Åsa Elzén

mail@asaelzen.com

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Forest Calling – A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration

or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge /


Skogen kallar – Ett oändligt kontaminerat samarbete eller

Dansandet är en form av skogskunskap


    – Extension #2 at The Experimental Field, Accelerator, SU

    – Extension #1 In Forest Intervals


Notes on a Fallow – The Fogelstad Group and Earth /

Träda – Fogelstadgruppen och jord


    – A Growing Fallow Archive / Ett växande träda-arkiv

    – Biography of a Fallow / En trädas biografi

    – Transcript of a Fallow / Avskrift av en Träda

    – Boy! / Pojken!

    – Fogelstad Fågelstad Fågelsta Fågelholk Fågelbo

    – The Other School / Den andra skolan

    – A Growing Archive on the Women’s Barn and Livestock

    School at Fogelstad / Ett växande arkiv över Kvinnliga

    Ladugårdsutbildningen vid Fogelstad

    – A Step to the Side / Ett steg åt sidan

    – A Growing Peace with the Earth Collection

    – Transcript of Transcripts: Elin – Bang /

    Avskrifter av avskrifter: Elin – Bang

    – Why do things when you could leave it? – An attempt,

    an in-between land / Varför gör man saker då man kunde

    låta bli? – Ett försök, ett gränsland


While I am trying to get to know Fredrika, I am always

thinking of you.


Memory of an Event

    – Memory of an Event I (Dear Honorine / Dearest Signe)

    – Memory of an Event II


History History

The Collaboration: MS and AL


Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian journey 1795 re-traced

    – The Glade I

    – The Glade II

    – Who Fooled Whom?


YES! Association/Föreningen JA!

    – A New Spelling of a Street – A tribute to Audre Lorde

    – All that you touch You Change. All that you Change

       Changes you.

    – NYPÅSTIGNA / NEW PASSENGERS

    – (art)work(sport)work(sex)work

    – Zyklische Gesellschaftsreise

    – SMOKING AREA

    – We Will Open a New Front/Lee H. Jones

    – (Dis)agreements?

    – When hell froze over


The guide and the seeing man

Project Description

I’ll be you if you’ll be me

A year of sisterhood

Getting Dressed

Bollywood Basketball

While I am trying to get to know Fredrika, I am always

thinking of you.


Medan jag försöker bli bekant med Fredrika, tänker jag jämt på dig.


site-specific installation / on-going action, copies of letters written by Elin Wägner 1947-48, paper, pens, typewriter, tables and chairs, 2018


At Bie biennal 2016 Åsa Elzén participated with the project Memory of an Event that created a link between The Women Citizen’s School at Fogelstad (Kvinnliga Medborgarskolan vid Fogelstad) (1925–1954) and Bie Bath (Augustenbad/Bie Badanstalt) (1843–1940). The project dealt with two fictitious events around 1920, a strike and a love story that were discussed in two letters, one signed Signe and the other Honorine, written by Elzén.


Åsa Elzén’s engagement in the legacy and history writing concerning The Women Citizen’s School at Fogelstad is since ongoing and in focus also at the current Bie biennal/text through the project While I am trying to get to know Fredrika, I am always thinking of you (Medan jag försöker bli bekant med Fredrika, tänker jag jämt på dig.). (Quote from a letter written by Elin Wägner to Klara Johanson 19/4 1948.)


...

above and below (from top down):

installation views with visitors/participants at  Bie biennal

letters from Elin Wägner to Klara Johanson 3/2 1947 and 12/2 1948

letters from Elin Wägner to Klara Johanson 19/4 1948

installation views with visitors/participants at  Bie biennal

During the years 1947–48, Elin Wägner (born 1882, writer and part of the Fogelstad-group) wrote a number of letters where fragments or longer paragraphs about her ongoing Fredrika Bremer-biography appear. Fredrika Bremer (1801–1865) was a writer and a well known feminist pioneer. The biography was never completed since Wägner passed away in January 1949. The letters are written to friends and colleagues, among them to literary critic and essayist Klara Johanson who previously had published Fredrika Bremer’s collected letter correspondence.


Visitors to the exhibition are invited to try to decipher and re-enact / transcribe some of these handwritten (and one typed) letters as a way to approach Wägner ”this side” of the words. Through the letters we understand that Wägner is trying to approach Bremer by reading her posthumous letters and through reading and re-activating Wägner’s letters we approach Wägner, Bremer and the receiver of the letter. We interact with triangular relationships and through our involvement we create an expanded web of relations. Depending on the intensity of this involvement we write ourselves into, or encounter a feminist genealogy where the singular subject dissolves and we are faced with the ethical dilemmas of biography-making as well as its boundaries and contingencies.