In ten days the trees in the park had really changed, and had rather big leaves now. Already during my last visit the flowers of the tree up on the hill revealed that it is an elm, and now when the leaves have come out there was no doubt about it. Elm trees grow only planted in Finland, so it is not as familiar to me as some other deciduous trees. All the elms I’ve seen before have been solitary or planted in rows and therefore this group of five trunks from the same root deceived me to assume it was some type of willow. And the way some small branches are growing directly out of the trunk near the ground made me think of a linden tree. Anyway, an elm is an interesting acquaintance. I visited the tree on Thursday and then again on Saturday, after a rather busy week. Not only did I travel to Oslo for a meeting directly when returning from Venice, where the research project How to do things with performance? organised a two-day event at the research pavilion called Accessing Performance. Preparations for Art Fair Finland 2017 were in full swing and I had to go there and set up my contribution, a four-channel version of the video installation Solsidan, which I made while staying at Solsidan in Stockholm during the winter 2015-2016 and which I have not shown anywhere else before. The video projectors were difficult to place and my media players are made for home use and not really reliable when running nonstop for days, but somehow I managed to set it up.
 
Sometimes everything seems to happen at the same time, and these days have been like that. There was an editorial board meeting and a pre-examination board meeting and on Saturday there was a non-human seminar (in Finnish) organised at Reality Research Centre, where I had promised to contribute in one of the panels. And there was an opening of an exhibition of self-portraits called Me: Self-portraits Through Time in Kunsthalle Helsinki, where one of my works was shown, too. I was very happy to be included in this large group of historical and contemporary Finnish artists, although I never thought of the work they had chosen as a self-portrait. Year of the Rat Uphill – Downhill from 2009 is recording time passing and the changes taking place in the environment while I am walking down the stairs to the northern shore on Harakka Island, and back again, once a week for the duration of a year. And why not, since I am the person walking, you can of course say it is a self-portrait. In short: sitting with the elm tree and the alder for a few minutes these two mornings felt really important and invigorating in the midst of all the hustle and bustle. Not only people but the trees and all the vegetation around is buzzing with life at this time of year.

The first “free” day in a while, and a sunny one, yesterday, on Lido di Venezia, seemed like an invitation to take a walk with my camera, tripod and scarf to see if I could find a tree to perform with somewhere on the shore. The previous days I had spent on Giudecca from morning til night engaged in an event called Accessing Performance, as part of the Camino Events related to the Research Pavilion organised by University of the Arts Helsinki and many others. The event was inspiring, but now I needed a break. So I walked and walked, enjoyed the fresh summer and admired the pine trees leaning here and there. Some of them were supported by huge crutches, so I realized I should not increase their burden by trying to sit on their trunk. And the background with rows of bath houses would not have been very exciting either, so I decided to return to the hotel. On my way back, crossing the street, my eyes fell on a strange tree in the roundabout, or rather a thick branch extending close to the ground, almost like the trunk of a giant elephant. The tree looked inviting simply because of that large very low bending branch. That is a place to sit, I thought, and immediately decided to try, despite the strange location in the middle of the roundabout.
 

When I went closer, I noticed there was some little toy on the branch. I did not move it but sat next to it.
 

 
Trying out various positions for the camera on tripod I ended up making four attempts. The first one was a spontaneous placement of the tripod and resulted in a silhouette image with the human figure and the tree as dark forms in the foreground with the traffic in the roundabout in full light. I decided to make another version from the opposite direction, perhaps to use in combination with it. That image had a more balanced light, but looked rather flat, with my back very close to the camera and thus too big. I tried to move the camera further away and get a little bit more of the curvature of the branch within the frame. And in order to maintain the logic of pairs, I took another image from the other side of the tree as well. The last image turned out to be the best one, although my wish to include more of the main trunk of the tree makes the composition slightly imbalanced. With a photograph that would be easily corrected with a tighter framing on the right, but video is more complicated. And since I have a habit of using all the material, having a hard time discarding less successful alternatives because of my love of variations, I will probably edit videos of all four versions of these images.
 

 

 

 

 
Lido di Venezia was my home base the first time I came to Venice in October or November 1996 (or was it 1995?) to write and compile the text for a radio play loosely based on the structure of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, and to do some recordings as well. I lived in a pension on Via Marco Polo, a small street on Lido, which gave the radio play I worked its title. That work I used as the first entry on my Harakka webpage created in 2000, as if my life as an artist would have commenced with that work, and not with the Bacchae in 1978, see Via Marco Polo 1-3 for more about the radio play. I took a walk this morning and found the street, but there was no pension there, although one of the villas looked strangely familiar.
 

There was an old cemetery at the turn of the road, which I cannot remember at all, although it must have been there twenty years ago. It was closed, no access, and that seemed like a sign. The past is a strange land, a closed cemetery we have no access to.
 

