Einat Amir

Someday My Work Will Return To You, Even If I Myself Cannot Return (2025, Video)

For the past three years, I’ve been overwhelmed by the horrors of genocide and the rise of nationalism. This project emerged from that feeling. It began from a place of devastation. I felt creatively paralyzed, finding it difficult to make art that could possibly respond to the current societal reality. I struggled to locate my own voice, so I turned to search for others who might be able to express it with me.

For this film I invited cultural workers living in exile, from Russia, Israel, Hungary, and Turkey, to reflect on what it means to speak when one’s home country becomes morally unrecognizable. I was asking them, and myself: how can one continue to speak under such conditions, and is it ever possible to truly leave one’s place of origin behind?

The work is inspired by the remarkable writings of Thomas Mann. During World War II, while in exile, he recorded anti-Nazi radio broadcasts for the BBC, transmitted from the United States into Germany. These speeches aimed to warn the public, counter propaganda, and advocate for democratic values. Long-wave transmission ensured the messages could reach ordinary receivers inside Germany. I return to this act as both inspiration and framework.

The film brings together contemporary testimonies with excerpts from Mann’s broadcasts, creating a layered dialogue on censorship, responsibility, and the limits of communication. My own experience as a cultural exile, and my longing for dialogue across borders, has shaped this process.

The film was developed during the residency In the Wake of the Waves (2025) and filmed at Grimeton Radio Station. Spending time there profoundly shaped the work. The site functions as both infrastructure and conceptual space, where distance, mediation, and reception become tangible. Walking among its antennas, I became acutely aware of how messages travel, and how much is lost, altered, or never received.

This project reflects on what remains in displacement and what continues to circulate in absence. It asks whether a message can ever truly reach its destination, and what it means to keep speaking about injustice, even when it may mean you can never return home.

– Einat Amir

Einat Amir is a multidisciplinary artist based in Finland whose practice centers on video installations and performance works incorporating scientific experiments from social psychology; these works explore the emotional, social, and political dimensions of everyday communication between individuals and groups.

https://www.einatamir.com/

The residency In the Wake of the Waves (2025, Varberg Municipality), taking the Grimeton Radio Station World Heritage Site as its starting point, examined the ceaseless, bustling movement of translations that constitutes a complex and fundamental aspect of human interaction, transnational flows, and connections. Through video, photography, sound, and collage, the artists highlighted voices, rhythms, and fragments of both resistance and hope, songs and dreams of freedom, and echoes of voices that refuse to be silenced.