Dabitch featured in the Epica Awards "Behind the bylines" series.

The Epica awards are doing a series of interviews with many creative journalists around the world who make up the Epica Award's jury. So here I am: BEHIND THE BYLINES: ÅSK WÄPPLING

With the global jury, global work, and global perspective in mind I thought that I should share a little about where I'm from. I find judging the Epica Awards to be a lot of fun because it is a global award, and I get to see ideas that often can be very quirky and localized in humor, traditions, or even just consumer habits that in itself creates a new space for advertising media. Since I've lived in several different countries and learned a lot about various cultures, I find culturally localized and relevant ads far more exciting than the "universal idea".

Hence this part of the interview:

We know you have a very rich background - could you tell us a little bit about your place of origin?

This has always been a question that stops me in my tracks. I always find this one difficult to explain, as my entire family and I are from Lapland. The family birthplaces stretch from Sweden to Norway and Finland, for many hundreds of years, and I know all the places very well. I grew up hearing stories about family members who moved around within the Sápmi borders, while simultaneously moving around the world for jobs in a very "nomadic" manner. So I have lived in Saudi, the United States, Germany, and so on, and when I decided to go to University it was in New York and London. But when I get bogged down by modernity, as I did right after I graduated college in London, the only thing that brings me back to life is the land in Sápmi. We all belong somewhere, and we all will feel our blood slow down and heartbeat settle when we are "home", as I have.