Otrava!

Through my mom´s family photos and my own analog photography, diary notes, paintings, and drama, I want to explore what it means to be a child of divorce, growing up between parents from two different countries who often misunderstand each other.

Hi!

My name is Camilla Pavlikova Sandland.

I’m an author, screenwriter, and photographer, currently based in Oslo. I was born in Tønsberg, Norway, in 1997.

I’ve self-published five artist books exploring themes such as grief, family history, and identity — often working across disciplines to explore how personal stories unfold in the space between image, text, and the search for belonging.

After my parents divorced when I was still very young, writing became my way of making sense of what was happening around me. It stayed that way, and became my entry point into literature and the performing arts.

For a long time, my artistic practice was rooted in prose, something that was both expanded and challenged through my studies in creative writing at Johan Borups Højskole in Copenhagen and Biskops Arnö outside Stockholm. During those years, video, drama, and photography gradually became my most important tools of expression.

When I was accepted to the Norwegian Film School in Lillehammer, I began exploring themes like identity, family conflict, and cultural heritage more deeply. It was also during this time that I fully embraced the personal as a starting point – with all its complexity and vulnerability.

As the daughter of a Norwegian father and a Slovak mother, I’ve experienced firsthand how language, shame, and power can shape close relationships. For reasons I still struggle to understand, my father didn’t allow my mother to speak Slovak with me and my younger sister, something that deeply affected how I saw her, and how I saw myself. As a teenager in Tønsberg, I felt completely alone in having a Slovak mother and chose to hide that part of myself from my friends. Influenced by my father, I even felt ashamed of her — simply because she was Slovak and spoke broken Norwegian.

I wish I had seen a film, a play, or read a book that depicted Eastern European environments as a natural part of everyday life when I was growing up. Maybe then I would have been able to see my mother for who she was — not as a contrast or a problem, but simply as herself. It became important to me to create the kinds of narratives I needed as a child — stories that give voice to what was left unsaid.

I’ve continued working across disciplines to make space for experiences that are often silenced or overlooked — especially those of young people navigating cultural divides, ideological tensions, or conflict between parents.

At the Norwegian Film School, I began working more consciously with themes like language, cross-cultural family relations, and the question of who gets to define meaning in a society. This found expression in my graduation script Kringsatt av fiender (Strangers Everywhere) — a coming-of-age drama about a teenage girl navigating her relationship with her Norwegian father and Slovak mother, and her search for a language of her own.

The script explores identity, the loss of language, and what it means to grow up between two cultures – with divorced parents, where miscommunication is woven into daily life. The personal nature of the story resonated deeply with me – and at times, drove me a little mad. t was painful to write so close to myself and my family, and made me realize how much I still didn’t know about them, or about myself.

As a result, or maybe as a reaction to all of this, I started searching for a format that could hold the process I needed, even though I didn’t yet know what that process was.

During a visit to my mom, she brought out a pile of old family photographs from her Slovak side. Some faces I didn’t recognize at all. Others felt painfully familiar. I was stunned, and I didn’t understand why I hadn’t been shown them earlier. But hat mix of closeness and distance ended up becoming the emotional core of what later becameOtrava!.

I spent months with the photos (because luckily, I have a trusting mother who let me borrow them with me) canning, sorting, trying to find some kind of thread or meaning. I also began searching for my old diary notes (that my mom luckily had saved in the attic, along with our family photos.)

And somewhere in that process, I began writing just to understand what I was feeling. But also for trying to imagine the younger version of myself — to make sense of the confusion I carried as a child, and to build a logic around it. The collages came in as a response to everything I couldn’t quite put into words. They helped me stay with the emotions without needing to explain them. It all became a way to make sense of the fragments — and to hold on to what felt real.

This eventually led to Otrava! – a multidisciplinary art book that brings together my mother’s old family photos from Slovakia with my own analog photography, diary entries, short prose, and drama.

The whole, massive prossess (... which also dissolved sooner than I could understand at the time) became a way for me to investigate what it takes to feel connected to one’s family, and what it means to be a daughter, father and a mother. But more than anything, the project became a rebellion against my own childhood.

Otrava is slovak for an annoying child – often said about a child who talks too much or asks too many questions.

Last year, I self-published Otrava! in a limited edition of 75 copies.

It’s written in Norwegian, with some Slovak words woven in.

I’ve had the chance to bring Otrava! to Oslo Art Book Fair, Lillehammer Literature Festival, and Bergen Photobook Fair. These encounters have been deeply meaningful – not only in terms of sharing the work, but in connecting with people who carry similar questions about identity, belonging, and memory. I see art books as a some of the most powerful ways to bridge cultures, provoke reflection, and make visible the lives that often go unseen.

At the same time, I still feel pretty new in the world of photo and artbooks. I’m trying to find my way — both in how to make better work, and in how to get it out there. I’d love to learn more, meet other artists, and be part of a community where I can keep growing and sharing ideas.

I would love to continue developing Otrava! as a multilingual publication. The book now exists in physical form, but it still feels like a process in motion, and I sense the themes have more to uncover.

One of my next steps is to work toward a version that includes English, so the work can reach more people across language barriers.

It would mean a lot to get experienced eyes on the project, to help me see new ways it could grow, both artistically and practically. PhMuseum’s support could offer the guidance and platform I need to take Otrava! further, in both form and reach.

I believe the project still holds a lot of untapped potential, and I would be honoured to explore it with your support — as part of a larger conversation about memory, belonging, and the languages we inherit.

Being part of PhMuseum would be incredibly meaningful — not just as a way to move the book forward, but also as a chance to learn, share, and build confidence as an emerging artist still finding my way.

Thank you for considering my application.