Fiskis Collective
Hannah Clarkson, Matilda Tucker, Konstantina Pappa, Milagros Bedoya
The Fiskis Collective is comprised of four artists – Hannah Clarkson (UK), Matilda Tucker (US/Germany), Konstantina Pappa (Greece), and Milagros Bedoya (Peru) – with backgrounds as various as visual arts, writing, and architectural practice, focusing on the potentialities of storytelling for empathy and political agency. Currently based in Sweden, the group met as students on the Decolonizing Architecture post-master research course at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Art, and have been working predominantly on projects with Fisksätra Museum, a self-described ‘cultural and political laboratory’ located in a suburb in the east of Stockholm characterised by its diversity of languages and immigrant communities. Our work at Fisksätra Museum aims to explore and shape ideas related to urban justice, civic participation and empowerment in a playful, empathetic way, through writing, interviews, video and animation, listening sessions, language and translation.
In our individual and collective practices, we are engaged in processes of storytelling grounded in everyday communities and the politics of home, exploring potential embodiments in language(s) of thinking and dwelling in the ‘here and elsewhere’ of places and spaces we may not physically be in, across cultural, geographical and/or emotional distance. Through methods and concepts of listening, speaking, and writing, we are interested in how language can be employed as a tool for empathy beyond concrete linguistic understanding; how translation as method opens up to modalities of fictioning and collective storytelling; and writing as an experiment in sharing everyday struggles and building collective narratives of care.
Fiskis Collective is founded on ideas of the ‘here and elsewhere’ which characterises both its members, with our various geographical and cultural roots, and the neighbourhood of Fisksätra, with its wealth of languages and high rate of immigration. Much of our work is based upon finding ways to dwell otherwise, especially in a time where we might be physically inhabiting places elsewhere, so the residency at Malongen in Stockholm is an exciting opportunity to explore further what it means to work collectively in several places at once. We are keen to use the studio at Malongen to expand upon our experiments with writing and visual language as modes of translation, focussing on finding ways to tell some of the stories we have been gathering during the past months.
Website: https://www.fiskiscollective.com/