Ermias Ekube:
Moving to Sweden impacted my work in many ways: one was in terms of subject matter, the other was the aesthetics, due to the physical reality of coming from Eritrea, this warm place, to this cold and different environment. As a painter, I used to paint with bright colours – because of the impact of life in Africa, you know, all the light – and when I came here, slowly the colours in my paintings changed, because of the environment, the climate.
Then there’s the culture itself. Sweden is a relatively closed society, and most of my time is spent in solitude. My interactions are mainly with my family rather than with wider society, and that dynamic has impacted my work too. Perhaps that's why most of my landscape paintings are just plain landscapes – they’re not populated with people or other objects or houses. That emptiness is one of the things I wanted to explore in the paintings I made for Foreign Lands.
Eric Pina:
For me too, moving had a huge impact. When I first left Senegal, I went to France. It was an enormous emotional shock when I arrived – I had moved there to continue my studies, and after just a week I told my brother, who had helped me settle there, that I wanted to go home. That’s a simple anecdote but it says a lot.
I joined the art school pretty much immediately, so I didn’t develop a personal artistic language per se. What I was doing then was very much based on academic requirements – but what I liked was the variety of workshops: engraving, drawing, silkscreening, photography… I took a lot of photos during that period, and I developed a kind of investigative gaze that always returned to the same question – where are people from? When you land somewhere new, that’s the first internal work you do, because you’re wondering what you’re doing there; I don’t know if that’s reflected in my work, but it is self-interrogating work, and it’s arduous. In a way, it’s about trying to exorcise the inner conflict triggered by living between two very different environments.
EE:
I’ve also worked with different mediums and modes of expression – my recent focus on landscapes has been with this exhibition in mind, but I am mainly a figurative painter, painting human figures, self-portraits, family portraits… They tend to be in the context of a closed space, echoing the interiority of the subjects, which I guess is also about exploring my situation in this new place. There are many emotional aspects to it – because when I moved to Sweden, it wasn’t really by choice. 10 years ago, I fled Eritrea because of the political situation – a dictatorship, where people have suffered for a long time and still suffer.
I went first to Kenya where I stayed for a year, but I was trying to move to Europe. Eventually, I had an invitation from collectors of mine to come to Sweden – a place I’d never thought of living until it happened! So, me and my family went to Sweden; and as you say, Eric, it was a shock because I didn't choose to come. The language issue was something I struggled with – it made communication harder, and as I mentioned before, it is a closed culture. Processing all that at once was very difficult, and it took me a long time to settle myself and my family before working out how to continue my art practice.
That said, one of the things that really impressed me about the country was the beauty of the landscape, and especially its transformation between different seasons. That was really magical – you don't see that kind of transformation in Eritrea or Kenya, or if you do it’s very slow and subtle. But here, every season involves a radical change, which means your emotions and feelings also change radically. On one hand, it’s exciting; on the other, it is still a struggle even now.
When I arrived, I tried to use the landscape as a resource to help me cope. I joined a snow sculpture competition in the north of the country, where I was invited by another artist to be part of a group project – a couple of artists take a block of snow and work on it over three days. It’s very, very cold – minus 30 or 20, working for hours. It was a struggle but such a beautiful experience; those kinds of things just push you forward.
EP:
I know what you mean, about landscapes informing your work. When I lived in Switzerland, I developed a practice centred on the idea of place, of locating people in space. To begin with I wandered around with a map, but soon enough I could go without, using mainly the architecture to get my bearings. I started drawing the people I saw – that work was based around meetings with anonymous people, and anonymity is something I’ve worked with a lot.
The encounters were fleeting but they felt significant. I would start a conversation, and we would always return to the same questions: where are you from? What are you doing here? And we would talk about their lives too. At the same time, I was trying to capture elements of where I come from – the smells, the sensory experience, even if the places were colder than Senegal, or as you say Ermias, colder than Eritrea. People are cold, it's true, but approaching them sets an encounter and discussion in motion. I learned a lot from that time.
Drawing on paper was the first thing that really helped me figure out new places and landscapes. Like you, Ermias, I was struck by the different colours when I moved to Europe, and I’m sure that influenced my work – though maybe my landscapes are more imaginary; a bit surrealist. In any case, they’re not abstract. Architecture is quite absent from my work even if it does feature in my practice, as a way to locate the people who become figures in it. You could say that architecture is an absent presence, something you can feel through the way the people are positioned so as to remove perspective – at least, any perspective that you can see.
That absence of architecture allows me to strip the figures of their links to places. It means nobody can pinpoint where they come from or where they are going. I am trying to suggest that places hold so many memories that it would be impossible to record or encapsulate them all: rather, they live in your imagination. Looking at a work of mine, it becomes clear that the people are part of groups; you wonder if they are communicating or not. That’s what I am trying to express, and it’s also something I am trying to figure out.
My work has changed over time, but the trajectory feels meaningful. When I started, it was silhouettes that I was trying to construct – the shapes of people. A viewer might feel emptiness in them, but for me they are full. The things you can’t articulate through words or symbols are just as important as the silhouettes and shapes people can see.
