Stop Motion Animation Short Film – 2022
Janina Hedström, Kaisa Penttilä, Pihla Kuusela and myself
This stop-motion short film is the final outcome of research on Sámi worldviews and cultures. In spring 2022 our team, Pihla, Kaisa, Janina and myself, started to learn about the last indigenous people in Europe, the Sámi, that is colonized by Finland, Sweden, Norway and Russia. By learning more about how the Sámi sees and experiences their landscapes, we decided to challenge the way we see our own.
Along the articles that we read two things kept coming back to us. One was how Sami viewed time, not as carefully precise minutes but as cyclical, and the other was how they learn. One of the most experienced measures of time is the seasons, depending on the location we experience different weathers and year cycles. Our team, composed of two Finns, one Swede Finn and one French, allows us to look at Southern Finnish seasons in different ways. We invented seven new seasons, which includes seasonal city practices, like gravel from the first snow to early spring, weaving experience and feelings. To name them we mixed our four languages, Finnish, Swedish, English and French, and came up with names that illustrated the feelings and emotions that each season created in us. Doing with our hands was important to us for this project, using a variety of mediums and recycled materials was a way for us to go back to our hands and to honour Sámi practice duodji. We started by doing a model of a prefabricated wooden house, common in Finland. Then we used old clothes, fabric, and threads to weave each of the seven seasons for the video. Afterwards, we sewed them together in a big patchwork. It was displayed as a roof above the seats to watch the video in the resulting exhibition at Aalto. The poem was written by all of us, to express in different ways our experiences, and in homage to Nils-Aslak Valkeapää that greatly inspired us. The sounds of the video were mostly gathered on our trip to Sápmi, where we hunted and interviewed water drops, snowy winds and timid waves.
Our goal was to have fun, to do something truer than our usual architecture projects, to renew with experiences and feelings, and to honour Sámi culture and land.
Process of the short The House of Landscapes – 2022