Measurings, 2021–22

Britta Marakatt-Labba

Britta Marakatt-Labba: I also created this work using flour sack material from the Second World War, just like last time, but this time the fabric came by the metre, which suited me very well. It allowed me to focus on the key years: from 1939 to 1945, the years that the Second World War was going on. Then in 2001, when the planes flew into the Twin Towers in New York.  2011, the year that the Utøya shootings took place. And from 2020 to 2022, which is when the pandemic was going on.

And that brings us to the issue of passports, the kind used during the Second World War. For Sámi who moved between Norway and Sweden, a passport was required, and that passport was written in both German and Swedish. At the same time, there were also letters stating that it was strictly forbidden to bring Norwegian refugees over the border into Sweden — and yet, people still did. Passports were also required between 2020 and 2022, when the Covid pandemic was going on. We weren’t allowed to cross over into Norway without a passport. So history repeated itself again.

Here I have chosen – at the very top – instead of including skull measurements, I have chosen to measure the eagle’s head and then its wingtip, to see how wide it is. And at the bottom – you’ll find Nazi symbolism, the swastika. And what happened under the swastika — and what is happening behind the barbed wire? There were a lot of people who lost their lives, and the same thing happened between 2020 and 2022. So many lives were lost in a kind of warfare where we could neither smell nor hear the aircraft flying over our heads. But it was a kind of warfare, one that took place in silence.

So that was what I wanted to achieve, to weave together these events from the 1940s with those of the 2000s.