I am currently working on a project I’ve called “Sofia – the missing Link”
This is a work about constructing/reconstructing the story of my Grand Aunt and her siblings who immigrated to Canada in the beginning of the 1900s. I am interested in My Grand Aunt Sofia in particular because she made a lot of choices that I consider quite radical both according to her contemporary time but also according to the family history (traditional farmers). She never married, worked until she was 85 in a high end fashion store and lived to be 102. The approach I make towards Sofia’s story is also my interest in what remains of a person who doesn’t have any children, who only live on by photographs and oral history, and a fascination towards the metaphors such persons become in a family’s history.
What I want to pursue with this work is to tell some of the non spectacular stories, which are never told when history is written and become parts of the statistics. In my work I want to emphasize the importance of the individual, that we all are irreplaceable and matter in the development of our society and history. The title also refers to the evolutionary term concerning what was missing between the chimpanzee and the Homo sapiens, according to evolutionary theory we as species are all part of the evolution, which is an ongoing process through every generation. Sofia is used as one of many missing links both in my family history but also as a woman who lived a very independent life, generations before this was common. In the work I also look at how emigration, religion, national identity has made an impact on how the 2nd and 3rd generation identify themselves today. From this reconstruction of a personal story I also expect to be able to philosophize around the questions we are discussing today about emigration, 2nd and 3rd generations immigrants, and how that make an impact on society.
The first part of this projects was done fall 2008 on a journey to Canada and the U.S where I met many of the descendants of the siblings who emigrated, I was able to borrow photographs and letters to develop my work, and I made several video interviews.
I made a blog during this trip, not so much about the work, but my meetings with my Canadian and American family you can see it here: My trip to North America
The next part of the work is my research on the Norwegian part of the story, the house and place the family emigrated from and the stories from this part of the world.