KNUTTE WESTER

Gzim and the frozen lake

 

Bronze sculpture (2011)

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In 2003 I moved my studio to a refugee camp in Boliden, in Northern Sweden. I started a project with an open studio there. A little boy from Kosovo borrows my camera to film. He is eight years old and has spent his childhood in various refugee camps in Europe. One day he comes by the studio to say he has something important to tell me. He and his family will be deported to Kosovo. We end up on a park bench by a frozen pond. The water and the dreams have frozen to ice. It is only when he tells of the expulsion and puts his words to what will happen, that he seems to understand the meaning of the words.

 

In 2011, in my studio, I returned to this memory and out of the memory made a sculpture. It’s not a sculpture of a person, but of a memory. A story that time had turned into a metaphor; by that time that child who inspired the sculpture had grown up and moved on, but there were other people on other benches, and lakes turned into ice.