OUROBOROS-LANDSCAPE OF MEN

About the exhibition:

Ouroboros – Landscape of Men explores the complex relationship between humans and nature in Hietasaari, an island district in Oulu, Finland, where urban development and land use pressures are transforming a fragile local environment. Work reflects on cycles of construction, decay, and renewal. Moments when human presence fades and nature slowly reclaims what has been left behind. The project has approached this change in landscape for example from the perspective of trees — silent witnesses, victims and conquerors of continuous change. Between these phases lies a liminal space where abandonment and flourishing coexist, where the traces of history persist as foundations, cellars, artefacts and remnants of vanished lives.

Working with traditional analog photography and especially experimental analog methods Keijo investigates how time, light and material memory inscribe themselves onto the photographic surface. Keijo left pinhole cameras and photographic papers in the ground and lodged them in trees in Hietasaari for a periods of time and waited patiently, sometimes many months, how papers record the time, soil and decay. Each print becomes a fragment of evidence, a record of what has been and already begun to fade. The physical process of working with light-sensitive materials echoes the act of remembering and forgetting.