The Land of the Northern Lights – Entangled Stories of Belonging

A dialogic storytelling process that studies experiences about migration, interculturalism and multilingualism through art and narrative in Sweden and in Finland. T

A dialogic storytelling process that studies experiences about migration, interculturalism and multilingualism through art and narrative in Sweden and in Finland. The work-of-art-in-progress takes place by the Finnish-Swedish border in Tornio and Haparanda as well as in Luleå, Kiruna and in Helsinki. It tries to cover vast areas and dive into deep time. The participants, called co-storytellers, are people from different generations with Finnish speaking background living in Sweden and people with an intercultural background. I start where it is the hardest and the traumas the most dense and dark – with the people closest to me. It is an artistic, documentarist and experimental exploration of “finnishness”, “swedishness” and something in-between.

The aim is to create through art and storytelling a multilingual, polyphonic and multidimensional narrative about belonging – to something or somewhere – or about always being torn in-between, being neither or, both or something completely new. This series of photos are my personal angel to the entangled stories, one part of a more vast story panning out for over a thousand years.

I am a Tornedalian, born and raised in the Swedish Tornedalen, by the border river between Sweden and Finland. Born to Finnish-speaking immigrants in Sweden some 50 years ago I am still torn, broken, sad and angry by the experiences of being a "second generation immigrant in Sweden" and a "first generation immigrant" in Finland. I am still working on reconciling the multiple traumas caused by this but also learning more about a complex phenomena so difficult to define. The Finnish speaking people are finally after a thousand years of common history recognised as a minority in Sweden but this has not made it easier as the causes derive from ideas and a way of thinking that has long roots back in the past. I thought I am "an immigrant" as that I have been told all my life, a lower breed in the Nordic Sweden speaking firstly a language that you should be ashamed of and not to speak. Nor does the Tornedalians speak "real Swedish". As soon as I started to study this complex phenomena of migration and of being in-between so many entangled stories are revealed, emerging, tired of being silenced – realising that I come from an area that has been inter-and multicultural for more than a thousand years. With violence it has been tried to make "true Swedish". I am amazed of all the silences. Of the invisibility of the Finns in Sweden and the Northern areas, of all the persistent stereotyping as well as of all the violences entangled that emerge when you dive deeper into the subject.

The Finnish-speaking minority has been very invisible in Sweden, the land of the "true aryan race" and of the racial biology studies that created a Racial Hygiene Institute in 1921 – that even influenced the nazis in Germany in the 1920's and the 1930's with all the implications that came after these ideas. But it goes further than that. The land  now called Finland was a part of Sweden for centuries and in 1809 this land was cut in two. The eastern part became a grand duchy of Russia and in the north a river made into a border cut a cultural area in half – these cuts still live in us.

I am born into a sense of a borderless border, that is what the dream and the marketing speech has been up there in the north – an idea of lives that cross geographic but also cultural borders and merge them. For me the border floats in the depth of the rive. It is flowing, not fixed. Forever changing and altering. This means that for me an identity or a sense of belonging is a very complex thing. You do not form it alone either. Where are you allowed to belong and who do you invite to belong together with you? Words are used to describe "us" and "them". For me it starts from all of us being beings in this world we share – everything else is not fixed nor binary, not only black and white. How hard it is to explain or describe. I am also appalled by the things not learnt in school and  the violence of master languages that are used to define, categorise and box things in and out – to separate and to not include.

The stories/artworks created by the co-storytellers are presented in a two-part-exhibition, an online work-of-art and an art book/series of zines as well as micro-stories on Instagram. The process is multilingual but the main languages used in the process are Finnish and Swedish.