Tidstrumman / The Time Drum
with Fredrik Prost
In 2025 Tidstrumman was purchased by the Public Art Agency Sweden. It is currently exhibited at Public Art Agency, Stockholm in "Wood Speaks – an exhibition with wood as material, motif and method".
Tidstrumman (The Time Drum) deals with themes such as time and silence from a Sami perspective. The sculpture is created by Fredrik Prost and Anna Senno, between dream, thought and hand, in an interplay based on Prost’s craft tradition and making. The work was created for the exhibition Juxtaposing Craft at Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, National museums of World Culture Sweden in 2022, where Senno was one of the curators. It was shown alongside three Sami drums. The drums were confiscated by Swedish authorities about 300 years ago. Two of the drums were found by Senno in a French museum collection of Mucem in Marseille. All the three drums are now being repatriated.
Tidstrumman is an interactive sculpture, we are invited to take water from the bowl using a scoop, from which the water leaks out of the wood and flows back into the bowl. The gesture highlights a moment of sound of silence; it gives us a moment to observe the feeling of silence, the sound, to feel time, not count it, to see the invisible through the water flowing back into the bowl.
The film highlights a stark contrast to modern relationships with land and resources and how we collect material.
The wood (pine burl and birch) collected in the film is used to create the sculpture Tidstrumman.
View over Kiruna mining.
The “green transition” is dependent on a continuous excavation of the north. Recognising the colonised past is to open possibilities of legal protection of land against mining and industrial foresting through immaterial cultural sites.
Photography by Inga-Wiktoria Påve and Anna Senno