Re-Construction: Children's Depictions of Home and Home District After the Second World War in Western Finnish Lapland and the Swedish Torne River Valley

Authors

• Päivi Granö Lapin yliopisto
• Anniina Koivurova Lapin yliopisto

Abstract

This article analyses two physical and mental landscapes of childhood in Northern Sweden and Finland in the post-war era during the 1940s and 1950s. The material has been produced within two competitions for schools. The aim of the Finnish competition was to increase aid during reconstruction and to mentally unite the nation. The Swedish competition was organized by a home district association. The aim of the contest was to foster regionalism and strengthen people's feeling of belonging to a nation-state. The interpretation has cultural perspectives on visual culture studies, humanistic geography and an individual's interpretation of a place. The intertextual connections to material such as school picture boards are shown. The drawings both rebuild and comment on what was an imposed cultural agenda. It reflects a national mental landscape and local school aesthetics, ethics and norms of the time.