Three days of crispy cold weather and almost clear skies, occasionally, even moments of bright cold sunshine – that is not what one expects of November in Helsinki. Usually it is damp and dark and windy and generally depressing – well, November has only just begun! On Thursday and Friday I was out sitting with the elm and the alder in the morning; today I visited them after noon, and noticed that the weather was getting warmer again. The ice forming on the puddles on the paths in the park yesterday (see image below) was gone today. Not many people out in the middle of the day, despite Halloween. But some with their dogs, still. Some of them show openly their surprise, when they notice a human being behaving in an unusual way, and so do children, while adults walk past as if they would not notice. Probably they avoid being embarrassed on my behalf that way, or perhaps they simply try to ignore noticing unusual details for some other reason. It is a way of being polite, I guess. Like when somebody is being drunk and behaving badly, most people try to look away as if not noticing, so they would not have to intervene.
Yesterday we had an interesting conversation with the visiting curator Irini Papadimitriou at Muu gallery, see info here, with some fascinating comments from people in the audience as well. I have not looked at the video documentation yet. The problem of inviting people to abandon representations of the environment and go out to experience the outdoors themselves, but doing that with the help of representations, is one thing. Another paradox or problem is the use of technology, which seems so immaterial and light but is actually draining lots of resources and creating much problematic waste as well. And there are other problems, too, like the illusion of continuity created by time-lapse imagery, which gives the impression of a durational performance while being produced by a series of short repeated performances and thus being “fake” in that sense.
The Muu exhibition, called Once Again, shows old works from Harakka Island, Year of the Horse (2003) and Year of the Horse – Calendar (2015) – they are available as small files on the RC, here – as well as several works created during the Arsbioarctica residency in Kilpisjärvi in 2014, with documentation on the RC as well, here. I am using the same principles in these visits to the trees, but for some reason I am not treating my tree companions with the same respect as Malla Fell; I am somehow taking them for granted, it seems. And the images are framed in a way that shows only a tiny fraction of the trees. Hm. Something to think about…