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2009
Remembrance of
Landscapes Past
Community Art Project
3rd
year six-formers of Mynämäki Upper Secondary
School
Mynämäki, Finland 2008-2009
14 videos, 10 pairs of photographs and the sound
installation about landscapes with a special
meaning.
Remembrance of Landscapes Past is a community
art project about the importance of landscape to
people. A song of praise to personal experience
and the ordinary landscapes we flash past in our
cars, but which to some are treasured places, the
milestones of identity.
Here the objective is for the subjects to observe
and become conscious of their own environment.
Remembrance of Landscapes Past is carried out
with the third year six-formers of Mynämäki
Upper Secondary School in Finland in
2008–2009. What students had in common was
the experience of living in the countryside,
either on outlying farms or rural conurbations.
The theme concerned seeing one’s own living
environment, observing changes and experiencing
landscapes as one’s own. After the
students’ contributions and the resulting
exhibition, the project widened to include the
personal landscape experiences of members of the
community.
The project was largely realised through videos
and photographs. The students would find someone
to interview who showed them a place considered
important but which no longer existed. Together
they went to look at the place and when the
interviewee was telling about the changes that
had occurred in the landscape, the student
videoed the scene. This was no national landmark,
but some inconspicuous ordinary scene that would
not attract the attention of someone flashing
past in their car. It is only when another person
tells the story and conveys their impressions
that a landscape acquires a special meaning. To
my mind, it was important that we didn’t
just think about the experienced landscape among
ourselves but that the discussion of changes in
the environment was extended to others within the
student’s circle. The landscape was not
created in a single night but has been lived in
and moulded by many generations. The more we know
of the different layers in this complex fabric,
the richer will be our experience.
The name of the project comes from Marcel
Proust’s novel In search of lost time, the
other English name of which is Remembrance of
things past. The book closely follows the
subjective emotions of the young protagonist. It
is suggested that from these subjective
observations an objective picture of man’s
psyche is born. I had something like this in
mind: that we gather information from numerous
personal experiences to learn how landscapes have
changed and how these changes affect people.
In Proust’s story, the young protagonist
travels the road from idealism to realism.
Perhaps the same thing happens with my sixth
formers. Man’s life circle expands from
oneself to the surrounding reality in which
changes are inevitably taking place. It is then
essential to replace cynicism by knowledge and
feel that things can be influenced. The students
were at a turning point in their lives: the end
of school and the beginning of life outside the
home.
In addition to videos, pairs of photographs were
also used to document changes. Students searched
through the family photo albums for pictures in
which a landscape was either the actual subject
or the background. I encouraged them to choose
pictures of quite insignificant scenes and then
think why they had been taken in the first place.
They then took a new photo of the same place. I
also persuaded them to believe that photos could
express change. Even though they perhaps thought
that no change had actually taken place, it was
worth while taking the picture and making the
comparison. We were often quite surprised.
A major part of working with the students
concerned studying their work. In analyzing the
pairs of photos and videos we thought about the
changes that had taken place in the landscapes.
Their foremost reaction was surprise with the
degree to which familiar landscapes had changed.
Even though the album pictures were familiar, as,
too, were the places in the present landscape,
the changes only became apparent when they were
compared. The students drew the following
conclusions from the photos: that the general
standard of living has risen, ie, prosperity,
defined gardens rather than open spaces, changes
in agriculture, spread of thickets, free-time
spent in different ways, new housing rather than
repairing old buildings.
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