MIMI SVANBERG

This 5minute video-exhibition UMBRA is for my brother and our mother. 

The music in this 5minute video-exhibition is from composer Sebastian Öberg. 

It harmonizes perfectly with my Umbra.        I feel am softly held and caressed in in the arms of my own sorrow.

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In my umbra there is a painful agitation, an ominous presence and anticipation of immediate danger.

Death, catastrophes, anxiety, distress and fear happens!

Expect the worst...

Umbra is a project created from my impenetrable umbra, my darkest core-shadow. There in the alarm of fear and sorrow, lives a little human who is never giving up curiosity and hope for everlasting happiness. 

When I was 25 years old I lost my mother in an unimaginable catastrophe. She was on a conference trip to Estonia and on the way back her ship “Estonia” sank in the Baltic Sea. She was just gone, her body never found. 

For many years I was tormented by horrible scenes created in my mind, trying to reconstruct her last moments. Not knowing if she was frightened, if she was in pain, if she suffered. Did it happened fast was she aware of what happened around her, did she think of me and my brother. Maybe she cried out for us, or for her mother. 

In the end I decided that she was unaware of what happened. She got struck by something hard as the boat quickly heeled on its side, which surely made furniture, people, everything not fasten, flying around with massive force. 

I fled Sweden for New York, I could not stay here any longer mostly because of the media. Everywhere I turned there were awful stories painted out and theories of what happened that night out on the Baltic Sea. 

New York was a place of healing for me. My sorrow and anxiety became fuel for me, pushing me forward. I had to make my life count, for her. 

Then on August 9^th, 2019, my brother died at the age of 53. Presumably he died from methanol poisoning, he laid down on the green grass in a park and he never woke up. At the time he had lived as a homeless for at least 15 years. 

My world fell apart, even though I had been waiting for that call and had mentally prepared for it. 

I felt such bottomless sorrow, a cry and scream from a place so deep within me, a place where no light can possibly penetrate. 

I was emotionally cut in half. I felt I was the loneliest person on the planet. Left in a world in some way foreign to me, forever changed.

Left behind in my Umbra.