mens vi venter (While we wait)

My pictures are about social relationships and about meeting oneself in and through others. Based on my own family, I work with visual reflections on how upbringing and history lay the foundation for our identity and self-image.

In 2019, we visited my family in Slovakia, after the pandemic. Starenka (My grandma) had gotten cancer a few years earlier, now she was different, everything was different. The holiday was a reminder of where I came from, and the distance I felt - both when I was there, but also back home in Norway.

My ongoing project "While we wait" was initially intended to be about how my mother's journey, divorce and hardship have affected her, and the generations that came after her.

Later, during conversations I had during the project, I noticed that everyone around me was also, more or less unconsciously, being influenced by patterns and longing for something else. I saw it in the pictures after developing them in the darkroom: there was a distance in their eyes, and perhaps mine too, that could not be explained.

I decided to go closer to this feeling of waiting for something else - and used photography as a journey into my own, and the longing of those around me.

Through meetings with the people around me, I have tried to find out where this "homesickness" that haunts me comes from.