Slash & Burn

Finnskogen - directly translated as The Forest of the Finns - is a large, contiguous forest belt along the Norwegian-Swedish border, where farming families from Finland settled in the early 1600s. The immigrants - called Forest Finns - were slash-and-burn farmers. This ancient agricultural method yielded plentiful crops, but required large forested areas as the soil was quickly exhausted. The Forest Finns' understanding of nature was rooted in an Eastern shamanistic tradition, and they are often associated with magic and mystery. This photographic project draws on these beliefs while investigating what it means to be a Forest Finn today, some 400 years and twelve generations later.