Colouring-in Sweden: revealing hybridity in Swedish past

Swedish identity has for the last 200-years been imagined as homogenous and ‘white’, which is often reused in political rhetoric. As a non-white mixed Swede, I identify with mixed subjects of the past and search for these stories.

Having children who look white, onlookers often express their surprise that someone who looks like them can share my colonial history, which makes it pressing to expand the narrative of Swedish identity.

How would Swedish identity be understood in the present if we included hybrid stories from its past into its historical narrative?

How can artistic interventions reveal hidden colonial histories of Sweden to benefit multiple narratives and heterogenous Swedish identities?Using Homi Bhabha’s theoretical framework of hybridity, this artistic research re-visits the colonial archive of St Barthélemy, a Swedish colony 1784 – 1878, with a particular focus on the mixed subject.

Combining archive material with new photographic material from St Barthélemy in artworks will add layers of hybridity to the representation of Swedish history.

My core idea is that the exploration of hidden colonial history can be used to help shift perceptions of Swedish identity in the present.

Using the perspective of hybridity is a unique contribution to artistic debates on colonial pasts, which resists binaries of colonized and colonizer, black and white. It prompts Swedish society more broadly to recognize the heterogeneity of Sweden’s heritage.