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.
The Centre for Creative Photography in Jyväskylä shows my Nokia series between 28.8. and 21.9.2008.
These pictures take me even further back in time, to April 1990. We were a group of TaiK photography students on way to Cairo. We stopped in Sofia. The Bulgarian Communist Party had just released its absolute hold and was renamed The Bulgarian Socialist Party. Somewhere in the centre a group of men were reading newspaper spreads posted on billboards. One man was concentrating on the map of the country. Another man raised a vivid street talk with his one-man demonstration, claiming proper compensation for the time spent in a labor camp.
A couple of years later all my colour negatives from trips abroad disappeared from TaiK, leaving me with only a couple of rolls from Sofia. Luckily I still have some quick lab copies and b&w rolls.
Pictures from the 1996 trip, mostly from Porto. Having rummaged through the old negatives I found that I was experimenting with some collage panoramas already then. The results however, were not interesting enough. The current experiments turn out a bit more rewarding for me (for seeing, you can browse through some of my recent posts).
We all had attended Encontros da Imagem in Braga the previous year, 1996.
In March 1997 I had stayed with Rose and George in Melbourne, where one of my projects was in a group show at CCP. On the way home I stopped in Beijing for a couple of days. My hostel was within the centre’s old quarters: the major bulldozing was already in progress and many residents relocated to far away high-rise buildings.
What will eventually happen to the house inside a house? Dubulti, Jurmala.
Last Friday was hot. These panoramas are from Dubulti, Jurmala: a 30-minute train drive from Riga centre.
We came back to Riga a few days ago. This panorama from yesterday morning is from Dzirnavu street, view centered southwards. The brown building on the left is a health centre. The tower behind is Hotel Latvija, whose sky bar offers cocktail drinks named Orgasm and alike. Riga has developed a reputation for its sex tourism.
A bit more to the right, where the the aeroplane traces point to, you can see a glimpse of the Esplanade Park. The park hosts an orthodox cathedral, trampolines and a giant air-filled crocodile. Yesterday, in the playground while a sociology student was interviewing us about phone connections and the internet usage, a young Russian mother was beating her small boy with a shoe.
On the right, a couple of blocks behind the corner-shop cafe, is the Art Nouveau Riga where you may spot houses built by Mikhail Eisenstein, the father of the film director Sergei. During these five years I’ve been strolling Riga the area has grown very posh.
