The Allegory of Tigers

In this series I tried to find a way to reflect on/around historical events that I have not experienced myself. Through focusing on personal points of departures as ways in to this project; I assembled a method of emotional reflection which consisted of an attempt to approach my grandfather’s life and history from a child’s gaze. My grandfather was a member of the Danish resistance against Nazi Germany that occupied Denmark from 1940 until 1945, during 1943 he was forced to flee on a fish boat to Sweden along with several others during what is later referred to as ‘the rescue of the Danish Jews’. The personal connection enabled affects and emotions to more easily bubble up while the position of the child dislocated me closer to the suspension of the walls between fantasy and reality – in this, told and retold stories started to arise as bodily experiences that affected the very basis of the creative process. To build the different scenes I used objects that I inherited from my grandfather and a set of plastic tiger toys. The photographic was not solely a result from a re-enactment of this gaze on these objects but through these objects connections to memories of people and atmospheres they rather figured as sparks for the photographic act itself. By means of this the photographic act inevitably turns into a performative act – leaving the study and becoming a play – rather than a still life in front of the lens, it is a theatre with actors and scenography. With other words; the methodology is: Turning to poetry without, but through risking and sometimes failing to, turning into poetry