Colouring in Sweden: revealing hybridity in a Swedish past

The research project Colouring in Sweden: revealing hybridity in a Swedish past, funded by the Swedish Research Council, highlights stories in Sweden's past that can help create visual narratives of Swedishness that include diversity. The central case study is St Barthélemy, focusing on the children of Swedish men on the island under Swedish rule, so-called ‘free blacks’. Through artistic strategies, this project will highlight forgotten, marginal histories by speculating on fragments of the colonial archive. The project aims to highlight the position of women, whose history is all the more invisible and inaccessible than the men on the island. ‘Colouring-in Sweden’ aims to reproduce a hidden past and an ongoing history that is full of multifaceted heterogeneous histories, intertwined cultures and identities.