About

Bio

Sanna Fogelvik is an artist and architect based in Stockholm, working in 3D animation and virtual reality, pinhole photography, cyanotype, sculpture, drawing and constructed language.

The work is addressed to the non-human world, and to the asymmetry in addressing it. Rocks are scanned and simulated until they move at human speed. A single grain of birch pollen is enlarged to an armful. Fossil Language, a constructed language with no tense, lets time run at the speed of whatever is speaking.

Fogelvik studied at the Royal Institute of Art and at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and practised as an architect from 2001 to 2023. They are a member of the studio collective Detroit Stockholm.

Statement

I work with things that do not answer. Rocks, trees, pollen, sand, magnetic fields.

Most works begin with something physical being measured or copied. Rocks and trees are photographed from every side and rebuilt as models through photogrammetry. The trees are from the forest near where I live. A grain of birch pollen is scanned under a microscope and printed large enough to hold in both hands. Once something is a model it can be given properties it does not have. The rocks become cloth and fall slowly. The trees hang from the sky instead of standing in the ground.

Other works stay chemical. A matchbox pinhole camera is left open on the ground. Ash is dragged across sensitised paper and exposed to sunlight. Iron filings are arranged on the same paper by a magnetic field. The field cannot be seen or felt. The filings are the part of it that prints.

I want to touch the rocks and the rocks do not register it. I have two Swedish words for that: vemod and förundran, wistfulness and wonder. Vemod usually carries a quiet grief for something lost. I use it for a longing with no past in it, the distance to what I am reaching for. Förundran is the lighter of the two. Both are there at once.

Fossil Language came from wanting a grammar for this. It is built for speaking towards the non-human world and has no tense. Time moves at the speed of whatever is speaking, so a tree grows a ring where a human takes a step. One marker belongs only to humans, and it marks that something is only imagined.

I worked as an architect for twenty-two years. Scale and material come from there.