 
 
 
 

This Willow grows on Harakka Island, right outside Kaivopuisto Park near the centre of Helsinki. Originally I thought I would look for a willow a little further away, but a few days ago when I visited my studio on the island looking for some old files I noticed this huge shrub on the hill and decided that this would be a slightly different tree to work with for the next calendar entry. The willow, Saille, is the tree for the fifth month of the Celtic Tree Calendar, which I am now performing by creating small still-acts with the tree of the month in Helsinki with environs. My interest is not so much in Celtic lore, but in finding out about the great variety of trees growing in my extended neighbourhood. So on Saturday morning I took my small boat and rowed across to the island, managed to get past the fierce male geese protecting their spouses sitting in their nests, and place my camera on a tripod on the hill.
 

 
The willow is fairly big, with its branches spreading over a large area, sticking close to the ground. The first image I made by sitting for a while on a boulder next to the willow, but although surrounded by its branches I was not really in contact with the willow. I wanted to sit on the trunk of the willow itself, too, and that was possible since some of them were fairly thick. Only the beginning of the session were I forced myself in among the branches was recorded, since I forgot to check the memory card, which was full again. But that did not matter so much, because my position in the image was bad, much too low, and sitting there listening to the bumblebees for an extra round was a pleasure.
 

 
So I made a third attempt, and this one turned out to be my favourite. The willow covers most of the image and I am almost hidden in it; my scarf is somehow caught by a branch so it almost looks like it was hanging there by itself.
 

 
The calendar image of the month of the willow, which extends from April 15th until May 12th, at least according to some sources, is thus not presenting a singular tree by the shore and a human figure sitting in it in the manner of the previous calendar images. Rather, this image shows a mess of twigs with the human figure half hidden among them, presenting another way of performing with a tree. After this experience I am no longer worried about some other types of vegetation included in the tree calendar like common reed or ivy.
 
 

On Friday morning a thick white fog covered the sea and there was no way of distinguishing the horizon when adjusting the image in Kaivopuisto Park. During the Easter holiday week, while I was away, the marks on the ground for the tripod had disappeared, but somehow I managed to frame almost the same image. And now I know for sure that the tree up on the hill that I am sitting with is not a willow; no catkins in sight. Behind the other tree, the alder down in the park, the grass was already green, or rather the small plants on the ground had small green leaves.
 

On Saturday the weather had cleared somewhat, but the dark clouds looked ominous; later in the day there was a veritable hailstorm. The parasols of the Mattolaituri terrace café were in place, waiting for the season to start, folded like some giant white umbrellas.
 

On Sunday the day began with a snowfall, although the snow melted immediately when it hit the damp ground. I waited until the rain had subsided and walked out to the park at midday. The geese and their shit is now everywhere, a sure sign of spring.
 

Sunday is also the last day of the exhibition Atmorelational at Gallery Forum Box, where my video work The Tide in Kan Tiang is shown in the Mediaboxi program. The work was performed already at the end of 2015, and is clearly a forerunner to the project performing with plants, although it uses the same rough time-lapse technique that I have used in the series Animal Years. But with no scarf! I am literally performing together with a small tree, which grows in a rocky cove near Kan Tiang Beach on Koh Lanta in Thailand, standing next to it every two hours for the duration of a day. When I started in the morning I assumed the tide would rise higher than it did, based on the marks on the shore and did nor realise that the moment of high tide was rather early in the day. I wrote a blog post at the time as well. The work has nevertheless been well received and, believe it or not, sold into a private collection, which is quite exceptional for a video work. I am planning to write something about the work, but I can only write my thoughts about doing it; what other people see in it I have no access to.
 

 
 

Finally, today I took my camera and tripod and decided to walk through the dunes in the northern part of the nature preservation area, further away from the sea, where the vegetation would provide a wide array of plants to perform with. Once there I realized the  solitary shrubs surrounded by sand were actually visually the most interesting ones. I remembered my previous visits in this area, Maspalomas on Gran Canaria, when I tried to record the dunes without vegetation or humans. This time I decided I would include all humans that walked on the dunes in the distance, and actually emphasized their size. But I was not interested in the dunes now, rather the shrubs. And I did not want images of the naturists, mostly elderly men, strolling among the bushes. While trying to follow the path, or the footprints of previous walkers, which the wind quickly wiped away, I spotted a small twisted tree on the crest of a dune, with the sand all gone from around its roots; that could be a plant to perform with, I thought. And better to do it now, since I probably never would find exactly the same place again. Without furter ado I made a first attempt sitting on the root.
 

