Who Fooled Whom?

hard cover book, 13,5 x 20 cm, 95 pages, edition 200, typography

Moa Edlund, 2012

part of the project Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian journey

1795 re-traced




Åsa Elzén

mail@asaelzen.com

news

cv/bio

projects

Forest Calling – A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration

or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge /


Skogen kallar – Ett oändligt kontaminerat samarbete eller

Dansandet är en form av skogskunskap


    – Extension #2 at The Experimental Field, Accelerator, SU

    – Extension #1 In Forest Intervals


Notes on a Fallow – The Fogelstad Group and Earth /

Träda – Fogelstadgruppen och jord


    – A Growing Fallow Archive / Ett växande träda-arkiv

    – Biography of a Fallow / En trädas biografi

    – Transcript of a Fallow / Avskrift av en Träda

    – Boy! / Pojken!

    – Fogelstad Fågelstad Fågelsta Fågelholk Fågelbo

    – The Other School / Den andra skolan

    – A Growing Archive on the Women’s Barn and Livestock

    School at Fogelstad / Ett växande arkiv över Kvinnliga

    Ladugårdsutbildningen vid Fogelstad

    – A Step to the Side / Ett steg åt sidan

    – A Growing Peace with the Earth Collection

    – Transcript of Transcripts: Elin – Bang /

    Avskrifter av avskrifter: Elin – Bang

    – Why do things when you could leave it? – An attempt,

    an in-between land / Varför gör man saker då man kunde

    låta bli? – Ett försök, ett gränsland


While I am trying to get to know Fredrika, I am always

thinking of you.


Memory of an Event

    – Memory of an Event I (Dear Honorine / Dearest Signe)

    – Memory of an Event II


History History

The Collaboration: MS and AL


Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian journey 1795 re-traced

    – The Glade I

    – The Glade II

    – Who Fooled Whom?


YES! Association/Föreningen JA!

    – A New Spelling of a Street – A tribute to Audre Lorde

    – All that you touch You Change. All that you Change

       Changes you.

    – NYPÅSTIGNA / NEW PASSENGERS

    – (art)work(sport)work(sex)work

    – Zyklische Gesellschaftsreise

    – SMOKING AREA

    – We Will Open a New Front/Lee H. Jones

    – (Dis)agreements?

    – When hell froze over


The guide and the seeing man

Project Description

I’ll be you if you’ll be me

A year of sisterhood

Getting Dressed

Bollywood Basketball

The project also deals with subject formation and shows how we become subjects in relation to others and how unstable these positions always are. Through a sometimes ambivalent, sometimes flirtatious, loving or even colonizing position towards Wollstonecraft, the biographers constitute their own subjectivity. The biography slips into an autobiography. It has been claimed that for example Emma Goldman’s, at first sight conventional lecture on Wollstonecraft from 1911, in fact is one of Goldman’s most autobiographical texts.


Who Fooled Whom? functions as a collective narrative trying to decipher events that occurred in the summer months of 1795, but also functions as a metanarrative tracing a history of the legitimacy of feminist knowledge production.




list of the 28 cited texts

Who Fooled Whom? is a text piece in book form that in chronological order cites 28 different accounts pertaining to the actual reason for Wollstonecraft’s journey in Scandinavia 1795 – her search for a ship with a silver cargo, and her possible involvement in a smuggling affair regarding this silver. During the 217 years that have passed, different theories have been put forth but the case is still not solved and the silver is still missing. The first citation is from Wollstonecraft’s own travelogue, where the silver ship is not mentioned at all, but can be sensed in her strong critique of commercialism. The last citation is from a 2011 radio documentary.


Most biographers have chosen to concentrate on the unhappy love affair that Wollstonecraft was involved in during the trip, just a few bring to the fore Wollstonecraft’s critique of capitalism. Other authors concentrate only on the Silver Ship, a story that came to live its own life in Norway, where for a long time divers searched for its silver treasure on the bottom of the sea. In 1893, a local historian in Norway chose to exclude Wollstonecraft’s name in the story of the silver ship and it wasn’t until 1972 that the two stories were brought back together again.