Monument without a home

Knutte Wester was born in 1977 and studied at the Umeå Academy of Fine Arts. He takes a great interest in social artistic processes in which he gives voice and expression to stories that are seldom heard.

Wester exhibited at the Örebro Art Gallery in 2016. I want to be heard, I want to be found was the title of the exhibition, which consisted of stories in the form of sculptures, videos and photographs. One of the works in the exhibition was a plaster sculpture that served as the model for this sculpture.

Monument without a home was made in 2007–2009, exhibited at OpenART 2013 and then purchased as a permanent artwork for Örebro. The sculpture stands outside Strömparterren, where the streets of Engelbrektsgatan and Kungsgatan intersect.

On a trip to Latvia with his family, the artist noticed all the monuments in the country standing as historical traces of former occupying forces. He also saw the thousands of children who no one is taking care of in our contemporary society, children at orphanages with a bag already packed, waiting for a home. Knutte Wester’s own grandmother was once an orphan in Stockholm.

The bronze sculpture Monument without a home was designed together with a group of seven-year-olds at an orphanage in Riga and bears the stories and lives of many different children. If you look closely, you can see the joints between the cast body parts of various different children. The children’s life threads are thus woven together in a monument to those who rarely have monuments erected in their honour.

Bent forward by the burden of the backpack, the child stands with bare feet and closed eyes. Where is the barefoot child headed, and what does he or she have to tell us?