EE:
I recognise that idea. When it comes to abstract elements in a painting, on some level they are expressing something that can’t be expressed verbally or symbolically. Abstraction is purely visual, sensual; the meaning comes through synthesising our own memories with the painting and its elements.
In my own work, even if I start by looking at scenes around me or recalling something I saw while travelling between towns in Sweden, I try to allow the essence of my experience to come through. Some aspects are literal depictions of things – trees are trees – but in my semi abstract and abstract works I want to show how I felt about the place as well as how it looked. That is something that’s difficult to express in words, but painting allows me to express it through physical or emotional gestures, through the pleasure of the brushwork, the thickness of the paint… Most of my figurative works are set in solitude, remembering my past, but the landscape paintings allow me to go out and enjoy the space available to me. That pushes me into the present rather than back to my memories – they’re about time as well as space.
EP:
Time is something I think about a lot in my work. Most of my work happens in the studio but I have a sketchbook where I draw things, to remind myself of ideas later. In the way I live and work, there is no future; or rather the future exists because of the past and present. When we translate work onto paper or into sculpture, we are always in the present, and I am interested in what is shaping it.
People collect things, they have experienced things, and it is that experience which allows us to shape the present – it’s that duality of absence and presence that I work with, particularly in my early work and my drawings. That accumulated experience – the past – is key to moving forward into the future, but it’s in drawing those encounters in the present that I synthesise things, even if I’m also stripping things away.
It’s important that viewers engage with the work and form their own impressions. When it’s out of my hands, it no longer belongs to me – I always say that the work needs to embark on its own journey and live elsewhere. These works are a bit like us, they have travelled – and it's lucky that in this case, they’ve travelled to London!
Ermias, what you do is amazing. There might not be a cultural link between our practices but that’s not important – what is important is the dialogue. The work is here to excavate things, and I really like what you do. With the difficult history of your country Eritrea in mind, I would like to ask how it feels to be in Sweden now – a country that is seen so positively by the outside world? It’s something I think about myself, now that I am in Germany.
EE:
There are a lot of layers to that experience. The people are different, the culture is different, but slowly you come to understand the place as a whole. And because it is the only thing you have at hand, that makes the process easier. Now I feel at home. It’s true that there is solitude here, but that’s part of the environment and the culture. As for my art, connecting to my practice feels different to how it was in Eritrea or Kenya. Culturally, politically, and in terms of the art scene, there are differences I am still adjusting to – but ultimately I feel good, and grateful to be here.
To address what you said about time: in my practice, time exists primarily in terms of memory. Without it, past, future and present are all the same thing; their separation comes only from memory and imagination, I think. So most of my figurative works are based on memories – as such, they blend past and present. Because of the solitude and the intimacy that is part of my figurative work – depicting myself, my family, my apartment – poetry has been a crucial source of inspiration.
That intimacy is part of my landscape painting too, because I tend to paint mainly from my immediate surroundings. Before I came to Sweden, or to Europe at all, I used to think about the landscape paintings – about how the Nordic ones were so distinct from the rest, from Van Gogh, Constable or Turner. I wondered, what was it that made the landscape so different? But coming here and experiencing it is so different to those memories. The way we remember things versus how we experience them can be so wildly different, and that made me realise how crucial memory can be in translating reality. That’s the poetic aspect of synthesising memories with what’s going on, past and present – sometimes I compare my landscape paintings to those of Swedish artists and it’s fascinating to see how our experiences can make the same landscape seem so different.
I know that the idea of intimacy in landscape painting is unusual. But as someone who felt so alienated from the landscape when I first arrived, I feel like I’ve become friendly with it over time. When I first saw those strong contrasting colours of the seasons changing, I felt like a stranger – but now, years on, I have become familiar with those tones and shifts. Seeing things from a distance, like in artworks or films, is one thing – but my own landscape paintings, views from my windows or from cars on familiar journeys, are sights I know well. And Eric, I feel like the scale of your figures in landscape evokes intimacy too. How do you relate to the figures? Are they Europeans or Africans? What is their identity?
EP:
The figures are a mixture of people – many are people I meet. I’m interested in the way they are drawn and where they are positioned in relation to each other. Their identities are encapsulated in their very presence; the fact that they are here at this point in space and time. Again, it’s about what’s left unsaid – that’s what I’m trying to harness. It’s something that I don’t like to talk about too much, as I’d prefer that people see it for themselves – as you have!
Sometimes I wonder about my work – why all these empty spaces? Why not fill them up? But I like the spaces. Even when I try to fill them, they remain. Life goes on, we have things to do, and there are more encounters to come. That is what I am interested in – once I’ve finished something, I am keen to move on and think about the next project. You were talking about the way that past and present mix, and I think that is what I am referring to when I talk about experience; the dual nature of things.
I often think of “paradise lost”, the life left behind. It’s great that you feel at home in Sweden – as for me, I am torn. When I am in Germany I miss Senegal, but once I am there I am keen to come back. I miss my studio, I even miss the cold. Perhaps that’s just the tragedy of the immigrant – but after a week or two in Senegal, I need to come back. And then on my way back, I am sad – it’s paradoxical, almost Schizophrenic, but I try to play on those feelings.
