Avara Luonto, 2015
Wild Nature is a multichannel video and installation that explores the longing for nature and the simultaneous inevitable sense of isolation.
The multi-channel installation presents a series of performance videos on multiple screens. The performances involve digressions, immersions and depressions, listening and bumping into each other. The videos were filmed on consecutive days over a two-week period in a residency in the sarcophagus. The material has been edited in post-production to add glitch effects that disrupt the otherwise tranquil stillness. The combined duration of the footage is approximately two hours.
From Work Diary, October 2015
Halfway through the stay, I begin to adjust to the presence of the forest. I no longer startle at every bird trying to take flight, step through the mosses into the water lilies, or am surprised by the totality of the darkness in the early evening. I have always been a city dweller who can’t even sleep in a detached house without the noise of the neighbours. In silence. When I go into the woods alone and am motionless, I can hear the sounds of a ferry in the distance as it passes the shore.
I try to cover my tracks. On my first trip to the woods, I tear a big chunk of moss and lichen off a steep cliff as I try to get down. I try to put it back so no one will notice I’m breaking the forest. Later, when I climb the trees, I feel guilty about every mark my landing boot leaves in the bark of the gnarled pines. I treat the forest as if it were on loan. Who am I responsible to? To the forest?
When I walk across an old logging clearing, I stay on a path trodden by someone who has gone before.
Ideas developed in the city feel glued on and far-fetched in the middle of nature. I begin to question the content and my way of working. Should I try less after all? How do I achieve authenticity? How much do I present and perform? Why do I shoot and what do I want to communicate? What kind of a whole is my work forming? What might it look like to an outsider?
During my residency, I am trying to continue the project of the last few months to isolate myself from the influences of the art scene. I am a recent graduate, having studied art at two levels of education for a total of seven years. I feel like I have lost the thread of my own making under everything I have absorbed from outside. How do you do art properly? Can it be done wrong?
For a long time, I reach small moments when I enjoy making art. The quest for professionalism has begun to make all work external and, in retrospect, pretentious. Now I try to work like an amateur. On sunny days, in boredom, for the joy of making. If I don’t feel like it, I don’t do anything.
In the last year of my studies, I made a massive installation out of paper. One of my teachers suggested that this could be your thing, use this paper and make these. I was deeply offended – I can do so many other things, harder things, whereas everyone can staple a bit of paper to the walls. The need to pretend, it’s hard to let go of that.
And now here I am, in a house in the middle of a forest in the middle of the sea. And I’m shooting videos of me walking in the woods, trying to move so as not to leave the first trace.
Exhibited in gallery 3H+K 24.9. – 13.10.2016
http://www.nyte.fi/galleria-3hk/anni-saijonkivi-avara-luonto-24-9-13-10/