Abstract

This Is How We Continue is an artistic research project that explores memory, community, and representation through a return to the community mural Bigger Than You Think, located on the outer wall of Folkets Husby in Stockholm. Created in 2015 by over 200 residents and local artists, the mural became both a collective artwork and a site of shared memory. Ten years later, I return not just to revisit its imagery, but to reactivate its stories—those remembered, those forgotten, and those still unfolding.

The project takes shape through three interconnected components: an experimental film, a site-specific audio guide, and a conceptual archive. Through poetic narration, fictional elements, and interviews with local residents, I examine how stories that fall outside dominant historical frameworks are preserved—often in whispers, in fragments, in everyday conversations. Drawing on microhistory and theories of collective memory, the work suggests that public art can function as a living archive: not fixed, but in motion, activated through care and engagement.

My background as a kultursocionom—a cultural social worker—deeply informs the methodology of this project. Rooted in a dialogical and participatory process, the work reimagines the archive not as a static repository, but as a shared space for reflection, resistance, and re-creation.

Grounded in Husby’s specific context and developed in close collaboration with Folkets Husby, This Is How We Continue opens up broader questions about history, voice, and authorship. It asks: What happens when we stop waiting to be represented and instead begin archiving ourselves?