The week at Tärna
A week that gave more than I expected
A week full of new impressions now lies behind me, and I have to say that the time at Tärna folk high school gave me more than I’d dared to hope for.
The writing course opened something I didn’t quite know was there.
Because if I’m honest, I almost wish I’d done this sooner.
Expressing myself with pen and paper — that’s where I feel surer than when the words have to be said out loud.
Maybe I’d have become a better writer than speaker, if only I’d started in time.
And then I think of all the blunders I’ve managed to make over the years.
Sure, it can be good to say what you think — but it’s just as important to think first.
That very thing, thinking before I speak, has never really been my strong side.
Leica Camera News
Mari Amman is an American-Italian contemporary artist who works across disciplines with photography, installations, video, poetry, painting, sculpture, textiles and design.
She describes her own work as research-based, using concepts such as Geological Empathy and Sublime Rheology to explore the relationship between people, nature, technology and built environments.
Young, Inspiring and International: LOBA Emerging Talent
Furthermore, German photographer Serghei Duve won the 2025 Newcomer award with his photo series “Bright Memory”.
In the project he explores his family’s connection to Transnistria.
📷 LEICA M11-P · Summilux-M 1:1.4/50 ASPH. · f/3.4 · 1/750s · ISO 64 · 50mm · 2026-08-14
The week at Tärna
When silence became my answer
If you keep from chatting about this and that with people you barely know, you can at least hope they don’t think too much about you either.
That’s how I’ve tried to live.
But sometimes that isn’t enough.
I’ve served on a board, and there I learned something about people.
How small things escalate.
How rules seem to apply to everyone except the one who shouts loudest.
How quickly everyday life can turn sour.
I spoke up once, calmly, about one of those small things — and got back words I didn’t think grown adults would put in their mouths.
But the worst wasn’t being contradicted.
It was being mocked for something you can’t help.
When someone drags a person’s illness into a quarrel, it’s no longer a quarrel.
Then it’s something else, something cold.
And there I stood, and the words ran out.
Then came the day when I’d truly had enough.
And believe it or not — nothing came out of my mouth.
Not a word.
I turned around and went inside.
For a long time I believed that the one who stays silent loses.
Now I know it’s sometimes the opposite: walking away with your head held high can be the strongest thing you do all day.
The week at Tärna
What doesn’t show
There’s one more thing, one that doesn’t show on the outside.
With my illness comes a tiredness that settles in the head itself — a brain fog, as it’s sometimes called.
The words are there, but they won’t come, however hard I search for them.
A week full of new impressions can grow heavy in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who’s never felt it.
And maybe that’s exactly why the pen has become mine.
On paper, the words can take the time the head needs.
No one waits, no one watches, the fog can lift at its own pace.
In a conversation, face to face, there’s never that grace.
There came a moment that week when we were to write about one another.
I said I wasn’t going to do it in front of everyone, and explained briefly why — that I’ve lived with a cancer for many years, and that my head was empty just then.
Most understood.
You could see it in them, that kind of silence which is understanding and not embarrassment.
But not everyone.
Afterwards someone asked, out loud, whether she too could be let off if she’d felt a bit sluggish.
I only said that she’s a grown woman and can do as she likes.
Then I said nothing more — there it was again, my old friend silence.
And when the rest of us later stood saying our goodbyes out in the sun, she wasn’t there.
She had already left.
There’s something in that: the one who mocks what she doesn’t understand often places herself outside the fellowship all on her own.
No one needed to say anything.
It sorted itself out anyway.
📷 LEICA M11-P · Summilux-M 1:1.4/50 ASPH. · f/2.4 · 1/1000s · ISO 400 · 50mm · 2026-08-15
Home again, camera in hand
Home again, camera in hand
Back home in Västerås I did what I usually do when the head needs rest: took the camera and went out.
Because the camera is a little like the pen — a way to say something without having to say it out loud.
You don’t have to talk to notice the world.
You only have to see.
And Västerås on a summer’s day has plenty to see.
The market with its crates of cauliflower and dill, and people stopping to choose.
The music at Sigmatorget, a whole crowd in hats and sunglasses, every gaze turned the same way.
A paddler gliding across the still water of the Svartån, alone and content with it.
On a bench lay a forgotten scarf in VSK green, left behind among dry leaves.
No person in the frame, and yet a whole little story — perhaps yesterday’s defeat lingered more than one would have liked.
So much a forgotten garment can tell, without a single word.
And then, in the middle of it all, a boy came up with his scooter held high.
“Take my picture, take my picture, please!” There he stood, wanting to be seen just as he was, in the middle of his own moment.
It struck me how different we are, he and I.
I’ve learned the strength of not being seen, of walking away in quiet.
He still owned that natural joy of taking up space.
So I photographed him, of course.
Some say it with words, others with silence — and some just want to be seen.
Maybe that’s just what a week like this teaches you: that there are many ways to have a voice.
Mine became the pen and the camera.
And that’s quite enough.
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Photos from the day’s adventure