 
The poor tree was actually swaying in the wind, burdened by my weight as well. The wind was so strong that the camera toppled over, falling on its face in the sand. Luckily it did not suffer any severe damage, but the last file was damaged due to my hasty reaction, I learned later when looking at the material.  On site I simply decided to try again, and did another version standing next to the tree rather than sitting on it.
 

 
As a last experiment I moved the camera to the spot where I sat and recorded the view, including parts of the nearest branch, because its frenetic movement seemed to make the force of the wind palpable, although that is hard to imagine based on a still image.
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The alder is the tree of the fourth month in the old lunar Celtic Tree Calendar, and the actual dates for the month of the alder are from March 18 to April 14, although there are variations. Alders are easy to reconise even in winter time because of their small cones, and they grow in abundance on the shores of Helsinki, many of them old and twisted, very beautiful. Finding one with a suitable branch to sit on, sufficiently sturdy and low for easy access, is another matter. A colleague sent me a photo of a nice looking tree in Mellsteninranta, Haukilahti, to the west of Helsinki, and already two weeks ago I made a trip to the area to find it. At that time I did not have my camera with me, and planned to return later. This “later” was about to be too late for the month of the alder, I realised, unless I performed before my Easter holiday trip. So, without further a do, I decided to make an attempt on Tuesday afternoon between two trips. Since I had visited the tree before, I knew I would need something to step on in order to get up easily; the branch was a little bit too high to sit on directly, and there was no other branch placed in such a way that I could heave myself up. After considering some alternatives, like a bucket upside down, I found a small stool in the attic and packed it in a bag with my camera, the tripod and the pale pink scarf. Before I could take the bus out to Mellsteninranta it was already evening, with dark clouds covering parts of the sky, but I decided it was worth a try. And it was, alhough the last image was already rather murky.
I had prepared a small rope to tie around the stool, so I could get hold of it and throw it out of sight, but that proved unnecessary. It was fairly easy to frame the image in such a manner that the stool below the branch was cropped out of sight. The first version was more of a close up, with my head cropped out of sight, so I tried a slightly wider framing. That session was recorded only in part; the memory card was full! How stupid of me not to cheque that… so I made the second version once again, and by now it was already quite late. At some point it started to rain, and the drops looked nice on the sea, but the rain subsided before it had really begun. By the time I walked back to the busstop through the woods it was getting cold; I was nevertheless happy to have performed with the alder, and thought I could always return in case the material proved useless. At the moment of writing this I have not edited the works, but only looked at the material, which seemed allright.
 

 

 
 
 

The magic purple light pillar (above) was not a UFO descending on the alder stump but a reflection of the bright early morning sun in backlight and dissolved fairly quickly. This effect on Wednesday morning is an apt beginning to the week, which featured the opening of ARS17 at Kiasma museum of Contemporary Art, focused on much stronger effects of artifice.
Changeable weather used to be the hallmark of April, and now also the end of March. On Wednesday morning the sun was shining warmly, the slopes in the park looked almost green and the buds looked like bursting any moment.
 

On Thursday morning the sunny weather continued, I went out early, so the chill of the night lingered in the air, but the sun was warmer every moment and the sea was almost perfectly still.
 

On Friday morning all that was gone; a thick layer of snow covered the ground, and the trees; winter had returned. I went out early, but the Snow was already crisscrossed by footprints of dogs. I sat by the tree, freezing, and wondered at the sudden change.
 

While returning from the park I amused myself with the thought that this total change would make a nice contrast and surprise in the video; good weather can be visually rather uninteresting…
On Thursday night I visited the opening event of ARS17 (see here) and tried to get a glimpse of the exhibition amongst the crowd. There was something familiar in the atmosphere of all these game worlds, internet hype and futuristic dystopias, and unfamiliar, too, of course. From the perspective of somebody beginning their artistic engagements in the eighties this world did not seem that odd, after all, although the technologies were not there yet. So why did I not feel at home? It occurred to me that I was actually beginning my intellectual and artistic life, in a modest sense, in the seventies; my sensibilities are based on the world of the seventies, rather than the eighties, to some extent; I am an old hippie at heart. Of course the real hippies were of the previous generation, but those were the ideas I admired at that time, I suppose. No wonder then that my favorite work in ARS was Julia Varela’s Luddite smashed black screens, which shined like huge slices of obsidian in my eyes. No wonder that I find myself sitting with trees and recording serial images in a minimalistic way, in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get manner year after year. Uh. Perhaps I should go and see the exhibition again, in order to update my sensibilities, or at least understand what is going on…
 
 
 

