Malva Hulda Lorensson
Malva has always been driven by an invisible force to move forward and challenge herself. As a child, she was an avid basketball player and with 14 she left her family home in Stockholm to move to northern Sweden to play successfully for the Swedish national basketball team. Together with the team, she won one gold medal in the European championship and four in the Swedish championship. But after more than five years, she had to give up the sport due to a back injury. Instead of sinking into depression, she used this stroke of fate to take a new chance.
"Thats when my creative side woke up...."
Her family has always served as a support and role model, especially now: "We are a big family where everybody is doing their thing. Just such a big personalities."
Malva was no exception. She packed her things, moved to Portugal and learnt to surf straight away. In addition to a lot of self-confidence and new ideas, she also had her great-grandfather's analogue camera in her luggage. It was a very special camera for her. "[It] still is the camera I shoot with for all of my jobs and stuff, it's like the only camera that I use and it's the same camera that the pictures of me, when I grew up, were taken on."
Malva managed to channel all the focussed energy she previously used in basketball into her creativity: "Still have all this drive in me from that basketball. I drive myself into something completely different and ended up being supercreative and continued to challenge me all the time."
Four years ago, she moved from Portugal to Sri Lanka for a season and perfected her surfing and photography skills on tropical beaches. She played and experimented a lot with the camera and shortly afterwards she got her first photo jobs. Together with her partner, an artist, she has spent the last few years alternating between Portugal and Sri Lanka, but has now made her home on the island in the Indian Ocean "because the tropicall life is pretty nice".
Malva and her partner couldn't have done better. They are infected by each other's creativity, paint together and have exhibitions together. Looking back on the last few years, she says: " Do what you love, don’t let anyone drag you down. Be a child all your life, just continue to explore and be creative and that would just bring you to such good places and opportunities...and sometimes it's worth to take a risk. We don’t have a life thats supersuper long…Life is worth living to the fullest and you want to remember it as something really fucking fun."
These are wise words from our new ambassador and we are more than happy to welcome her to our team.
