FANTASMI – Hannu Aaltonen
Landscape paintings with a camera
Hannu Aaltonen
For people who have moved from rural areas to urban environments, nature experiences are increasingly shaped by moments of seeing the landscape. In addition to urban areas, people have moved into cars. The road network has evolved according to the wishes of modern man, emphasizing expressways. Classic scenic villages have become highway vistas. Rural lives, vibrant village scenes, are no longer the landscapes of modern man. The fast-paced highways whisk past traffic-calming measures and village communities. Expressways run through forests and fields, presenting the countryside as endless wilderness, flat farmlands, and the backyards of farms. The views are punctuated by deserted houses. Rural landscapes are characterized by the disappearance of people’s connection to nature almost entirely. The person in the rural landscape is a subject sitting in a car, seeing another townhouse’s yard stain or the forest’s shadow on a walking trail. Animals are also absent from the rural landscape: intensive livestock farming keeps animals in livestock buildings to ensure production.
A couple of years ago, as I deepened my photography skills, my studies led me to the road. For months, I drove nearly 200 kilometers daily. The experience revealed that the images I had previously formed were indeed the harsh truth for the everyday traveler. I began photographing my experiences of the highway and expressway. These photos form the foundation and material of this exhibition. I have captured the landscape as seen and experienced by the person in a car. What characterizes these views is movement and speed: there is no time to see anything clearly. The views, the images, stretch and become vague. When the experience of the landscape and views in Finland is long overshadowed by the twilight, rain, grayness, and darkness of the polar night, the landscapes gain new dimensions. Seeing turns into fantasies: visions, illusions, mirages, deliriums. Paradoxically, the most mundane moments of modern man’s life, the drive from home to work, commuting from one town to another and back, produce fantasies, where the reality becomes unreal. The images may be aesthetic but not realistic, rather distorted. The images are tinged with the imaginary; the unreal becomes the reality.
The fast-paced man’s daily life is interrupted by weekends, winter holidays, and summer cabin vacations. The urbanite dresses for nature. It’s either the dock at the summer cabin or an adventure tour operator’s motorized safari that leads to a tranquil moment. The person sits on the morning mist at the cabin dock, absorbing the sweet silence, which becomes nourishment for the next vacation moment. On the way home, in the fast-moving ride, the quiet moment stretches into an amorphous landscape view, but deep in the true Finnish heart, the memory of the water landscape keeps the dream of the beautiful homeland alive.
The concept of the Fantasmi exhibition has also been deeply influenced by my year-long participation in the implementation of the MaisemaGalleria – an environmental art project in the Kuopio region. The MaisemaGalleria has been funded by the Road Administration to create environmental artworks specifically along highways and expressways. In this context, the key aspect in designing and executing the works is that the viewer experiences the artwork while traveling in a moving car, in the fleeting moment. Some of the MaisemaGalleria works are located in such places that it is not even possible to stop on the highway. The speed society has now advanced so far that in dull, contentless environments, the road authority has felt it necessary to create new mental content to maintain the energy and perceptiveness of the busy person. The MaisemaGalleria in the Kuopio region spans 180 kilometers, and a similar project has been carried out between Pori and Kankaanpää.
After months of contemplation, photographing, making images, and preparing this exhibition, it was a remarkable experience to find a philosopher who has created his own science of speed! At the MaisemaGalleria opening, the exhibition juror-curator, artist Erkki Soininen, who had just concluded his work as the rector of the Academy of Fine Arts, quoted the French contemporary philosopher Paul Virilio.
When, shortly afterward, in December, I read Virilio’s dromological work The Speed of Escape, I realized that I had intuitively been investigating exactly the same things with my camera that he formulates into aphoristic wisdom with his words. It was delightful to borrow the name of my exhibition from Virilio’s The Speed of Escape. Virilio’s aphoristic thoughts felt very familiar to me: “You do not have speed, you are speed… The illusion of movement is beginning to be considered the truth of seeing, just as optical illusions are beginning to appear as life’s illusions… The congruence of the eye and the engine, the truth of seeing, transformed the rhythms of life completely… Speed handles vision as its raw material. With the acceleration of speed, traveling has become like filming. Less about images and more about producing new, unreal, supernatural traces of memory… Fast movement from one place to another means disappearing into the tomorrow’s celebration of the journey. The nihilism of speed destroys the reality of the world.”