Girl, Battle

Girl, Battle stains from my experiences of being committed to handball during the adolescent years. In this long term project I’ve been engaging with a team of 15-year-old female handball players in a rural mill town in the north of Sweden. By observing the dynamics of team sports at this crucial age – between adult and childhood and in relation to achievement, intimacy and violence, I have been interested to examine how girlhood is formed through such experience. The work departs from a personal perspective of revisiting not only the sport and its members, but as well the location from my youth with the eyes of an artist and adult. I left the sport as a 17-year old athlete at my physical peak. As a result of the high pressure my body rejected my mind and I wasn’t able to perform. I never returned. Until now, twenty years later. Handball is among the general public often perceived as a jovial and communal team sport. However, as a high impact sport with a combatting nature, it involves one of the highest rates of injury of all Olympic sports, specifically injuries that lead to permanent complications or discomfort. I surely remember how we collided into each other without any protection. The project sought to explore also the darker areas of these memories and to approach the ambiguity that lies within the silent violence and its accompanying closeness. Conflicting entities that so strongly shaped our world. Through workshops with the young players, the photographs were staged in a tentative collaboration. By reducing the light only to flashes, freezed moments of contact, attack and defense formed a choreography of intense and isolated movements. To highlight the beauty and struggle within handball and to pay tribute to an ordinary team sport without men, I used analogue techniques to embrace the physicality, surface and style of Baroque paintings