Finishing date: December 2022. Modeled by Natalia Salazar & photographed by Katja Malmborg in January 2023.
A rainy day in March 2023, Laura called. Out of the blue. I was home, procrastinating, while I should have been preparing a lecture – and the phone rang. I hadn’t spoken to her for, like, a year, and we rarely texted, but we shared an office for the first half of my PhD. Went on writing retreats together. It was so easy to talk again.
I had been wondering about that for a while, my first winter in Bergen: How does it happen? The ease. Part of it is proximity and time, of course, but it isn’t all. I’ve had long exposures to people without reaching that ease of conversation.
I’m a researcher, I want to pick things apart, analyze, come up with a framework and make things fit into it. But with some things, that just doesn’t work. Friendship, for example. It doesn’t make sense. There’s a touch of the inexplicable in it, a touch of magic. And accepting that it goes beyond my understanding makes it even greater.
Look at me. I turn 35 and become a mystic.
I started working on a cardigan for Laura in 2020. She wanted it, picked the colors, I put fish in the yoke design because Laura is a fisheries researcher – but then I kept on getting distracted. She graduated and moved away. And then I graduated and moved away. Finally, I managed to finish it, in late 2022. Had Natalia pose in it in Cecilia’s and Isak’s snowy garden – because Laura lives on Bali and I have no idea when I’m going to be able to get this alpacka fish cardigan to her.
Katja Malmborg 