Only two visits to the trees in Helsinki this week, on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. My plan was to include Thursday, too, but I chose to go to CARPA 5 – colloquium on artistic research in performings arts, where I have a small installation running nonstop for the duration of the event. One reason was the rainy weather, I have to admit. And I had to make preparations for a trip to Odense in Denmark, where I am participating in an event organised by Nordic Performance Art, facilitating a participatory performance with swinging and also speaking at the seminar. So my thoughts were everywhere else except wih the trees. On Tuesday I was preparing for a busy day, but the weather was calm. On Wednesday the wind was strong, but the direction was such that the camera on the tripod was not under direct attack. The only incident I remember was an alder leaf falling gently down on my head while sitting on the stub, a surprise and a strange feeling, a sign of autumn.

For once it was easy to find the tree of the month for my tree calendar – based on the ancient celtic tree calendar – namely the hazel, whose month (according to one version of the calendar) is from 5 August to 1 September. I found a nice group of hazels growing next to the path following the shore near Herttoniemi Manor from a map on the internet that listed fruit trees and bushes with berries in Helsinki. These hazels did not have any nuts, though, or hardly any traces of them, really. But they looked thriving and there was no doubt they were representatives of the common hazel, Corylus Avellana. I walked among them and tried to find a suitable framing for the image, including some water but not the houses. At first I sat on a rock next to one of the hazels near the path, and placed my camera in the middle of the bushes. Then I tried to find animate with more space and placed the camera on the lawn, standing in or amongst the branches holding on to one of the thicker stems. In Finnish there is a satin “kolmas kerta toden sanoo”, meaning something like “the third time is the real one”. And that proved correct this time. For the third image I found a bush with several stems bowed in a way that I could venture to sit on them, actually sitting in the small tree, and that version seemed like the nicest one, despite the darkening of the sky towards the end. Only when I left the park and walked back towards the metro station, returning to the city centre, did the rain start.
The material is now edited into three videos, Hazel in August 1 (10 min. 40 sec.), Hazel in August 2 (10 min. 10 sec.) and Hazel in August 3 (9 min. 35 sec.) and I still think the third version is the “real” one.
 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 

After spending a few days in Kassel, Germany, experiencing Documenta 14, it was a pleasure to return to the trees in Helsinki for three mornings in a row. Two of them sunny and bright and the third, this morning, a grey day with drizzle. Not that visiting Documenta would not have been a pleasure, but it was exhausting, too, especially on Saturday, when everybody seemed to have decided to go there and the queues were long. The amount of people everywhere felt unfamiliar to somebody living in Finland, where we tend to look for crowds to get close to each other for a moment, for festivals and the like, and then quickly retreat to a safe distance afterwards, with plenty of emptiness around, if possible. Not many people passed by in the park these mornings; a group of small children from the nearby Kindergarten.
 

The plant growing from the hollow stub of the alder has gained in vigour and is now reaching far beyond its cosy base (see image above, and below).
 

 
But what about Documenta and plants? There were Beuys’ Oaks, of course, and in the current exhibition in Kassel, in Documenta Halle, Aboubakar Fofana from Mali had assembled plenty of living indigo plants as part of his work Fundi (Uprising). There might have been others, I could not see everything, in the overabundance of art works, but it seemed otherwise plants were present mainly as materials, or as representations.
 

 
There were three different plants that had been used to produce traditional indigo dye, Indigofera arrecta, Polygonum Tinctorium or Japanese indigo and Isatis Tinctoria or woad, which all contain indigotin and where a source of wealth and misery in colonial times, before synthetic methods for dyeing were developed. I remember reading a beautifully written ethnographic study about indigo, I suppose it was Indigo: the Indelible Colour That Ruled the World by Catherine McKinley, but I am no longer sure. And as a child I read a strange novel from the thirties or forties, called Aniliini in Finnish, which described the background to the chemical inventions related to textile colours, which has stayed in my mind more as vague atmosphere than any story as such. These thoughts never occurred to me while strolling in Kassel, I did not even think the art work in question was so special. But now, in retrospect, I am fascinated by the world it opens up. And similarly, various worlds could be entered via each and ever art work, uh! It is just too much…
 
