MALIN SJOBERG

Reveries from Childhood

When I first looked at Malin Sjoberg’s photographs I was struck by her sensibility to render the complexities and fictional qualities of a child’s imagination. This, of course, was based on her own reveries as a child and her photographs pull us back in time when she revisits her room by the Baltic sea. Sjoberg grew up in Stockholm where the melancholy and magical nature of the city greatly inspires her work, which often deals with themes of exile, identity and memory.

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From My Room by the Baltic

© Malin Sjoberg

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Inspired by the literary arts, Sjoberg extracts from poetry an imaginary landscape which is often tied to a sense of belonging and identity. The poem The Days of the Fall by the Finnish-Swedish poet Edith Sodergan carries significant meaning—

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‘The days of the autumn are transparent and
painted on the golden foundation of the forest…
The days of the autumn smile at the whole world.
It is so relieving to fall asleep without dreams, weary of the flowers and tired of the greenery,
with the red wreath of wine at my pillow…
The day of autumn does not yearn any longer,
its fingers are implacably cold,
in its dreams it sees

how everywhere snowflakes are falling…’

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MS: Those opening lines express the “transparent and painted” quality autumn has on the rest of the environment: never really connecting to it, enforcing that distance between the vitality of summer and finality of winter—

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From My Room by the Baltic

© Malin Sjoberg

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MS: I am drawn to the childhood gaze where the boundary between dream and reality is blurred. What I remember are the sounds and silences of rooms filled with longing and loss, which has shaped how I relate to and understand the relationships in my family. My grandmother’s house and her being always evoked a calm and distant feeling filled with longing and loss, which I fell into and came to represent a safe haven. I spent most of my summers and winters with her in her large silent house by the sea and I felt safe there.

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From My Room by the Baltic

© Malin Sjoberg

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From My Room by the Baltic

© Malin Sjoberg

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From My Room by the Baltic

© Malin Sjoberg

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Sjoberg has not returned to her grandmother’s house by the sea since her passing twenty years ago, but she remembers every room as though she never left. She re-enters the familiar space in her imagination. One can argue what sparked the return to her reveries as a child is the result of her becoming increasingly distant from her homeland and her language while living in foreign lands. Physical distance and the passing of time evoke the need to return to one’s roots, either in literal or imaginary terms.

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From My Room by the Baltic

© Malin Sjoberg

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Sjoberg’s inspirations include the Spirit of the Behive by Victor Enrice, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Fanny & Alexander by Ingmar Bergmann. She says about the filmmaker Ingmar Bergmann—

MS: His film deals with the memories, the imaginary worlds and the fragmented logic a child uses to make sense of the world. While talking about his film ‘Fanny and Alexander’, Bergman says the following words about childhood: the days and hours exploded with these strange wonders, unexpected sights, and magical moments. I can still roam through the landscape of my childhood and recreate the lighting, smells, people, places, moments, gestures, intonations and objects. Seldom do these memories have any particular meaning; they are like a bit of a film, short or long, with no point, shot at random. This is the prerogative of childhood: to move in complete freedom between magic and oatmeal porridge, between boundless terror and a joy that threatens to burst within you…Time did not exist. It was difficult for me to differentiate between what existed in my imagination and what was real…there were always the ghosts and the visions. And the fairy tales, were they real or not?’

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From My Room by the Baltic

© Malin Sjoberg

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MS: Working on ‘My Room by the Baltic’ has made me realize that seeing is not believing. I believe that in these transitory homes, these environments that are at first devoid of memories, we project our own memories and imaginings on to them. ‘A Room by the Baltic’ is a visualization of that inner landscape and a recreation of that childhood gaze. I recreate these spaces not only to remember and make sense of the past, but first and foremost to return home. They are fragments rescued from the turmoil of the external world, rendered in the labyrinthic stream of consciousness of childhood.

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From My Room by the Baltic

© Malin Sjoberg

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MS: With its small box like case and small prints ‘A Room by the Baltic’ should be experienced and possessed by the viewer alone just as our inner gazes are ours alone. Like my previous series, this work is not a window to an ‘objective’ reality, but to my subjective reality and thus a reflection not of what I see but what I dream.

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From My Room by the Baltic

© Malin Sjoberg

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Malin Sjoberg currently pursues studies in photography at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University after having received a B.A. in International Relations at Boston University in 2002.

She lived in Prague from 2004 to 2005 where she worked as an Assistant Dramaturg with FAMU. A year earlier she acted as the assistant producer for short and feature scripts for Twenty-Two Productions in New York City between 2002 and 2003.

Her work has been exhibited twice at the Maine Photographic Workshops Gallery in 2007.