Projects
Swede Home, 1966/1973/1975/2009, DV PAL video with sound, color, English voice over by Jan Edman, converted from 8mm film, 14 minutes, dimensions variable
As the second chapter of a larger project utilizing Jan Edman’s homemade movie archive, the project evolves from 8-mm films taken by Jan Edman (1928) in Iran during the ‘60s and the ‘70s. Edman is a retired Swedish engineer who traveled to Iran nearly 15 times between 1966 and 1979 on behalf of a Malmö–based company Agriconsult AB for the purpose of realizing industrial projects for various Iranian state-owned and private industries. The films obtained from Jan Edman in order to be used in the project are the following:
1966
Iran: work trip with Kampsax A/S, a Copenhagen-based mapping company to Tehran for the feasibility study of cold store at the Teheran Slaughterhouse, visits to cities of Amol and Anzali
1973
Iran: work trip to Shiraz for the feasibility study and proposals for 1&1 canning company, visits to Persepolis and Tehran
1975
Iran: work trip to Tehran for school milk project study accompanied by Jan’s family, visit to cities of Gorgan and Rasht
Among the projects Edman was working on in Iran, the project follows the former Tehran slaughterhouse from its formation in a suburban area to its industrialization and further transformation to a cultural centre in the process of gentrification of the area. This slaughter/culture house is carefully set as the meeting point of double narrations in the installation Swede Home 1966/1973/1975/2009. These narrations are partly based on the diverse contributions of workers of Agriconsult and Tehran slaughterhouse in the research that the artist conducts around this non-lived past that she carries variety of its memories through different modes of transference. Approaching the found footage as both an insider and an outsider, Swede Home deals with belonging and displacement, social memory and colonial modernity.
