| FILM AND VIDEO COLLAGES (2008–2023)
I
In 2008, I made a painting on a hundred-meter-long blank film, and named it Pori–Helsinki. Pori is the town where I lived for the first 20 years of my life. Then I moved to Helsinki. The process of hand-painting this film was a mental travel between these two places. Tapani Rinne and Tuomas Norvio (aka Verneri Lumi) made the soundtrack. Pori-Helsinki formed the basis for the films following it.
II
The next film was Sea (2013). Sea shows nighttime waves, life under the sea, and millions-years-old amber at the bottom of the sea. Sea is painted on a 35mm negative copy made of Pori-Helsinki. The result is much darker scenes, but also what Freud called the ‘oceanic feeling’, ego submerging with the universe. Sea was premiered at the same time in two cities across the sea, Helsinki and Stockholm. Pentti Dassum made the soundtrack.
III
Attraction (2015) is painted upon Sea, and it is my vision of a garden. I painted Attraction in the aftermath my trip to Rome, and after seing two thousand years old garden frescoes of Livia, there. Emma Augustsson, Anton Svanberg and Jesper Eriksson made the soundtrack.
IV
Beautiful Confusion (2017) is painted upon Attraction. Beautiful Confusion deals with the nature of things, the law of nature and messenger pigeons. Like the image, also the soundtrack consists of analog and digital layers. The soundtrack is a collage of P.P.Puska's and Zemlja's improvisations.
V
The fifth film, Mixed Feelings (2020) has lots of movement and passing views, but in contrast also tiny microscopic dust particles, that were drifting around the studio and caught onto the film. In this film, analog and digital working are more mixed with each other than in the beginning of the series. The soundtrack consists of P.P. Puska’s 4-track recordings on c-cassettes. Puska´s music is stored among the tracks of old mixtapes from friends.
VI
When painting the sixth film, Uusi mato | New Bugs (2021/22), I let the images emerge from the subconscious and lead the way. After painting, and digitizing, a hundred meters of film, I cut fragments from my video archives and added them. The result is a video collage where things merge, collide, intrude into each other and circulate; sometimes bird eats worm, and at other times worms eat carcass of a bird.
The soundtrack consists of P. P. Puska’s music and four-track recordings on used cassette tapes.
VII
Trapeze Net / Trapetsiverkko (2023) started at the cottage out of amazement at how many types of webs spiders could weave. Messy and clear ones. A broken thread web was quickly replaced by a new one. The spider silk never ran out. According to one text, spiders spin silk from their own secretions. It is produced as long as they get nourishment from the web. That's why a spider always climbs back onto the thread.
The film keeps on metamorphing and mutating.
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