Ljiljana Maletin Vojvodić //

Shifting Roles is an ongoing artistic and literary research project that explores identity as something fluid, unstable, and continuously shaped by the spaces we inhabit and the roles we perform. Developed through my literary practice and extended into visual and spatial research, the project asks what happens when we step outside the identities assigned to us and begin to inhabit other possibilities of the self.

During my residency at Villa Kivi, a writers’ residence in Helsinki, I continued developing the project while also confronting a period of creative and literary blockage. At one point, I experienced a breakthrough that allowed me to reconnect with writing and with books, while at the same time recognising the need to move beyond literature and explore questions of identity through other forms of artistic expression.

The project became a way of questioning the expectations placed upon us by society, particularly those imposed on women and on women over the age of fifty. It is an attempt to resist ageism and the idea that, at a certain age, a woman should become more predictable, invisible or confined to an established identity. Instead, Shifting Roles proposes the possibility of change, transformation and reinvention at any stage of life.

The city became both a setting and a participant in the research. Unlike my previous work in Gothenburg, where I explored identity in close connection with nature, in Helsinki I deliberately chose an urban environment. I was drawn to parts of the city that have retained their architectural character and a sense of local identity, resisting, to a certain extent, the homogenising effects of globalisation. These spaces evoked for me the restrained, melancholic atmosphere of Aki Kaurismäki’s films, where architecture, interiors and everyday gestures often speak as much as the characters themselves.

Within this context, a wig and clothing purchased from a second-hand shop in Helsinki became simple but significant tools for transformation. By changing my appearance, I explored the possibility of temporarily stepping outside my familiar identity and inhabiting another role. The second-hand garments also introduced the idea of a previous, unknown life: clothes that once belonged to someone else, carrying traces of an identity that is no longer present but can be imagined, borrowed or performed.

The project also emerged from a personal moment of creative blockage. During the residency, I experienced a breakthrough that allowed me to return to writing and to books, while simultaneously questioning the limits of literature as the only space in which I can explore myself. The literary residency thus became not only a place for writing, but also a point of departure for moving beyond writing.

Shifting Roles moves between the written and the visual, between books and the body, between the personal and the constructed, and between the self we recognise and the selves we temporarily invent. It is an exploration of fluid identity, but also a quiet act of resistance: against ageism, against fixed expectations of women, and against the assumption that a woman over fifty should remain within the role that society has already chosen for her.

Helsinki became a space in which literature could be both recovered and questioned, while the city itself offered a new stage for exploring identity, transformation and the freedom to change.