The roadside shop in Kapsede.
Archive for the '2008 photo' Category
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.
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.
This is the first landscape (seascape) after returning to Finland, taken at the tip of Porkkala peninsula. Of the mainland, this is the closest point to Estonia and only about 37 km from Helsinki centre. The area was leased to the USSR during 1944-56. This is a great place for observing migrating birds–something I am not specialised in. A few days after taking of this picture two Estonians swum across the Finnish gulf, starting from here.
A couple of days before our return to Helsinki our friends took us for picking cherries near Livberze, south-west from Riga.
Here is one more landscape from Kapsede. The cost of heating has grown very much during Latvia’s EU membership. I’ve earlier shown you glimpses of the central heating system of the school and its surroundings (here and here). The system is outdated and will have to be replaced by something else. One proposal is a plant that would be producing electricity from (I hope I got this correct) corn waste. As a side product the faculty could offer heating to its neighbourhood – possibly noise and smells too. The plant would be located somewhere within this panorama. In the village the discussion about the plant is heated.
During the nights, if someone is not boosting their out of date techno, we hear the dogs, cranes, owls and tree frogs discussing. A bit later into the summer and it’d mainly be the crickets.
Half-way through renovation I had to acquire a battery driven drilling machine. It came bundled with a vacuum packed football–for a reason unclear to me.
Name of the place, Kapsede (prolong the first ‘e’), means the place where the dunes sat down. Long ago this was where the Baltic Sea was flushing its surfs. Now the sea is about nine kilometres away. The road from the former important harbour Liepaja to the now more important Ventspils follows the protected ridge of the ancient sea shore. Kapsede is within Liepaja’s immediate reach, yet truly countryside. Liepaja Metallurg’s chimneys are still pouring red smoke though the plant only runs at a fraction of its Soviet time powers.
We have been busy refurbishing Ausma’s kitchen, hence the silence. Under three layers of wallpaper we discovered the Russian Blue, variations of which always seem more like green to me.
Here is the salad recipe I earlier promised:
- green spring cabbage sliced thin
- a bit of grated carrots
- oil
- citric acid
- salt, sugar
- mix and squeeze well
- let stand for a couple of hours