 
 

Finding a holly (Ilex aquifolium) in Helsinki is no easy matter, but there are some hollies here, although they have trouble surviving the winter and need a protected spot to grow in. Hybrids between the usual holly, which grows as far up north as Denmark, and another relative (Ilex rugosa) have been created to survive here (Ilex x meserveae), although their leaves are not as sharp, they say. The holly is the tree (or shrub) for the 9nth lunar month in the Celtic Tree Calendar from July 8 to August 4, and one of the most difficult ones from a Finnish perspective. My original idea was to find trees for the tree calendar on the shores of Helsinki, but some compromises are necessary. At the end of the Töölönlahti bay there are some thriving hollies, but they are completely mixed with other shrubs and growing in a narrow area between the footpath and the main road, thus difficult to perform with. The holly that I decided to begin with I found in the Kajsaniemi Botanical Garden, growing in a corner next to some Magnolias. At first I thought it completely impossible to do anything with the hollies there, since they were cramped in a corner, against a wall and he area was so limited, but then that proved an asset. Instead of sitting on the ground next to them, as I planned at first, I framed the image so that the signs describing their names remade out of sight below the frame and stepped “inside” the shrub, standing amongst the branches. I made three attempts, and in the last one I am actually standing next to the wall, behind the holly, as it were. I tried to stand immobile for approximately ten minutes each time, and it was relatively easy, except in the first image when some of the sharp leaves tried to get into my eyes so I had to keep them closed for most of the time. That image is probably the nicest, though, since I am almost completely covered by the leaves. The last image is probably the most beautiful in a conventional sense, because of the sunlight playing on the wall. Anyway, I think I am happy with these first attempts, although they have very little in common with the first images of the calendar, when I tried to find trees by the sea shore. The three sessions resulted in three videos, Holly in July 1, Holly in July 2 (9 min 22 sec.) and Holly in July 3 (10 min 20 sec.). The third one is fascinating, because after a few minutes the camera decided to focus on the leaves in the foreground rather than the human being in the background, probably waiting in vain for the human to continue to move. And when the leaves move in the wind, they then get the attention they deserve.
 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

Now that the grass around the elm tree is cut the stubs of the two trunks that accompany the three growing ones are more visible. One of them is completely hollow, and was perhaps cut down because it was rotting from the inside, while the other is cut rather high and looks like it was a quite healthy when cut off. Anyway, they all grow from the same root, so when I say I am sitting in the elm tree I am actually not describing the situation clearly. I am sitting under the elm trees or at the foot of the elm trees or, well? – Most of the time these (holi)days I am actually sitting in the former telegraph on Harakka Island, as a gallery guard of sorts.
 
Spending time as a gallery guard is a nice form of holiday activity, especially when the gallery or exhibition space is a small wooden house built at the end of the 19th century to serve as a telegraph for the Russian military, and situated on an island with nature preservation areas. And of course it helps if the exhibition you are taking care of is your own. Well, Harakka Island is very close to the centre of Helsinki and I have my studio there in the former Chemical Research Laboratory of the Armed Forces, together with quite a few other artists, so this is actually a working place for me. In summertime, however, the place feels almost like a summer cottage. Perhaps moving down the slope from the big main building to the little wooden house creates the feeling of cottage life. So here I sit and drink tea and chat with the occasional visitors, who are not very many I must confess.
 
The exhibition is called Cami de Cavalls and shows two works recorded on the horse path with that name on Menorca in July 2015, as well as a small work recorded in Stockholm in 2016, Summer at Söder. For more information about the exhibition, please look at Cami de Cavalls. And because the exhibition is open on from noon to 5 pm, I have plenty of time to visit the trees in the Kaivopuisto Park in the mornings.