Hanna Wildow has been chosen to artistically lead Konstfrämjandet Bergslagens project Bortom de blå bergen (Beyond The Blue Mountains)

Hanna Wildow has been chosen to artistically lead Konstfrämjandet Bergslagens project Bortom de blå bergen (Beyond The Blue Mountains). From September 2018 – June 2019, she will work together with a group of youths in the remote nature reserve Gränseskogen (The Periphery Forest). The youths come from the village Storå in Lindesbergs county, which serves as arrival point for many newly arrived refuges in Sweden. The social environment of the school in Storå is consequently tinged with disruptions and renewals, and Bortom de blå Bergen is a project aiming to establish a temporary safe space in the unique and remote primeval forest. Through participatory and pedagogically influenced artistic processes, Hanna Wildow and the group will near the forest as a place, a material and a context for relationships, to collaboratively generate artworks. Hanna Wildow will lead the process based on four orientations; a walking choreography, a straying language, dying materials, and the natural blueprint process of cyanotypes. From the proposal:
 
"There is an interesting tension in Konstfrämjandet’s project description, concerning place and subject, which I would like to embrace. The Periphery Forest is described as an environment where trees are allowed to live freely – growing, dying, falling, providing life to other species; generating diversity. A poetic reading of the forest’s name also reveals the magical shield that the forest can provide; a demarcation from the world outside; or a borderland within which other realities become possible. Maybe, the contrast between the forest and the constrained existence on the outside, is the most palpable for newly arrived youths, whose lives are carved with flight, disarrays and recommences. And maybe, that’s why the temporary haven that the forest can provide; a place to breath and for a moment live freely, is uttermost important for this group."