Höljet (The Husk) (2024)
Is an artistic research project developed during a one year residency at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. The project was exhibited at Gallery east in the Academy between 24/9–5/10 2024.

A couple of years ago, I realized that insects had invaded my practice. They had slowly crept in one by one, while some had suddenly swarmed in. Eventually, the numbers became so overwhelming that I could no longer ignore them. What was I looking at? Why had I allowed an invasion of these small animals?

Around the same time, largely because of the insects’ intrusive presence, I came across two things that became crucial to this project. The first was Clarice Lispector’s book The Passion According to G.H., in which the main character, through her encounter with a cockroach, comes to question her whole understanding of her existence as a human being. The second was the entomological collection at the National Museum of Natural History, where millions of insect specimens are pinned down and named in boxes, stacked in cabinets. The former depicts a mystical experience that finds both ecstasy and terror in the dissolved, changing, and ambiguous, while the latter expresses a belief in and longing for clarity, stability, and definition. In the contrast between these different ways of approaching insects, it became clear that these animals— perhaps because of their otherness—bring with them a fruitful opportunity to reflect on how we create our understanding and relationship to the world. For me, they have proven to be destabilizing creatures, both seductive and also disgusting and disturbing.

The project branched out into two parallel processes, interwoven but not necessarily mirroring each other. One is a text, the essay Höljet (The Husk). The other is a sculptural exploration that uses the chocolate praline box as a starting point to build a new infrastructure for (insect) collecting. I have tried to approach the insect and matter with a gaze that differs from the discriminatory seeing of science—an intimate, haptic gaze, open to the leaky and ambivalent, where things crumble and significations are clouded.