Emma's Best Interests

Emma’s Best Interest is a documentary-poetic work exploring how a child’s life is shaped and governed through institutional language in encounters with school, health care, and child welfare systems. The work is presented in three parts: Performance, illustrations and written format.

 

The project is based on authentic case files, school evaluations, legal transcripts, and clinical records from DPS and BUP, which I have edited and transcribed over time. The child’s own voice is absent in the documents — yet present through the many narratives told about her.

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Performance and illustrations

In the exhibition and performance format, these documents are read and activated within a staged environment. The audience is invited to respond in writing or speech — either during or after the performance. These responses are collected, transcribed, and incorporated into the work as a poetic counterpoint to the institutional language.

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The project operates in the intersection of psychology, language, and power, emphasizing how institutional descriptions within health and welfare systems shape identity and self-perception.

 

​The book

Emma's Best is an ongoing art and book project that examines how a child's life is shaped and managed by systems, language, and adults. The narrative is told exclusively through the voices of others – teachers, police, psychologists, child welfare workers, siblings, and mothers – while the child's own voice is absent, yet present everywhere.

 

The material consists of authentic case documents, court records, school assessments, journals, and private letters, assembled in a poetic, polyphonic, and documentary form. The project asks: What happens when we listen to everyone – except the child himself?

 

The narrative is created entirely through the perspectives of professionals and family members: midwives, police officers, teachers, psychologists, child welfare workers, mothers, siblings, and neighbors. Every word is real – drawn from authentic documents: medical records, legal rulings, school reports, letters, and psychological evaluations. The material is curated and reframed into a literary and poetic form.

 

This project is both an aesthetic experiment and an ethical challenge: What happens when we listen to everyone – except the child?

 

“Child welfare authorities initially left the girl with ‘the reporters,’ who were themselves part of the case. We were not told where she was. They just said she would be placed in an officially approved location.”

– parent complaint, Sarpsborg Municipality

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FORM AND RHYTHM

 

Emma's Best Interests moves between raw documentation and lyrical reflection. The narrative shifts from clinical to intimate, from the language of institutions to the hesitation of the subjective. What first seems cold and factual gradually reveals deep emotional resonance. For instance:

 

“She herself asked to be tested for HIV and hepatitis C. The parents opposed it.”

– child welfare emergency note, Sarpsborg

 

“The girl simply said she wouldn’t come home. Her hands had cuts on them. I hoped the blood didn’t carry anything.”

– rewritten from an official report

 

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“I didn’t know you wouldn’t come back. But I knew that’s what you said.”

- personal letter from sister, 1998

 

 

CONFLICTING VOICES

 

The parents reject diagnoses. They oppose the placement. They claim the help itself was harmful. Meanwhile, the system records:

 

“The girl shows signs of depressive symptoms and carries a deep ambivalence. The parents refuse family therapy.”

– psychologist report, BUP

 

“The mother says: ‘We will continue as before. We won’t let her wriggle out of her duties.’”

– County Board ruling

 

“She received no confirmation gift. Only from her sister.”

– statement from child welfare report

 

 

 

CONTEXT AND CONSEQUENCES

 

The book reveals how support systems try to understand – and simultaneously reinforce – the child’s powerlessness. We watch as documentation grows thicker, but insight remains shallow. The girl is labelled “manipulative,” “intelligent,” “precocious,” “disrespectful,” “engaged,” “deviant” – sometimes all in the same report. Responsibility is always assigned to her. And the consequences are hers alone.

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“I was a measure. A temporary placement. A file with a number and a logbook.”

“But I also had hair that fell into soup, smiles, connection and meaning.”

 

 

 

PURPOSE

 

Emma's Best Interests speaks to professionals, researchers, relatives, students, and the broader public with an interest in childhood, trauma, neglect, and systemic critique. The book shows how good intentions often fail when confronted with the complex reality of a child’s life – and how the language we use about children shapes the reality they must endure.

 

It also carries a poetic notion: That the joy was there, even when no one was there to witness it. The sun touched her skin. And while institutions debated who she belonged to. She lived. This is not a book to understand her. It is a book to understand how they defined the language around her life.