ARCHIVE II – Olli Larjo, Lasse Wallenius
Archive II, the second part of the Archive installations, premiered at Galleria Kone on February 1, 2019. It was later exhibited the same summer at the Ars-Häme exhibition “Space as the Background of Perception” at Old Glass Factory in Riihimäki and at the national Ceramega exhibition at Voipaala Art Center in Valkeakoski in 2020.
Archive II continues the six previous Archive exhibitions, which were displayed across Finland between 2012 and 2016.
The Concept of Archive
Archive is a narrative concept characterized by spatiality, transformation, growth, evolution, and progression. The story is neither coherent, logical, nor complete—instead, it depicts the groping and phobic wandering of two fictional male characters through apocalyptic mental landscapes. The visions that emerge from this story and this landscape form the imagery and installation elements of the Archive.
The story began with two men, Operations Manager Larjonov and Janitor Wallén, who were left behind at a research station on the tundra to maintain its basic functions while the rest of the staff departed. The researchers were supposed to return in about a month to continue their work. If, for any reason, this did not happen, the two men would be retrieved, and the station would be abandoned.
However, Larjonov and Wallén’s stay at the research station was prolonged, and their connections to the outside world were severed. Their internal visions, fears, and the distorted logic of isolation soon took precedence over their daily routines, and the very existence of the station took on a new meaning in their minds.
They began to believe that they were part of a game, where climate change, a great flood, strange messages written in cryptic symbols, and the research materials found at the station all seemed to fall into place in an uncanny way. They became convinced that they had been given a new, more difficult, and more important mission—to save the world from an impending catastrophe: the flood.
The Archive Remains
The men vanished, but the materials they left behind were discovered and presented in the Archive installation: iron, ceramics, glass, salt, bronze, bones, fish remains, lights, pumps, photographs, texts…
These fragments referenced, on one hand, technology, knowledge, and science—control; and on the other, a mystical past, history, mythological narratives, animism, dystopia—the uncontrollable. This is what the Archive was made of.
The men disappeared, but their trail has been rediscovered. They had left the research station and traveled north for hundreds of kilometers along a nearby river, eventually reaching the sea. At the river’s mouth, in an abandoned school, a New Archive created by Larjonov and Wallén was found—an archive that the undersigned now wish to present.
Translated with ChatGPT