Your work in the exhibition is a filmed interview with a retired miner from Kiruna, Bengt Jernelöf. He talks about his life and his experiences working in the mine. In the video you have clipped photographs of the landscape around Kiruna, particularly the mountains Luossavaara and Kiirunavaara, in with the interview. Why have you chosen this particular angle in the project?
We wanted to find a basic starting point in order to talk about Kiruna: stories and histories, the people, the city and the mine. How can one acquire adequate insight into Kiruna from only visiting for a few weeks? Our way in was to meet the oldest living person to have been employed by LKAB: he could describe the city’s development in his own words and reflect Kiruna through his own life story. In the interview, the pensioner Bengt Jernelöf talks about his life: both his free time and his work. He is a third generation LKAB worker and in many ways one can say that he is an embodiment of history, both the local and the national.
One could say that the work consists of three main components: the interview, the landscape and the music. The music, which is played on a fiddle, was created by the Sami joiker Lars-Ánte Kuhmunen from Kiruna. Can you say something about your choice of music?
It is violent to experience how the mountains near the city, Kiirunavaara and Luossavaara, have been affected by the mining operation. For us it is interesting to try to give a contrasting view of this image of nature. The joiking of the reindeer herder and musician Lars-Ánte Kuhmunen’s describes the mountain area around Kiruna from a non-industrial and more emotional perspective. It is salubrious. When the folk musician Vegar Vårdal from Norway interprets joiks on the fiddle, there is an intense musical presence, but also a distanced–and melancholic–feeling of absence.
Coming up: Dave Hullfish Bailey about his work with documentary and fictional material, Kiruna’s multiple rhythms and time scales as well as his idea for a workshop with teenagers in the city…
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