Hunting Towers series
This series of Swedish hunting towers deals with issues of personal cultural, emotional and mnemic displacement, and serves as a component in my ongoing interrogation of representation and metaphor. My attempts at connecting with 'time lost' are futile, and it is this futility that is at the centre of the project - highlighting the impossibility of a 'return' to what has-been & which ultimately places us in a permanent form of exile from the past.
Burning video, 1h 17"
The wooden tower burning in this video piece relates to the Hunting Towers series, and deals with similar issues. However, the focus is more on the 'creative destruction' that is taking place; the constructed tower burning to the ground is concerned with displacement from the past, but it also highlights the metamorphosis of materials, the passing of time - and ultimately comes to represent an anxiety over human mortality.
Majorna series
This series of photographs focuses on the part of the city of Gothenburg that I grew up in, and forms yet another component in my futile search for way of connecting to what I am separated from by time and space, and to that which was never documented. As attempts at connecting, the many 'returns' to my place of birth, Sweden, fail, as they tend to highlight rather than soothe the disconnection I feel. This is a feeling that is ever present during the course of each trip, and the resulting images are haunting pieces of evidence of my position as an 'outsider', a sense of non-belonging.
Owner Deceased series
These images depicting scenes of what has been 'left behind' by deceased owners are accompanied by found images recovered at these sites. Again, issues of memory and belonging recur, as well as the sense of discomfort, as the images become mementos mori in their own right.
© 1999-2010 All images and text are copyright of Sara Andersdotter
