THE GREEN CABLE DRESS

Finishing date: September 2021. Styling and photographed by Natalia Salazar in August 2022.

I

The green cable dress, worn by the Lustra fjord north of Bergen, Norway, one misty morning in early August 2022.

Natalia and Josh had been visiting me in Bergen, and we were driving back to Stockholm, taking the scenic route along the Sogne fjord and Jotunheimen National Park (where the ancient giants were believed to live). I brought the dress (and the shoes), just in case – and then this.

I just could not NOT ask Natalia to take a couple of photos.

And how lucky was I, to have two friends in the car with me, willing to indulge my knitting and landscape photography obsession.

II

In the beginning of October 2021, I nailed my thesis. As in, the Swedish tradition of actually, with nail and hammer, nailing the printed thesis to a piece of wood. It is done at university departments all over the country.

Going through the photographs much later, I was struck by how happy everyone seemed for me. All those smiling faces, that I hadn’t seen for such a long time. I moved to Bergen just three months after graduating. The people was what made Stockholm Resilience Centre a wonderful place to work.

But, oh, how tired I looked, standing next to my supervisor Lisen. The exhaustion took ages to recover from. It took me a year to go through the photos from my spikning and defense. I just wasn’t up for being reminded of it.

But at least I was well dressed! I wore the green cable dress – just one of all the pieces I knit during Covid-19-and-thesis-finishing-isolation.

Remembering, while floating in the Mediterranean, October 2022:

That smile.

In Paleochora, Crete. I’m floating in the Mediterranean waves. I have no sense of time. It hits me: I can’t remember when I was this comfortable spending time with my own thoughts. There’s been so many years of chasing academic achievements, surviving pandemics, recovering. Silences, idleness has scared me.

But now. I’m here. And maybe I needed to find my way back to my own company to see: That photograph, the early August morning by the Lustre fjord, western Norway.

I got my first, hand-me-down, basic analogue compact camera when I was six. One thing that all these years of amateur photography has taught me, is that what ends up on the photograph is not only about the person being photographed. It is also about the person photographing, what they see. And about where the photographing takes place.

That morning by the fjord, being photographed by Natalia, Josh saying something out of shot that makes me laugh. This is not only a photograph of the cable-work on the green cotton dress I knit while finishing my thesis in Covid isolation.

It is also a photograph of Natalia, and of Josh. I wish I could be in Natalia’s gaze, always. In perpetual dialogue with Josh. I can’t. But I can return.

This, and the high salt content of the Mediterranean Sea, keeps me afloat.