This morning I went to see the Local Time exhibition. Not mine obviously but another one in Riga with the same title. You see, just two days before my exhibition opening I heard that Riga Goethe institute will open almost simultaneously a poster exhibition of Stefan Koppelkamm’s long-term project Local Time — which I only managed to see on the last day of mine.
The morning was as rainy as yesterday, topped with strong wind. Again many umbrellas passing by the gallery. I was passing time by taking pictures of them. Between 12:30 and 14:00 local time.
Riga, 7 pm local time, an umbrella walked into the gallery carrying a well dressed somewhat tipsy man. He (the man) pointed to this picture and said (in a mix of Latvian, German, English and Russian) that this is not interesting at all.
Then he gave me a long list of all the old cars from the 30’s he has collected and restored and of the precious medal he has won for one of his cars in Rostock. After this he listed all the places he has given concerts in — around the world, of course. He was not able to finish his proud description on how fine a house he owns on the other side of the river because I had to answer a phone call.
Speaking of cars, this morning I placed my old bumpy Citroen in a guarded parking lot. While paying for the service, the watchman bitterly told me how he “can’t understand why Latvia is in such dire straits, so many clever people we have. Here are no chances. Here I sit all day long and all I see is cars. Only cars. This is no life.”
Riga. 7 pm local time. An umbrella walked into the gallery carrying a well dressed somewhat drunken man. He (the man) pointed to this picture and said (in a mix of Latvian, German and English) that it is not interesting at all.
He then gave me a long list of all the vintage cars he has collected and restored and he told of the precious medal he has won for one of his cars in Rostock. After that he listed all the important places he has been to – around the world, of course. He did not quite manage to accomplish his proud description of how fine a house he owns on the other side of the river because I had to answer a phone call.
Speaking of cars, this morning I placed my bumpy Citroen in a guarded parking lot. While paying for the service, the watchman bitterly told me how he “can’t understand why Latvia is in such dire straits, so many clever people we have. Here are no chances, no work. Here I sit all day long and all I see is cars. Only cars. This is no life.”
I am attending the gallery during the two last days of the exhibition. It is raining here in Riga. Umbrellas are passing by the gallery window dragging people beneath. An hour can go before any of the umbrellas decide to take a look in. I feel a curious sympathy with gallery supervisors.
Local time 3 pm. A girl is travelling by train from France to Japan and stops in Riga and ends up in the gallery. She accepts a copy of the Survival Handbook to accompany on her 8-day journey.
On Wednesday I will close here and take the exhibition to Ventspils, to Juras Varti culture house. Opening on Friday, local time.
I am attending the gallery during the two last days of the exhibition. It is raining here in Riga. Umbrellas are passing by the window dragging people beneath. An hour can go before any of the umbrellas decide to take a look in. I feel curious sympathy with gallery supervisors.
Local time 3 pm. A girl is travelling by train from France to Japan and stops in Riga and ends up in the gallery. She accepts a copy of the Survival Handbook to accompany on her 8-day journey.
On Wednesday I will wrap up here and take the exhibition to Ventspils, to Jūras Vārti culture house. Opening on Friday, local time.
Hi. Long time no see. The summer has much gone preparing for the exhibition which was opened last Thursday. Vietējais Laiks (Local Time) will be open until September 29th in Gallery Carousell in Riga old town.
In the exhibition are shown projects Relating Latvia and If Nokia were a place… As a third, new project I published a Survival Handbook. Kārlis Vērpe wrote an essay and Zigmunds Lapsa made the design. The Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art is the publisher. In Helsinki you can obtain the book from Kiasma shop, Photograhic Gallery Hippolyte, FMP bookshop and Gallery Luova.fi which also has an online bookshop.
Salo Art Museum opened their summer exhibition last Friday. Among many other artworks commenting farming, there’s a selection from Hay on The Highway – a joint project I accomplished with Yrjö Tuunanen in 1993.
Hundreds of free journalists protested against Sanoma News in Helsinki yesterday. The media house says they stop collaboration with free lancers who won’t sign the dictated new agreement. Sanoma News aims to take all known and unknown usage rights with syndication, selling further and manipulation rights to texts, photographs and illustrations for the price of a single publication, while leaving the free lancers alone juridically responsible.
Sanoma News is part of the Sanoma Group. The corporate altogether (with a 300 million euro operating profit) publishes over 300 European magazines and Finland’s two most read newspapers along with above ten other newspapers. They own the leading picture agency in Finland. In book publishing they are the Finnish market leader and significant europe-wise too. They have five TV stations and three radio stations in Finland. In the Baltics and Finland Sanoma Group is the market leader in press distribution, kiosks, cinema theatres etc.
It seems as the Finnish media emporium’s first aim is to deliver maximum profit for shareholders and to gain maximum grip over production and distribution of information – free journalism comes only after that. What else can you make of it?
A photo of myself was found and put in this blog’s “about” page. I just thought you might want to see who you’re dealing with.
My Relating Latvia exhibition was opened last night at LCB, Berlin.
