The following report has been informed by the observation of Borderline Offensive activities in Sweden, to which Ylva Svensson had direct access to. The activities in Sweden started in an artistic residency that took place between 1st and 10th June 2018. The artistic residency was hosted by the Nordic Watercolour Museum, and produced in cooperation with the municipality of Tjörn. The initial question of the residency was: how can humour and art help us to amuse each other and build relationships?

The artists involved were: Abduljabbar Alsuhili, an actor and cultural activist, living in Sweden, originally from Yemen; the anonymous group Creative Destruction, a street and guerilla artistic collective from Sofia, Bulgaria; Ivana Šáteková, a visual and new media artist from Bratislava, Slovakia; and Omar Abi Azar, a theatre maker and director from Beirut, Lebanon. As part of the artistic residency, a 2-day creative workshop for local youth was organised, targeting both newcomers (asylum seekers or refugees) and native born citizens.The workshop included creative exercises (sometimes ridiculous, sometimes practical) involving drawing and writing, creating stories and acting them out, as well as asking participants to draft a message taken from their experience and share it with society, posted on a memento designed by them: an originalt-shirt.

Later on, between 9th-18th August 2019, the activities continued with an arts exhibition at Röda Sten Konsthall, that included the return of some of the artists who had taken part in the 2018 artistic residency, as well as new artistst hat were part of Borderline Offensive residencies in other countries: Abduljabbar Alsuhili, Ivana Šáteková and Omar Abi Azar, with The Museum of Real History, Petko Dourmana, with Three Migrants on a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Smuggler), Darinka Pop-Mitic with The Long Heavy Road, as well as Škart,with Paper Puppet Poetry.

All the artists gave an artist talk and hosted participatory workshops as apart of the exhibition. Darinka Pop-Mitic and Škart even had the opportunity to mediate creative workshops with local children from Vänersborg – where Sweden’s biggest accomodation centre for asylum seekers and refugees is located.These workshops took place in cooperation with Timjan Youth Culture House, as well as Grupp av Knoppar, a cultural association founded and run by asylumseekers. These workshops invited participants to work together on creating and drawing storyboards to make their own fanzine, and later on to direct their ownpaper puppet play and animated documentary. Due to the ethical concerns of conducting research involving children, Ylva Svensson focused her observations on the project activities of 2018.