Giulia Mangione

Installation shots from A Little Larger than the Entire Universe, Bergen Kunsthall, 2021.

A three-screen video and sound installation that interweaves the fragmented history of the Oleana colony - founded by Norwegian violinist Ole Bull in 1851 - with the author's personal history of restlessness searching for the perfect place to live. Archive footage is edited together with my family's home movies to tell a story about migration and memory.

According to the World Happiness Report, a yearly survey of the state of global happiness, commissioned by the United Nations, Denmark is often ranked as the “happiest country in the world”. While studying photography in Denmark in 2014 I had to work on a final project. Most of my classmates went to far away countries. I decided to stay to understand what made Denmark the happiest country in the world. “People often ask me if the Danes are really the happiest people in the world. I still don’t have an answer to this. But I know what I like about the Danes. I like that they use cemeteries as places to celebrate life more than death. I like their innate sense of freedom in being what they want to be. I like the fact that Danes go to ‘højskole’ (High School) to learn something for life, to be aware of what they are good at and what makes them happy. In her New Year’s Speech 2017, Queen Margrethe of Denmark said: ‘Try and do something that is not necessary, something that there is no need for, something pointless!’ And continued: ‘I think it is important to have experiences that appeal to our senses, something that inspires our imagination, that stimulates the mind, and that can enlarge our world. That is not so pointless after all.’ Driving around Denmark, often sleeping in a tent under pouring rain, I would find myself asking why I was doing it. But now I have the feeling that Margrethe might be right.”

A journey into the Far East

The summer of 2017 I travelled on the Transsibirskaya Zheleznodoroznaya Magistral’ or better known as Transiberian Railway, from Moscow to Vladivostok, riding a train for over 9000 km. I photographed the trip and the people I met along the way. I chose to travel in the platscart , the third class carriage, where I talked to soldiers on leave, families on their way back from holidays which can not afford to travel by plane, students travelling home for the summer holidays. If one never gets off the train, the journey from Moscow to Vladivostok lasts 6 days. The train’s speed is on average 90 km/h, the speed of a regional train. The train makes multiple stops and at the stations, waiting on the platforms, all kinds of sellers can be found. Usually they are women and they sell scarves, waffel filled with condensed milk, blueberries. Some of them carry a metal hanger where the smoked fish is hanging from the eye socket. Each carriage is run and administered by a key figure, in most cases a woman, called provodnitsa.  She is responsible for maintaining the order on the train, checking tickets and passports, handing out bedsheets, and she is also the person that wakes you up 30 minutes before you need to get off the train. I decided to get off the train multiple times, so that my trip lasted a month. The first stop was Ekaterinburg, a city located close to the Urals mountains, which separate eastern and western Russia. Here begins Siberia, an immense region extending until the Pacific Ocean. After Ekaterinburg I got back on the train and I stopped in Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, then I stayed for 5 days on Olkhon Island, an island on lake Bajkal, the deepest lake in the world. Finally I went back to Irkutsk, where I caught a train to Ulan Ude. After Irkutsk the landscape and the people started to change, people started to resemble Mongolian people in their features. The only thing that still makes one feel that one’s in Russia is the language. Around Ulan Ude, Buddhist temples can be found and a strong tradition of shamanism too. After Ulan Ude I’ve been to Chita, Birobidzhan, the capital of the Jewish autonomous region, Khabarovsk and finally, at dawn, I arrived in the Far East, in Vladivostok.

I never belonged to that category of people with a clear idea in mind of what they will become as a grown up. I am 26 and I still think I can become an astronaut, a photographer or a singer. Not necessarily in this order. Choosing one way or another would necessarily mean to give up on something and in this moment I don't feel like precluding any possibility. Because not choosing is a bit like choosing everything. I am not looking for one job, one group of friends or one life. Every day I think I could be living in Berlin, New York or retire in a little house on the top of a hill in Tuscany. Instead of making steps forward I feel like I am stepping back to a sort of second adolescence. These images describe this fragile balance between a sense of guilt for not having obtained something and not wanting to have it. I documented this phase by photographing the people around me in London, friends surrounded by the same fragility, uncertainty and doubts, but also by a continuous and vital desire for change.

In 2000 the Midloathian Council proposed a re-alignment of the A701, a roadway that runs on the eastern edge of the village of Bilston, next to a protected ancient woodland, 7 miles south from Edinburgh, Scotland. The 're-alignment' entails creating a new dual carriageway to replace the existing roadway. The Bilston Glen protest started in June 2012. As a way to spare a large portion of the surrounding forest from being cut down, a number of people started to build houses on trees. They created a non-hierarchical woodland community, where the protestors live in tree-houses and a few ground structures, including a kitchen, communal areas and a stage to host a summer festival. Community members welcome anyone for a visit, for a cup of tea or a beer. No one knows how it happened. It could have been a knocked-over candle that set the tree-house on fire. In the beginning of 2011 24-year-old South African student Andrew Millhouse died victim of a fire that quickly escalated in the dead of night in the forest. The stumps of Andrew's hut still stand as a memento for the rest of the community. The Scottish government has donated fire alarms to the community which now keeps a number of water bottles close to each hut, should the need ever arise again.