My Beloved SNOW, Childhood MEMORY, and Encountering CAROLA GRAHN

My beloved countryside at Červená Voda

During my curatorial residency in South Sweden, the work of Carola Grahn came to me as both a discovery and a recognition. Reading, seeing, and reflecting on her installations, particularly Snön withing the whole Exhibition concept Drick Drick I felt as if her voice was touching something very familiar within me: snow, memory, and the fragile ways in which we belong to land.

Installation by Carola Grahn at Wanås

Snow has been present in my own childhood in Bohemia not only as a season but as a texture of life. I remember the mornings when my mother would call up the stairs: “Kids, it’s snowing! Wake up! Get up!” My brothers and I would rush to the window, amazed by the white world outside, while my father was already outside, clearing a path from our house to the main road so that we could get to school. Snow was an event that re-ordered the day, filled us with wonder, and demanded both joy and labor.

At Wanås, as I read Grahn’s texts and encountered her installations, I realized that snow is not only a personal memory but also as Carola perceives it herself - it is a cultural heritage, one now endangered by climate crisis. Grahn’s Snönasks: what happens to us if we lose snow? That question echoes my childhood memories as much as it echoes Sámi traditions.

This connection became even stronger when I watched the Netflix film Stolen during my stay, which follows Sámi youth confronting climate change and cultural erasure in reindeer herding communities. Together, the film and Grahn’s work illuminated for me that Sámi art is not isolated expression,it is testimony, resistance, and a rewriting of European history from the North.

Grahn’s art situates Snow as a Language of Presence and Erasure. She stages it as something to step into, an atmosphere to inhabit, a phenomenon that speaks of continuity and loss. Her childhood in Jåhkåmåhkke, a Sámi meeting place north of the Arctic Circle, grounds this work in lived experience.

For me, it resonated with my own memories of waking to snow in Bohemia - a recognition that memory, place, and weather shape us more than we realize.

Her installations extend further: Notes on Hide transforms reindeer hide into poems of survival, Seventeen Knives turns Sámi tools into communal memory, and her “yoik machine” reanimates voices once captured on wax cylinders. 

My daugher Franca absolutely loved this piece, returning to it within the visit several times joyfully inserting the "TREASURE CAROLAS'S COIN". These works are not only objects, but Acts of Cultural Resilience.

As a lens-based artist, researcher, and curator working between Bohemia and Mallorca, I recognize in Carola Grahn’s practice a mirror of my own interest in edges and crossings between North and South, archive and experience, memory and future. With the encouragement of curator Ashik Zaman, I now prepare to interview Carola for C-print Magazine, extending this dialogue into a wider European context.

Snow in Sámi has hundreds of names, each describing its textures, moods, and conditions. My childhood memory was simple“Kids, it’s snowing!” Yet through Carola’s art I see how even that simple joy belongs to a broader story, one where snow is not guaranteed, but fragile, layered, and worth remembering.

Photoillustrata carries this forward: to connect personal memory and cultural heritage, local place and European dialogue, into projects that remind us of what is both most fragile and most enduring.