I worked on the pictures included in Imaginary Homecoming between 1991 and 1997. A landscape is speechless. Day by day, its only idiom is the sensory experience afforded by the biological reality, the weather conditions, and the actions that take place in the environment. In fact, any understanding of landscape entails a succession of distinct moments and different points of view. The layeredness of landscape, in other words, forms part of our own projection.
Every landscape is also a mental landscape.
This historical landscape also consists of the narratives and histories it contains - a point that is highlighted in my pictures. The open, void-like landscape provides an ideal stage on which these hidden narratives can be played out. Given that it was impossible to return every archival image to its exact original location, these migration routes provided a symbol of homecoming. The locations I chose ranged from Karesuando in Sweden to the fells around Kirkenes in Norway. There is no absolute landscape.