Video installation, 2016
Anna Knappe, Amir Jan, Laura Böök, with residents of Forssa reception center
HD video projection, photographs of landscapes in motion, Persian carpet
Duration: 21 min
Mohajer (camp-e-forsat) was filmed in Forssa asylum seeker reception center, an old hotel temporarily used as accommodation for people seeking asylum in Finland. The work was made together with Hazara asylum seekers from Afghanistan who had recently arrived in the country.
The installation is organized around the word mohajer, a loan word from Arabic used in Persian for someone or something moving from one place to another. In the film, different speakers define the word through their own histories of exile, displacement, arrival, and non-belonging. Their accounts expand the word beyond administrative categories such as asylum seeker and refugee.
The video combines images of the empty hotel with the voices of its residents. Rooms, corridors, carpets, and temporary domestic arrangements carry the atmosphere of waiting, while the spoken definitions of mohajer shift between identity, condition, inheritance, and burden. The work considers how naming can shape the way a life is understood, both by others and by oneself.
“Mohajer means not belonging anywhere, not where you are and not where you’re from.”
