Siri Berzelius is a poet from Nora, Sweden. She is currently studying the master’s program in Literary Composition at HDK-Valand in Gothenburg, and during the summer she is staying as a writer-in-residence at Villa Sarkia. During Runokuu, she will read poems from a suite in process titled Mentalitet (”Mentality”).
Mentalitet is developed in relation to two geographic regions: Bergslagen in Sweden and Haapajärvi in Finland, and explores the reflections between them from the 19th century to the present. It weaves a family history of oblivion, movement, labor migration, mine shafts and soil. Collectivity, cultivation and the body become carriers of fragmented (post)memories. The work also delves into the imaginary and the envisioned in relation to lost places and a lost language. These entities become destabilized and elusive, like molten steel.