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.
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