The Month of the Ash ended yesterday, on the 17th of March, if we believe Robert Graves (see here) and other sources as well (see or here). The choice of which ash tree to visit for the third image in my tree calendar was obvious since several weeks; I knew there was an ash standing on the shore in Kaivopuisto Park near the pier and the cafeteria, so I did not have to guess and decipher the bare branches of the tree in winter shape. I passed by several times and noticed how the branches were too high to sit on, had a vague idea of hanging from the branch, in the same manner I once did hang from the branch of an old pine tree in Kalvola, in Year of the Dog in Kalvola – Calendar. But that time I visited the tree once a month for a year and edited all the moments of hanging to be one continuous movement, which was funny in some way. To hang from a branch real-time without any tools to help me would be impossible, except for a very short moment. So I had to do something else. I realized this weekend would be the last chance to record the ash, so on Saturday I went to do my regular visit to the tree on the hill and then walked down to the shore to visit the ash and see what I could do. I took some photos of the tree from various angles and found a perspective that felt quite allright. After one small test image I decided to simply stand and lean on the tree, with my hand on a broken branch. I also tried to hang, mainly out of a sense of duty – at least I could try, couldn’t I – but had no power to hang there for long enough. After I packed my things and walked toward the park I turned around to take one more snapshot with my phone, and realized that the ash tree looked quite beautiful when seen in full from a distance. So I did another version, recording the image across the path, fully aware that I would get all the passers-by included in the image, too. Thus I have two versions again, Ash in March 1 and Ash in March 2. I actually edited a shorter version of the latter, removing the passersby as well.
 

 

 

 

 
I took some still images before I started recording, and they show the ash from various angles:
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

As part of the artistic research project performing with plants I am supposed to not only perform with plants, or trees, but to write scores about or related to my performances, and that I have not thought about yet, so better to start soon. On twitter I saw a great event score by Yoko Ono, from 1961, Painting for the Wind, which is a form of performing with plants although the wind is the lead character. “Cut a hole in a bag filled with seeds of any kind and place the bag where there is wind. summer 1961” Others are interested in Fluxus today, the research assistant of a Finnish photographer contacted me and asked about Finnish Fluxus scores. I sent her one of my own, but had to admit that I do not know any Finnish Fluxus scores, although Fluxus was rather big in Sweden and Denmark. Starting from an existing score is one thing, and can be inspiring, but creating a score of one’s performance afterwards is another. So how could I score my visits to the trees in Kaivopuisto?
“Find a stub and sit on it, do it again as needed” or “Choose a tree, touch it slowly, repeat at least once a week”, or simply “Visit a tree regularly”.
Yesterday, on Saturday the sun was shining and all Helsinki seemed to be out in the park. Somebody had brought a horse and a sledge there, too, and was taking people on a ride around the park with bells ringing. The sun was warm, there was no wind, everything was lovely, for a change…
 

 

 

 
Today, on Sunday there was a new world awaiting me outdoors. The heavy fog of the morning was slowly transforming into a mist, and a pale sun was partly visible behind the cloud cover from time to time. The fog lingered as frost on the trees and the open sea had an ice cover again – winter had returned. On the hill by the shore the wind was cold; by the alder the water had frozen, dogs stopped by the tree stub to make fresh marks, and the bird watchers were out again with their huge telescope lenses. The horse sledge from yesterday was there, too.
 

 

 

 
So what about the score? “Sit on a stub look around; do it again the following day; notice the changes.” Or should I say enjoy the changes?
 

While entering the park today I noticed, for some reason, the monument next to the tree, which I usually ignore. A view from higher on the slope reveals the granite slabs standing quite near to it. They commemorate Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (1832-1901) who was an explorer and scientist, the first one to sail the whole Northeast passage, that is, along the north coast of Asia. He was born in Finland but had to move to Sweden because of his views on Russian politics. The monument is designed by Heikki Häiväoja, and you find more information about it here.
 

 

 
Two days ago, on Thursday morning, the snow was still falling when I left home, but it stopped by the time I was at the shore. The sun came out and then disappeared again, changing the whole landscape dramatically, back and forth…
 

 

 

 
On Friday morning it was still chilly, minus 6 degrees celsius, but sunny and clear. I realised a structural problem with my images: the morning sun shines beautifully from the east, as a side light, revealing the forms of the tree trunks when I am sitting on the hill, but it shines me directly in the eyes, and thus blinds the camera, too, when I sit on the alder stub down in the park. And that does not look very nice, as you can see…
 

 

 

 
On Saturday, today, I went out a little later, around noon, and the sun was not so bright today, shining momentarily from behind the clouds. There was not much wind, but it was could enough for me to keep my cap on. While sitting and looking at the small Uuninsuu strait I can observe the changes in the ice cover from day to day. Although the sea is mostly open further out, there is much ice on the northeastern side of Harakka Island. But I would not walk across the ice now, although I guess it would still be possible. And if this chilly weather continues it will probably take time before the ice disappears. Soon it is time for thaw. We call it “kelirikko” in Finnish, broken weather or broken road conditions.