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.
Katja Malmborg 