Tina Enghoff

And Our Beds are Cedar Green

2012

A serie from the project MIGRANT DOCUMENTS

This series consists of 22 works.
60 x 40 cm archival pigment print. 
Blankets and ground pads for the homeless. 22 days in one of the few shelters where undocumented migrants can spend the night, Danchurchsocial’s night café, Copenhagen 2012.
 
The migrants who come to Denmark on a tourist visa for a whole range of socio-economic reasons have a different kind of dream that is much harder to make come true. Maybe the words And Our Beds are Cedar Green could be part of the story they hope to take with them – either home or on in life. But the poetry of the title grates against Tina Enghoff’s matter-of-fact registration of the beds of reality: 22 days of almost identical photographs of the blankets and ground pads reserved each night for undocumented migrants in a Copenhagen shelter. The blankets only fill a single shelf unit. Their dreams have to be packed away.
Whereas the movements and views of the tourist are typically guided and organised, the experiences and observations of migrants are not controlled. Their observations generate a different kind of unpredictable image that frames Migrant Documents.
 
Excerpt from the text Borders by Louise Wolthers, Head of Research and Curator at the Hasselblad Foundation, Sweden.