Sandra Vitaljić: I Just Greet Back

I moved to Sweden in 2019 and then realized that I had to start seeing myself as an immigrant. The word carried a weight and a stigma that I found difficult to accept. I tried to deal with the negative associations that the word implies. I struggled with the feeling of unworthiness.

In the migration debate, extremes often dominate: dehumanizing rhetoric from far-right parties and success stories about integration from the left. Amidst all these dramatic stories, the humanizing depictions of simple everyday life are often missing—that which is common to all people, regardless of background. The small stories are often perceived as insignificant or too personal, and are thus rarely told.

I therefore started collecting various women’s stories about everyday struggles, often over a cup of coffee. During the conversations, I write down parts that feel important to me to retell. These stories reflect the struggle for dignity in uncertain circumstances, but also become a mirror of society and reveal working and living conditions, mentality and cultural differences. The stories are complemented by photographs and a herbarium where keywords from the experiences and conversations replace plant names. Together they form a collective diary, a web of thoughts and experiences that would otherwise risk being lost.

Sandra Vitaljić is an artist who works in the borderland between documentary and conceptual photography, focusing on collective memory, national identity and female migrants’ experiences. Through research-based work, she depicts complex social and historical issues, often from a female and politically conscious perspective. She examines what is made visible and what is repressed in the writing of history, and creates alternative memory spaces for marginalized experiences. Vitaljić has a master’s degree in photography and a doctorate in the history of photography from FAMU in Prague, and further education at the Royal Institute of Art. Between 2004-2019 she taught photography at the Academy of Performing Arts in Zagreb. Vitaljić has been living in Stockholm since 2019.

Digital artist talk via Centrum för fotografi’s Instagram on Friday, October 3 at 1 PM.