Västerbottensteatern's artistic director Johanna Salander talks to the author and former factory worker Maria Hamberg about lifting invisible stories and places, and about how memories settle in the body.
Maria Hamberg was born in 1954 and lives in Ullånger in Ångermanland. For many years she had dreamed "of telling the stories of the women who, like myself, went around as immigrants in the world of men, in blue overalls and steel-toed shoes during working hours". She wanted the rest of the world, who had not been inside workshops and factories, to meet people they did not know and did not believe existed. That's how it started, with short stories in various newspapers. Eventually it became a book. Then several. Her book Några gjorde hålen, about women on the shop floor, has been a great source of inspiration for Johanna Salander and was the start of the work on the performance Stygn, about the women who worked at Algots Nord, which also plays during the Narrative Festival.
Maria Hamberg is both critically acclaimed and award-winning. In 2012 she was awarded the Ivar Lo Prize of the trade union movement and in 2018 the Birger Norman Prize.
In the fall of 2025, she will publish the book The Really Important: Memory, Body, Place.
"There is a difference between reality. And real reality. Even memories change over time. But there are also memories and thoughts that are in your body, in the movement of your hand or that live in a place where you have been. When you feel the wind caressing your cheek, the earth falling over your fingers in the planting pit, you smell a special scent or see a tree bending under the weight of the snow and you are home, you know you can. That's what this book is about - the very real."
