Selected Works
Each project begins with a fragment: an image, a recording, a gesture, a historical trace. Film becomes the instrument through which these fragments reorganise themselves into movement. What follows is a process of accumulation: through montage, sound, performance and time.
Maroonen (2026)
MULTI-CHANNEL VIDEO INSTALLATION | DIR: SALAD HILOWLEA multi-channel installation tracing Gustav Badin through archives, Black presence within Swedish history and acts of remembrance. Maroonen, is based on Badin’s own words.
Maroonen is a three-channel video installation that, together with objects, reliefs and painting, explores memory as ruin, the gaze of the archive and Black presence within Swedish art history. Through the figure of Gustav Badin — both as a historical individual and a mythic presence — the work creates a poetic constellation between past, present and future.
Rather than reconstructing a biography, Maroonen moves through fragments, gestures and echoes, allowing history to emerge through image, music and spatial experience.
Synopsis
The project forms part of Nationalmuseum’s major 2026 exhibition Badin - Beoynd Surface and Mask. Artist and filmmaker Salad Hilowle was invited to create a new work centred on Badin.
Badin (Couschi) was brought as a child from the Danish West Indies to the Swedish royal court during the eighteenth century. Although deeply embedded within Swedish cultural history, his life has long remained at the margins of historical narration.
By returning to locations connected to Badin’s life — including the ruins of Haga Palace and Gustavianum in Uppsala — the project examines both colonial legacies and forgotten narratives. In doing so, Maroonen enters into broader international conversations surrounding postcolonial memory, representation and the archive.
Hilowle previously explored Badin in the project Vanus Labor, but Maroonen expands this work through a collaboration with author Ola Larsmo. Larsmo’s novel Maroonberget (1996), which also engages with Badin’s story, introduces a further dimension through the encounter between literary and cinematic interpretation.
Background
