GRANNSKAPET
CHAPTERS in random order.
My neighborhood has experienced violence and other forms of crimes lately.
Last summer a man got shot on the street outside my building, and in March two bombs exploded. In response to the violence, I made a comic and self-published it in the lobby in my building. It was a way to create a community-based sequential story in response to how my neighborhood suddenly was portraited in the news as a bad and dangerous area.
The need for new stories and narratives based in local communities is urgent in today’s turbulent political, economic, and environmental climate. On a local level it is to tell stories about a place that can become its own myths and thereby empower the place and its people.
The making of sequential storytelling and comic-art can be a way to take back the power of the narrative of a neighborhood and the everyday life, and thereby be part of creating new and just futures for communities. This project aims to find ways to deal with and help harbor trauma on a community level through comic-based art. By showing and telling stories from a neighborhood’s history and present now, a future can be visualized and created by and for the community. This visualization of a place through sequential storytelling can open for the community to collectively harbor the experiences that make a neighborhood.
The comic-art based project Leave no line behind artistically explore the power of sequential storytelling to animate and create new myths by making a graphic novel from the local community and interpersonal meetings in the everyday.
