Workshop and Artist Talk at Skövde Kulturhus 27th Aug 26 at 5.30 PM
History as a Breeze, as Breath is a performative storytelling lecture where autobiography, historical fragments and fiction begin to seep into one another. At its centre is Ishmael, an imagined young prisoner of war and drummer, carried by the wars of the seventeenth century to Skövde, Sweden and into the hospitality of a local family. Three hundred years later, I call him back to life.
As I follow Ishmael, my own story surfaces: memories of moving to Sweden with my son almost twenty years ago, and of returning there now, as if a pilgrim.
Through storytelling, drawings, photographs and small films, different times and places begin to overlap. Encounters happen: I meet historians, displaced artists emigrated in Sweden, Ishmael meets his hosts, the young Emanuel Swedenborg, himself moving between Sweden and London 300 years ago, just as my own life moves again between these places.
History becomes less a line than a breeze, a breath, a pilgrimage, a story: something that passes through us, disappears and returns, carrying one life into another across centuries.
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