The modern peoples home; an essay on migration, repetition and dysfunction

Sammanfattning

In this essay, I reflect on the current political discourse around migration in Sweden, its historical background, its relationship to my own family-story, and my artistic practice. I explore how the present could be understood and deconstructed by investigating its history and redirecting the attention toward narratives that have been shadowed or forgotten. This is done through the lens of the Finnish post-war labour migration, Swedish imperialism and my own family-story as a microhistory. I propose storytelling as a tool for understanding how political ideologies and social structures become imprinted into our bodies and minds, and how they are transmitted across generations. Through working with mechanical figures, I use movement as a form of communicating stories through the most intimate; behaviour, feelings, rather than relying solely on language. In this way, storytelling becomes a means of making visible, the connections between personal experience, historical processes and contemporary political realities.