memories

I think that memories are like portals or time traveling. Remembering smells, textures, places, etcetera proves ones self that they have lived. More than that, it suggests that existing is a series of events, and while the event is happening, you don’t know if it’ll be a part of your lived archive or not.

I can watch a movie in my mind

Memories are like an archive. It’s an archive I use to pull work from, sometimes. It’s an archive I have as a toolbox.

Dreams as memories
Foods as memories
Texts as memories


A dog house from the house where I grew up in that wasn’t lived by a dog

A tree by that dog house had a squirrel couple living in it

I took my little brother on the rooftop of the dog house when our home got too loud

The squirrels were often chasing each other


The reason why I think memories are a toolbox I use for my work, is because in me there’s a need to make sure, to know that other people can connect to something similar. So it’s very human. Looking for a connection in others. This is a simplified answer.

A good moment is when a work of memory comes together as such that a viewer of any age can relate to it. Relating of this kind doesn’t need words, it’s about delivering an atmosphere.

A good moment is when I view a work which is not my memory but still I think it could very well be. Movement, moments, places.

Paintings
Spaces
Sets
Textures
Sounds

“This took me back to my grandmothers house”

Reading books, poems, even text messages creates memories, which I think are equal to your lived memories, at least almost. They are an important ingredient: Your brain makes connections from your lived moments, the things you learn, read, dream, watch, observe, discuss, eat, touch, smell. Where and how you move, who you meet, where you are.
And "everyone is a me to themselves” is something I learned and realised when I was 13 years old.



There was a checkered tiling on the curb next to our house

I was flying one meter from high from the ground, slow like a snail

My body posture was like I was a four legged


After writing all this I think that what ultimately interests me in memories, is not trying to control them. Accepting memories, not thinking if they are true or false, not suggesting something is true, there’s no need to. Not filtering or questioning memories. It might be a lie but it is still a memory...

written notes ---->

Four reflections of humans were standing close to each other in an elevator
The elevator felt like a horse that had too many people riding on it’s back
It couldn’t get up but it couldn’t go back down either

A rooster and a chicken was the first thing I saw from my window when I woke up, my neighbour
had bought them the day before but I don’t know where one buys roosters and chickens. I wonder
how much energy and time they spent looking for a place to buy them.
The least they could do would be to build a nice house for them. Now the rooster and the chicken are just living on the
rooftop level of the house, and the material of that rooftop surface is nothing like a hay bed
or an earthy surface but more like asphalt, concrete, small rocks bound together.

A sound I recognised as a squeaky window woke me up at 6:40 and I got up to look out the window. There were two bright green parrots standing on the bar in front of the window, watching me sleep. Three, actually. One of them was grabbing the window sill vertically. The squeaky sound you get from rubbing friction: something against something and then up and down movement. Big round eyes and tilted heads looking inside and we live on the 6th floor, around 30 kilo meters from the ground level.

Geographically speaking geographically seeing means to speak, to see a line that has been drawn on a paper


A word and something that is not a word

How do they connect

Write a story where you describe how they could connect

What we really needed was to have a moment of stillness, to look at something just to look at it
See shapes and textures without touching, colours without thinking what kind
to see this colour on this shape to see this texture on this surface and under that surface something that made it look like something.

you can scroll down, sideways, up... every direction and zoom in

notes

Learning to not control memories

Accepting memories

True, false, fantasy, read material, heard material and finally, collective subconscious


In the Baltic Finnish mythology the world is created, when a sea bird that flies over the sea of nothingness drops its eggs while looking for a good nesting place. The eggs fall from high above to the sea and are shattered in its surface. From the shells of the eggs the earth and the lid of the sky are formed. From the yolk rises the sun, from the white the oceans and all the waters, the stars from the dots on the shells. All other matter is formed from other parts of the eggs.

In other stories from ancient Finnish and Karelian mythologies the North Star is a pin that is holding the blanket of the sky from falling down on us.

Birds that fly high above and dive to the deep waters are seen as messengers between humans and gods, flying through the layers of the universe to the transcendental and back. If a bird flies to a window or into your house, this is a message from the life beyond.

Spaces where the collective consciousness takes back to the stories of our ancient mothers and fathers.

Many of the tales in Finnish mythology and heritage help people to connect with the animals and the nature that surrounds them. The stories help people to protect the land and protect the Animalia. How is a human living in this age relating to the nature surrounding them? Could mythology help a modern human to be more wary of the nature surrounding them?

When these stories were gathered and told to children and they told them to their children, it was not a fantasy, but a part of reality.
For many of us today it is something ungraspable to see the world as they saw it, and we have grown to not see connections with spirits or transcendental places in our lives. This has partly made us ‘need’ other things in life such as material ownership, possession, money etc. (this is an unfinished thought)

Accepting memories: truthful and fictive, all the information your brain holds from stories to colours, shapes, images, sounds etc. can help to restore the "collective subconscious” (let’s call it that while in search of a better word). When the memory and mind is uncontrolled and anything is let out, we shape and stir it into something unknown. For me what came out of it was strongly connected with my heritage which I only learned afterwards.

There was a checkered tiling on the curb next to our house

I was flying one meter from high from the ground, slow like a snail

My body posture was like I was a four legged


In the mythologies mentioned before there is a bird nest located on the edge of the earth, where all the water birds move to across the sky in formations for the winter.


A dog house from the house where I grew up in that wasn’t lived by a dog

A tree by that dog house had a squirrel couple living in it

I took my little brother on the roof top of the dog house when our home got too loud

The squirrels were often chasing each other


The birth story of wolves and dogs

A woman who opened their legs towards the wind and could be impregnated by the wind, could carry a dog or a wolf in their womb.



A swan mother brought her six children to feed on weeds that grew from the water level on the stone wall

A rat came out from a dent on the stone wall and grabbed one of the swan children out from the water

The child disappeared to the hollow dent with the rats claw

The mother was crying, trying to push her head to the depths of the dent

She left with five children