Aleksander Motturi

Aleksander Motturi (b. 1970) is a Swedish writer and artistic director of Clandestino Institute where independent critical, educational and artistic programs such as Victims & Martyrs (curated for Göteborgs Konsthall), Creative Writing for Newcomers (led by Hassan Blasim in Arabic), The Right to Narrate (in relation to many Swedish writer’s boycott of Gothenburg Book Fair 2017), The Fire Next Time (a multidisciplinary program inspired by James Baldwin’s essay) have been presented. After finishing a doctoral thesis in philosophy on Wittgenstein’s remarks on James G Frazer (Filosofi vid mörkrets hjärta– om Wittgenstein, Frazer och vildarna) he has written several novels (Diabetikern, Svindlarprästen, Broder, Onåbara), essays (Etnotism) and plays (Förvaret, Pappersgudar). He has also directed Thaumazein, an essay film based on an interview with the Ugandan-Sudanese refugee Peter Ekwiri who he first met in James Fort Prison in Accra, Ghana, 2003. The encounter with Peter Ekwiri—who had been dumped in a foreign country in Africa by Swedish migration authorities—gave birth to the Clandestino Festival. However, in Thaumazein the refugee does not merely appear as a flagrant victim of European migration politics but also as a thinker dealing in wonder with the universal questions in Paul Gauguin’s famous painting: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?