I feel connected with nature and the forests, it gives me peace. It is “forest healing”, or what you wanna call it, to be with nature. I’ve been with this forest since I was five years old and now I’m sixty-eight so of course I feel a connection to this forest. I can see where we cut when I was younger, how good it has become in some places where we culled. You see how it has thickened up. What happens with the weather, I cannot control. If one of those saw logs were to blow over, then I’ll saw it up for some useful timber. I have talked with the old ones who experienced the summer of 1959, and remind you the summer in 2018 was even worse, so much of the forest didn’t even dry up back in ‘59. Then you start wondering about the climate, these long and persistent heatwaves and bad winters with too little snow that don’t replenish our groundwater. Once we had winters with half a meter of snow, at least here on Gotland. Simply, it’s the water that does it. And this extreme drought and heat… Middle of summer now. It was not really this hot before. I believe our generations have lost it, the knowledge that my father and his father and before that had. Nature and how to care for it in another way than we do today. And people have become so.. They have lost touch with nature, to know how to give and take. Everything is connected, everything. Conversation with my dad in his forest on Gotland, tuesday, 27:th July 2021 Jonna Hägg (b.1989, Visby) works with the disharmony between human progress and the fragile ecosystem that has been stabilized over a long period of time. In 2018 she graduated from Malmö Academy of the Arts and in 2017 she did an exchange semester at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. In recent years, Hägg has, among other things, shown at Obra (Malmö), Uppsala Art Museum, Galleri Delfi (Malmö) and most recently with the site-specific sound work Trädgården i Botaniska trädgården in Lund which was inaugurated in May 2021. www.jonnahagg.com
Hendrik Zeitler