12.11. In-between art and anthropology by Annu Wilenius

What do anthropology and art have in common? (Annu):

1. Experience: Both are something you have to really go through, be there - an idea or reading about it is not the same.
2. Presentation: again, you have to think how to present the experience, how the doing presents what you are wanting to present.

Thus an exercise of "writing an image".

Of the House I Grew Up in...Helsinki-Ulaanbaatar
digital photographs, voice-over, Mongolian translation, photograph, 2007-2011

I grew up in a house built by a carpenter out of scrap building materials just after the Second World War ended. The house grew through the years from the first centre part to have a second centre part, higher than the first with a balcony over-looking the sea. Then there was the East wing and some years later the West wing. There were ‘front’ doors on every side of the house as well as terraces and smaller balconies. The materials used were sometimes appropriate, sometimes not so and definitely more innovative than conventional. My all time favourite is the stair elevations built out of rubber door fasteners. And of course half the electricity switches and water taps were connected the wrong way around.

When I first came to Mongolia I was fascinated by the ger districts with their amazing combination of settlement and nomadism: gers and gardens. To learn more I asked several artists who had grown up in the Ulaanbaatar ger districts to show me around in their childhood environments. What happened to me as I walked through the fences and self-built villas with their balconies and newly started flowerbeds was that I suddenly recognised my own childhood environment in Helsinki, Finland in the 1970s. Then the roads were still unpaved and the gardens more like patches of forest than anything else. Also people themselves mostly built the houses – at least partly. All this was rapidly changing already then and now most of the area is very neatly asphalted and the villas come from construction companies’ brochures.

Besides the ‘childhood walks’ into ger districts I also visited current ger district dwellers, especially ones with elaborate gardens, and people who invited me to parties. From all this photographic material I then put together a slideshow that I paired with a voice-over describing my childhood home and its environment changing in my experience from the 70’s to the 2000’s.

I have presented this work in different contexts (and versions) in Finland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Austria and now finally in Mongolia. In Europe the most remarkable reaction was that of being shown something people would have imagined as slum and misery as something lively and positive. In a Viennese conference several architectural historians marvelled at the inherent, wonderful aesthetic of these areas and were clearly invigorated by the idea of seeing ger districts with a positive slant and not just as problems to solve. Besides this the structure of the work was much commented for its eerie connections and a sense of ‘creating memories’.

Showing the work in Ulaanbaatar I could see that the images, that held such exotic fascination for European audiences, aroused almost no interest at all; it’s all too familiar. As to the voice-over story, I received only one direct comment: A Chinese visitor enquired if there was something wrong with the work as the images and the story seemed to be mismatched… 

(I'll try juggling with the googledocs to add a link to the pdf of her book about the Bare House exhibition in Ulaaanbaatar which Annu sent me)