When I was two years old, my father went into the woods with the intention of never coming back. For almost 20 years, my parents chose silence about his suicidal attempt. And still, I found myself drawn to the place where the incident happened and on its anniversary a wave of grief washed over me. When my parents finally decided to tell me, it all started to make sense. This project started out as an investigation into the traces of a well-kept family secret. While I was revisiting my parents’ trauma – its places, objects and memories that I could not call my own – I found it here, inside myself. My body always knew. This is no longer a story about a suicide attempt. This is about the impossibility of secrets, about what we are sharing when we hide. This is about pain inflicted out of love, about the complexity of silence, and the unexplainable sadness of a boy. Mum, Dad, this is your trauma, that you kept wrapped up in countless colorful blankets and yet unknowingly handed over to me in a loving embrace. I will carry it with care. Additional Artist Statement: Trauma is transferred over generations. It is stored in the body, in objects, in places, in dreams, atmospheres and memories. It is handed over trough those energies: hidden gazes, coloured silence, small cracks in daily life behaviours. Those are quiet disturbances for the next generation, tiny interferences of reality, that are impossible to put into a system. And without the information of their origin, we are doomed to navigate through a maze, without even knowing. Once the secret in my family was revealed, I was slowly starting to understand and to rewrite my own story. Things fell into place, made sense and I became the narrator of what I had always believed was a broken life. Working on "Now is not the right time" reversed the power dynamics of our family story. So many years, my parents had been the gate keeper of this dark spot, they held the power of what was known and what was hidden. They did it out of love, and yet, they created a new form of pain. Taking control over the narrative was an intense healing process; both for myself and my parents. My story is a case study of the universal theme of family secrets and the transforming power of them. But the same mechanisms take place in a more broad societal scale as well. We have to break the silence and hand over the voice of the narrator to the unheard. It took a lot of energy to keep them in a confusing silence, let us transform this energy into naming the dark spots, listening to the silenced and finally into healing. "Now is not the right time" has recently been published as a book by The Eriskay Connection. In the book, I use text like diary entries of my family members and essays written by myself to bring context to the confusing landscape of my images. The text is hidden between the pages. It takes some effort to read it, but once done, the audience is not left alone in the foggy feeling of guessing and sensing. I want to offer the relief of knowing, since this is a crucial part of my healing journey as well.

Please find a video of the book via this link.