'What is Left in the Temple of Memory' 2025-2026

Interdisciplinary project based on community research, video art and spatial installations in disused places, with focus in rural areas, and natural settings

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This interdisciplinary project is based on community research and site-specific installations in abandoned premises and natural landscapes, investigate dynamics-phenomena related to memory, time and their relationship, perception, nature.

 

The research, planning and implementation related to the project is scheduled during 2025-2026, in the rural areas of Ostrobothnia. The main artistic production is focused on the design and realization of large-scale spatial installations, including immersive and interactive ones, which will be open to the public through display events.

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The groundwork includes the involvement of locals connected to these locations through open dialogue interviews, written material and recordings with different mediums of objects, places, people and whatnot. The collection of inspirational material will also take place on a national and international scale, as an archival action.

The archive is intended to obtain material for the main artworks, for documentation with the focus on preserving, exploring and interconnecting stories that are about to fade away, investigating and translating them into active exchange and salient insights to stir and spur timeless introspective dynamics in our contemporaneity.

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The final art will be realised and achieved by embracing interdisciplinarity in the visual arts, also integrating words art, sound art, media art and performance art; all inextricably linked to space and time.

In the first site-specific installation and exhibition concept 'The Hidden Spots' the public will have to interact with an apparently bare, empty space, but one that actually conceals memories, stories, that for some reason have now fallen into oblivion.

The artistic corpus of the project also includes artworks to be displayed in more traditional exhibition spaces, such as galleries and museums. One example is the video art piece of the same name, in which the community and the public will be involved through the sharing of memories.

 

The project 'What is Left in the Temple of Memory' underlines the relationship between time and memory, the human perception and alteration, (our) precariousness; the traces left behind that wear out quickly and those that endure, history that fades and evaporates by repeating itself; what was so important and what is now… linked to the personal, human and transcendental dimension. Perceive differently the possible values of impermanence in perpetual awareness.

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From this universal perspective, as a counterbalance, attention is paid and value is given to sharing existences that bring us back to our present, to our surroundings.

‘Home’ as a body… as symbol of us. Intimacy and individuality, but also connective structures to the community and collectively. Personal memories that belong to us, and reminiscences imprinted unaware within us. 

 

Disused, abandoned, forgotten places what do they whisper… what do they exude?

 

What can and should we hear, do not forget? And what inevitably falls into oblivion, crystallizing in remote places of our unconscious? How tied are we to the material, to the tangible? How do the traces around us transform themselves, how do we perceive them, and what do they transmit to us? Why do we want to passively take refuge, but often escape from memory and estrange ourselves from our history? What do we hold, freeze, warp, and what should we really take from this unstoppable change and empty song of the phoenix… what could we become?

 

These are some of the questions the project wants to investigate and find a plural artistic expression to address and represent them through reflective, evocative experiences of individual poetics and collective imagination.

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In later stages of the project, the topics will also cover landscape and the environment, analysing our awareness and (altered) perception of the territory and its changes, as well as the idea of ´home´ and the construct of belonging.

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The art project is supported by Arts Promotion Centre-Taike.

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Partner and collaborators: Vaasa City Museums, Architect Ruusa Viljanen Rossi-Tidorum, Regional Dance Center in Ostrobothnia, Elokuvakeskus Botnia ry, Övermark Byaråd, Thommy Bergström, Roger Palmroos and Camilla Ågren, more to be announced.

Communication collaborators: Vaasa City Cultural Department, City of Nykarleby/Uusikaarlepyy, Korsnäs Municipality, Korsholm Municipality, Art in Malakta rf, Vaasa City Cultural Department, more to be announced.