Sites and Departures

PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY HIPPOLYTE
Sites and Departures, 7–30 March 2008

Opening hours: Tue-Fri 12.00–17.00, Sat 12.00–16.00 (the Gallery will be closed on Good Friday, 21 March).
A discussion on the topic of 'landscape' will be held on Thursday 13 March at 17.00. 
The panellists are artists Tuula Närhinen, Jussi Kivi and Ari Saarto. (Discussion in Finnish)


The exhibition Sites and Departures presents a compilation of work that the photographic artist Ari Saarto has been working on in Japan since 2004. The exhibition consists of two series, Suicide Forest and Aomori Water Walks, neither of which have previously been seen in Finland.

On the north-western slopes of Mt Fuji, a few hours' drive from Tokyo, lies Aokigahara Jukai ('Sea of trees'). Growing on fields of lava left by an ancient volcanic eruption, the unique forest has a mythical reputation in Japan. The terrain is rough and breathtakingly beautiful – and more than 50 people commit suicide there every year. In Saarto's photographs, the landscape is traversed by nylon lines that are used to mark the route for paramedics to reach the bodies. The lines are not removed afterwards, and the site of the suicide is not cleared.

The panoramas in the Suicide Forest series were shot in March 2006. In addition to them, the work also includes a video entitled Aokigahara Jukai: Suicide and Amnesia in Mt. Fuji's Black Forest. Originally shot on 8mm film, the video was inspired by an article about three suicide cases published in 1988 by Professor Yoshimoto Takahashi. In each case described by Takahashi, the failed suicide attempt involved amnesia ('Suicide Life Threat.' Behaviour. Vol 18, issue 2, 1988).

The theme of the conceptual installation Aomori Water Walks is presence. In 2004, Saarto trekked for more than 110 kilometres in Japan, taking photos of the landscapes and collecting water samples from mountain brooks as well as ocean bays in cheap soft drink bottles. The samples were frozen to preserve them for this exhibition.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ari Saarto (b. 1961) has also previously created serial works that address the themes of presence, documentary and landscape: Topography of Murder (killings and executions in the 1918 Finnish Civil War and mapping them with photographs, 2001), Topography of Fear (the threat of violence in the public urban space, 2001) and IN SITU (dwellings of the homeless in Japan and Finland, 2001–2005).

Saarto's work has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions in Finland and internationally, including Great Britain, Italy, Austria, Germany and Japan.

IN SITU 2001–2005

Can there be human excistence without traces or memories? If not, how long can a memory, a piece of evidence or a relic survive?

These are the questions I have approached in my exhibition, examining the traces and evidence of human presence in the huts and shacks of the homeless. Traces, oblivion and vanishing are the prevailing themes of IN SITU.

In IN SITU the outcasts and their huts are the objects of landscape photography, as opposed to the approaches of traditional photojournalism or methodical documentarism. The builders of these huts are mainly invisible to us, located on the peripheral vision of society. However, in the images, their presence is still discernible - as if someone had just been there.

In the images a parallel is drawn between Kyoto, Osaka, Tokyo –a metropolis without evident borders– and Helsinki. Two cultures, divided by thousands of kilometres, with different histories and languages, meet. A moving similarity can be seen in the tents and huts of the images.

IN SITU continues my series of exhibitions focusing on landscape and visual re-mapping with images. Photography is a logical instrument for this work, an instrument, which is in very complex ways also believed to be neutral. The themes have varied from the executions and violence of the 1918 Civil War in Finland (Topography of Murder, 2001), the threat and fear in city space (Topography of Fear, 2001) and hiking (Aomori Waterwalks -installation, Japan 2004).

\In si'tu\ [L.] In its natural or original position or place; in position; -- said specif., in geology, of a rock, soil, or fossil, when in the situation in which it was originally formed or deposited.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.