Three mornings in Helsinki, sun on two of them, which is not so bad after all. Tis is one of the most previous times of the year, “mellan hägg och syren”, as they say in Swedish, literally between bird cherries and lilacs. Not all bird cherries are blooming yet, but most of them, while the lilacs are only opening slowly. On Monday morning in rainy weather I was fascinated by the difference in the view from my place under the elm ( see image above) and the view for the camera from the place for the tripod, either up on the slope or then next to the rock closer the elm. But on Tuesday and Wednesday when the sun was shining I forgot all about it and simply enjoyed the season.
The leaves of the elm are hanging low and really hide me well in the first image, which is alright and gives some variation to the series, although i did not plan it. On Wednesday there was a woman in a red cap sitting and drawing on the rocks, and she inevitably came to perform in these images, too. My thoughts were on the trip to Hamburg later in the afternoon, to join PSI #23 Overflow there. The Performance Studies International conference is a yearly occurrence somewhere in the world, and for some years now I have been engaged in the Artistic Research Working Group with Johanna Householder and lately also with Bruce Barton. We are going to have three sessions with short presentations by artists and researchers, titled Excess and Overflow of Artistic research, and I am going to present this project there as well. I actually made a compilation of all the snapshots I have posted on tumblr so far in the blog of images called Year one with plants. There I take one image of a plant each day, and in the winter months it was harder than I expected. But this time of year there is a profusion of vegetation everywhere, the difficulty is in choosing.
Performing Landscape 