Who is the Sleeper?
2024-2025 | 14:30 min | Full HD | Stereo

Voice: Mona Mörtlund
Translation: Inga-Britt Uusitalo & Ingela Henriksson
Sound mix: Henrik Sunbring


In Who is the Sleeper? the artists reverse the perspective in one of Sweden’s most well-known stories: Selma Lagerlöf’s The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906–1907). Originally written as a geography textbook for schools, Lagerlöf’s tale presents Sweden through a journey on the back of a goose. A national romantic flight that passes over, exoticises, or entirely omits certain people and places. The borderland of Tornedalen, between Sweden and Finland, and its Meänkieli-speaking population, is not mentioned at all.

In the book, Nils Holgersson sleeps and dreams that he is fighting a terrifying troll in the north. The film takes this act of sleeping as its point of departure. Instead of following Nils, we see through the troll’s eyes. Creatures and landscapes are given agency, and interwoven with excerpts from The Book of Sleep (Haytham El Wardany, 2021), the film becomes a collage of night and day, light and darkness, dream and reality.

The film was recorded during the artists’ journey to Pajala Folkets Hus in November 2023, when the Swedish Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Tornedalians, Kvens and Lantalaiset presented its final report. Just as Lagerlöf travelled along the railway for inspiration for her book, the artists journey by train.

Who Is the Sleeper? is a reflection on whose stories are allowed to shape the national narrative, and on the bodies and landscapes made invisible throughout history.

Exhibition and screening history:
Den som sover, Pajala bibliotek, Pajala, 2026
Den som sover, Nattfestivalen, Korpilombolo, 2025
Landskapens resonans, Sandvikens konsthall, 2025
Framtidslandet i 15 1/2 kapitel, Havremagasinet, 2025
A Shared Absence, The Aine Art Museum [FI], 2024