In the wake of independence day celebrations, sitting in the snowy Park, I thought of how much harder the winter mornings must have been without our modern comforts. Independent or dependent, well. I remember Karen Finley giving a public performance lecture at Theatre Academy many years ago and speaking of her work within the dependent cinema, because that is what the so-called independent cinema of course is, dependent on all kinds of factors, like the enthusiasm of its makers. And the same things goes for many fields. This came to mind because of the 100 years independence festivities yesterday. There is much to celebrate in our 100 years of independence, including the right to vote for women etc. but that does not mean we cannot acknowledge our total dependence of so many things, among them the trees. The Swedish language local newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet had a series of articles on the major factors in the shaping of Finland and the first, the absolutely most important one, they suggested was the forest!
 
On Friday the world had changed again, rain, rain, drizzle and rain again. Around 1 pm when I went out the rain had stopped for a while but the wind was strong. Using a rock in a plastic bag as a weight kept the tripod standing, but the wind shook the camera and made it slide to the left, a funny panning movement. I decided to be content with that, perhaps it adds some documentary feel. And the mud! Rotting leaves and wet soil, uh. But then I remembered that these were one of my last visits to the trees. Next week I will visit them once more, or perhaps twice, but that is all. A holiday trip takes me away from Helsinki for the end of the year, so my last visits will take place at mid December.
 
What to do with the material, how to edit it, will be something to think about after Christmas. It is of course possible to make time-lapse videos with fairly short clips like twenty seconds each, or so, and also to try to synchronise the same images with and without the human figure, as I have done before. What I thought of when beginning the visits and recording my sitting with the elms from two distances, was of course creating a two-channel installation with both versions synchronised. But since there is quite a lot of material, around five minutes of each session, I could also try extra long cross fades to see what that could give…
 
The Tree calendar, my “hobby” during this year, I finished last week, with the last tree, an elder, in the same park as my “ordinary” trees. For the HCAS blog, or Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, where I have spent this year, I wrote a summary of sorts about the calendar, including a map of the trees I visited for the calendar, here. But those trees I of course visited only once each of them, unlike the elms and the alder stub that I have come to know quite well after visiting them a few times a week for a year now…