Girl, Battle

Girl Battle is a long term project that stains from a personal experience being a dedicated handball atlete as a teenager. I left the sport at 17. Today I am revisiting the same hall, team and young athletes, who are involved in the photographs.

Girl, Battle is a long term multi-chapter project. The project stains from my own experiences of being a committed handball athlete during my adolecent years. In my work I’ve been engaging a team of young female handball athletes in a rural mill town in the north of Sweden. My interest in them is observing the dynamics of team sport at this crucial age - between adult and childhood. How is girlhood formed through such experience in relation to achievement, pressure, intimacy and violence?

The work departs from a personal perspective of revisiting not only the sport and its members, but as well the location from my youth with the eyes of an artist and adult. I left the sport when I was on my physical peak at the age of seventeen. As a result of the high pressure my body collapsed due to a overtrained syndrome. I wasn't able to perform at all and it took me years to recover. I never returned to the hall, until now, twenty years later.

Handball is among the general public often perceived as a jovial and communal team sport. However, as a high impact sport with a combatting nature, it involves one of the highest rates of injury of all Olympic sports, specifically injuries that lead to permanent complications or discomfort. I remember how we collided into each other without any protection. 

The project sought to explore also the darker shadows of these memories and to approach the ambiguity that lies within the silent violence and its accompanying closeness. Conflicting entities that so strongly shaped our world. Through workshops with the young athletes, the photographs were staged in a tentative collaboration. By reducing the light only to flashes, freezed moments of contact, attack and defense, dedication, euphoria, we formed a choreography of intense and isolated movements. To highlight the beauty and struggle within handball and pay tribute to an ordinary team sport without men, I used analogue techniques to get close to the physicality, surface and style of Baroque paintings.

The project has been exhibited at Landskrona Photo Festival, Centre for Photography, and Konstfack