In my previous post I told a few words about Lapua. Aside from the exhibition installation work I had some spare time to walk around the city; it must have been some twenty years from the previous time there. This wall arrangement in a flea-market was zealously preserving the core values of the White Finland: home, religion and fatherland. For those who don’t recognise the man in the framed print below Jesus: he is Marshal of Finland, C.G. Mannerheim. I felt like time had stopped long-ago, and I don’t mean just the antique clock on the wall. I had to double check that my own watch was running: it was indeed, and so I went out into the fresh autumn air.
Last week my exhibition If Nokia were a place… was opened in Lapua, at Ostrobothnian Photography Centre. This is the ending for a year of touring Finnish venues. Lapua is 200 km north from Nokia.
Lapua is known as a make of ammunition, a bit like Nokia is known as a mobile phone brand (and was previously known as a make of rubber boots). The factory in Lapua was the primary supplier of ammunition for the Finnish army during Winter War and World War II.
In 1976 a serious accidental explosion happened at the factory, killing 40 people. After this the factory has been moved away from the city centre, and the former plant converted to a cultural centre and named as Vanha Paukku (The Old Bang / Explosive Charge). That is where my Nokia series is now hanging.
When I had settled in Lapua, this sweat braking mural greeted me in the chill out room of my hotel sauna: two wrestlers locked in an embrace and large caliber gun cartridges lined up along the beds of Lapua river.
Lapua sits in the South Ostrobothnia flatlands. The region has played a big bang whenever the classes have clashed. During the 1918 Civil War (while Nokia was Red) the White army stronghold was up in the flatlands. In 1929, the violent anti-communist Lapua Movement started from here, eventually aiming for a fascist rule. In 1596 the Club War, the last peasant revolt in Europe started – from South Ostrobothnia. The peasants, armed with clubs, marched the 200 km to Nokia where they were defeated a week later. The school tableau below illustrates the peasant encampment in Nokia.
Picture above was taken in Nokia, 2002.
Again Finland woke from a slumber into a nightmare. Less than 11 months after the Jokela school shooting a similar tragedy repeated in Kauhajoki.
STAKES (National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health) reported in July 2008 Dialogi magazine that the state has not taken responsibility of formulating a comprehensive national account of school curatorial and psychological resources.
The need for more resources was recognised in 1973 and a committee proposed that by mid-80’s in Finland should be established 500 posts for school psychiatrists and another 500 for school curators. But professor Matti Rimpelä from STAKES states that the general interest in resources for children and youngsters died out already in the early 80’s.
Rimpelä has tried to find the data for 1980’s but all of it has disappeared which, he says, well describes the attitude. Since then, only two questionnaires were carried out: in 1990-91 Finland had 201 curators and 123 psychiatrists, in 1993-94 just a tad more. During the 90’s the burden on the resources grew a lot. After 1994 no studies have been made: no-one knows the numbers of today.
Meanwhile, Finland has been internationally shining for its success in the PISA studies. Thousands of experts have traveled to Finland to learn from the educational wonderland. It goes without saying that, a study of the “PISA tourism” has already been carried out.
So, has the country been dreaming about unlimited marvels of the uncontrolled economy while making of decisions has been handed over to the business world? Has it been a dream where everyone takes care of themselves only? Also within families.
My first moves in Russia took place in the mid 80’s when I was still in music, and our band Kadotetut (The Lost Ones) was among the first western rock groups to play in the USSR (this was roughly two years before Uriah Heep’s 1987 concert in Moscow). The train was then a great way of making it to Leningrad or Moscow. The atmosphere in the old style restaurant cars was charming, something that you could still enjoy in 2006 on a train to St. Petersburg:
Recently the Repin trains were changed to modern hardware, resulting in interiors quite as uninspiring as their Finnish counterparts.
Commuting in the large cities can be nightmarish instead, like when I was in Moscow photographing at the Millionaire Fair: the previous night’s 20-minute taxi drive took 3 hours and 40 minutes the following day. Many drivers had the nerve to start tailing ambulances wedging their way through the streets. The picture below was taken towards the end of the drive.
At the fair houses like this were on offer.
Meanwhile, in the outskirts of St. Petersburg multiple colossal suburbs were under construction.
I continue with publishing older travel pictures. In an earlier post I told about the disappeared color negatives. I just went through my multiple piles of quick lab copies from our student trip to Cairo in 1990.
The locally made prints are nicely tanned, but it is hard to say anything else positive about the pictures. It is disturbing to go through 15 rolls worth of images and to see that nearly all of it is rubbish. This one popped up though. It was taken at the camel market and it seems to record something about the great theatre of trading.
The course was titled Contact Photography. Our teacher Stefan Bremer said that he does not want us to bring in pictures of people’s backs. I think I took this too seriously, as I remember the sentence knocking in the back of my head for long. So I have heaps of sluggish compositions with a local fruit seller, shoe trader or meat seller grinning for the camera. When using black and white I seem to have experienced a few more moments of questioning the designated modus operandi.
Maira’s book about the life of a girl in her early teens was published last Friday. Even if you can’t read Latvian, you can get a clue about the stories through Anete Melece’s illustrations. The publisher is specialising on books for children and youngsters: readers which for long have been overlooked by the industry in Latvia. Maira Dobele: Nepareisas dzives skola.
