Grant awarded to research communication

On 4 December, the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) announced the projects awarded grants for research communication in artistic research. The project Looking for Jeanne: to bear witness with film received 888 000 SEK to be distributed over 15 months. The project is led by Petra Bauer, Profile professor of Film and Media at Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH).

Petra Bauer has been working on the project since 2019, alongside collaborators Marius Dybwad Brandrud, Marta Dauliute, and Carolina Sinisalo. Thanks to this grant, they can now reach a broader audience.

“We are grateful for the grant from the Swedish Research Council, as it allows us to explore how film can both bear and generate testimonies in a contemporary public sphere. In collaboration with community centers, cultural institutions, and feminist organizations across Sweden, we will use film to discuss feminized labor, value, violence, and resistance in today’s society,” says Petra Bauer.

Petra emphasizes that the project is also about returning the knowledge generated by the research to the groups and places involved in and affected by the study. A central premise has been to collaborate closely with the individuals, groups, and organisations addressed by the research.

She elaborates on the project’s core idea:

“For several years, we have been searching for Jeanne – across Brussels, Paris, London, Edinburgh, and Stockholm. Jeanne is the central character in Chantal Akerman's 1975 film Jeanne Dielman. In the film, we follow Jeanne, a Belgian housewife, as she performs her daily routines over three days. It is the mundane, the invisible labor of women, and the uneventful that are given time and space. A less discussed, but central, theme is how experiences of violence and oppression are dealt with.

This search for the figure of Jeanne led, among other things, to an event in 2016, when two young boys were shot in Akalla. The youngest son, Robin, died, while the older son survived with severe injuries. The event was witnessed by their 13-year-old sister. In 2019, we met Carolina Sinisalo, the boys' mother. Together, we began exploring how moving images and sound can resist simplified narratives about violence.

Carolina’s refusal to accept the violence and loss became an answer to the question: What happened to Jeanne? Through her imagination, Carolina has attempted to take over her children’s pain and grief. We realized that our film must similarly bear witness to and share Carolina’s grief. The project’s challenge, then, became to explore how film can create new witnesses with a responsibility to respond and contribute to a collective grieving process.”

The project will ultimately consist of four films. The latest in the series, fifteen zero three nineteenth of january two thousand sixteen, was created in collaboration with Carolina Sinisalo and is based on her experiences of violence and resistance.

Congratulations to Petra Bauer, Marius Dybwad Brandrud, Marta Dauliute, and Carolina Sinisalo!

The Swedish Research Council granted a total of 2 out of 13 applications within the artistic research are. The decision was published on 4 December 2024, and the total grant amount was 1887000 SEK.

Learn more about Petra Bauer