“Being a foreigner is like being underwater

while others are talking to you on the surface:

sounds penetrate, but not their meaning.“

- Tania de Montaigne

OMVÄXLING
[Variation]

I have been living in Sweden for three years and I am slowly absorbing the culture. I am gradually getting to grips with the rules, standards and language, and I am even starting to appropriate certain codes. However, I still feel extremely foreign, completely different, still far too often “Lost in translation”. I try to acknowledge my own filters and those of my interlocutors to apprehend their reality and better understand mine.

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The series “Variation of a Swedish Window" tries to illustrate this impression of being in a constant dissonance that I am currently feeling as a foreigner in Sweden.

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We see here a few windows, very characteristic of Swedish architecture, seen through huge ice cubes that deform them, making them more or less recognizable. These ice cubes act as the parallel reality filters that I pursue in my artistic process and which make me perceive what surrounds me in a way that is unique to me.

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They symbolize here the cultural barrier that distort relationships and complicate exchanges. This cold seizes your heart when they make you feel you are not at home. foreign without knowing the codes, and the ice of a priori, of the fear of the unknown seems then unbreakable.

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These windows, although always being the same, impassive, imperturbable, appear to me sometimes grotesque, sometimes aggressive, comical, hurtful, discriminating ...

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"Sounds penetrate, but not their meaning": Foreign, I feel things first before understanding them, and if the meaning invariably remains unchanged, my perception varies according to the rhythm of my impressions.