Filmhuset, 2024-06-18

“My hope is that the movie will lead to a change”

Meet Wasim Harwill: artist and member of A house Filmhuset. Earlier this year he won Young Swedish Design 2024 with his artwork “A house without date palm is no home”, which has received a lot of media attention recently. At Filmhuset, he is currently working on an exciting documentary about the process of creating his art.

Hi Wasim! Your project “A house without a date palm is no home” recently won the Young Swedish Design Award and has received a lot of media attention lately. Can you tell us more about it? How was the idea born?

– It’s great that my work continues to meet an audience and discuss issues about home. Right now the work is touring around Sweden and is exhibited at various art galleries, museums and cultural centers. Earlier this year, SVT also did a report about me and my work. But it all started at my grandmother’s house.

It was a chilly afternoon in December 2022, my grandmother and I were sitting opposite each other at her kitchen table. I remember that the whole kitchen smelled of saffron, probably because her saffron-yellow rice was under the lid, simmering. She looks at me with her olive green eyes and says:

“You should have seen our home in Iraq. There, in Hillah, we had six date palms in our garden.”

I toyed with the idea – if I were to transfer a date palm from Iraq and plant it here in Sweden. Would she feel more at home then? Would I have felt more at home?

But you can’t move a date palm from Iraq to Sweden and expect it to grow. The Swedish climate does not allow it. For a date palm to grow, it needs the right conditions and, above all, time to take root, grow and bear fruit – like integration.

I guess that’s where it all started. In the dream of a home. With “A house without a date palm is not a home”, I want to redefine the concept of “home” and what it means – to feel at home. A concept that everyone can relate to, whether you have a home or not. Everyone forms their own personal approach to the work, which discusses the right to be part of a community, to be a whole person and to feel safe in any space. If you have never had to leave your home, you will hopefully still be able to reflect on your and others’ relationship to home. With the hope that you reflect on how your actions affect other people around you.

In the text of your work at the graduation exhibition, you end with the sentence “It is up to you to help them.” What emotions did you hope your work would evoke and how has the reception been?

– I think I always intended to create a work where the viewer, in contact with the work, ends up in a kind of self-reflection about their actions. This work is primarily about the act of making. What is it that you do that makes people feel at home or not at home? What happened was that some visitors dug in the mound and some just watched. Many apologized for their actions afterwards, whether they dug or not. Which still says a lot in itself. I think we are blinded today in the pursuit of what is – right or wrong. When really it’s all about allowing all people to just be people.

You are currently working on an exciting documentary about the creative process. Would you like to tell us more about it and why you want to make the documentary?

– In the documentary, we follow the main character, played by me, who wants nothing more than to grow, take root and blossom. But the place he is in neglects him. We are actually following a sequence of events where something is trying to grow, in a place where the lack of empathy is constantly present.

The documentary is set in a college, which aims to be a safe space for everyone as part of its social mission. But because those who “govern” do not see themselves, they are never able to reflect on how their actions affect the possibility for everyone to flourish in that place.

In parallel, during the creation of ‘A house without a date palm is no home’, the whole process was recorded. It is the most honest portrayal of my experience of moving in white spaces in recent years. An experience that I seem to share with many other racialized artists but that I have never seen portrayed in this way. My hope is that the film will lead to a shift from talking about the vulnerable to talking about the victimizers.

Your project begs the question of what a home actually is. What have you come up with yourself and how did you arrive at it?

– I think I always felt that home was defined as a feeling for me. In this process, I’ve really just had that confirmed, that I don’t define it as a physical place. In many ways, defining home as a feeling is absolutely fantastic. Because then you can feel at home anywhere in the world, anytime. Incredible, isn’t it? It’s almost like the emotional connection to home creates a physical space.

But what I also realized is that when we define home as a feeling, we make ourselves vulnerable. Because then anyone can take that feeling away from us.

Finally, what are your plans for the future? What do you dream of?

– In the near future, I want to finish this documentary and bring it to an audience. At the same time, I am writing my first short film which I hope to produce later this year.

I dream of a future where I can work artistically in film and theater – as an actor, director and playwright. I grew up outside the cultural world, unaware that this existed. Now that I am here, I have no plans to stop. I want to continue creating art that criticizes and challenges the way people see the world. For me, it has always been important to comment on the present. Hopefully, my work will lead to self-reflection and maybe even change.