Ivanda Jansone (finland)

// BIO

She is a Latvian-Finnish comic artist working and living in Helsinki. She has studied media art in Latvia and design in Finland (Bachelor of art and culture). In her work history, She has extensive experience in the creative field, from visual design to short film scriptwriting. Since 2020, She has been working on comics as a freelance artist. She has made short stories that have been published in Grafia magazine, KutiKuti and Parnasso magazine. She received the third prize in the Väinö Tanner Foundation comics competition for her story “Creation of the forest”. The award was given at the comics festival in November 2021. She is currently working on her first comic book album. The album will be published in early 2023.

// PROJECT

During the residency period, she will be researching the phenomenon of collective secrets through the artefacts. It is background work for her upcoming graphic novel Canary. She aims to create a collection of drawings of artefacts from her childhood and early teenage years. With a few artefact drawings, she will share her secrets or memories in the form of brief text. The secret is, one way or another, related to the item in the picture. The items can be f.e. an orange polka-dot milk can, Cheburashka toy and VEF radio. The viewer is invited to participate in the collective secret (memory) sharing via the exhibition of the drawings. Secrets can be shared anonymously but will be collected for further development of the project and shared with the public.
All the people in different post-soviet countries during the years of occupation drank from the same cups, played with the same toys, and wore the same clothes. But they all have their own secrets. The time period itself is full of secrets. Secret in this context is a memory which at the time has been a secret from somebody.
Bordertown Narva, home to a majority Russian-speaking community, is a suitable place to start the research of secrets via artefacts. Part of the outcome of this project will be included in her graphic novel.