| Reliving, re-enactment, and remembering form an important part of my personal work. I am interested in re-telling stories that have been passed down, giving importance to past events that I played no part in but feel a connection to through the experience of others. I often use staging and re-enactment to blur the boundaries of past and present. In the series Finnish Civil War I have used models to stage imaginary scenes, trying to picture moments that might have happened but never got recorded in history. The aim is to invoke the past and to examine ways of visually working through traumatic events in history. The scenes I am showing are clearly staged, and do not necessarily follow historical fact. |  |
Elina Jokipii
Reliving, re-enactment, and remembering form an important part of my personal work. I am interested in re-telling stories that have been passed down, giving importance to past events that I played no part in but feel a connection to through the experience of others. I often use staging and re-enactment to blur the boundaries of past and present.
In the series Finnish Civil War I have used models to stage imaginary scenes, trying to picture moments that might have happened but never got recorded in history. The aim is to invoke the past and to examine ways of visually working through traumatic events in history. The scenes I am showing are clearly staged, and do not necessarily follow historical fact. Susan Sontag in her book Regarding the Pain of Others comes to the conclusion that an image, which is purely fictional, might show the reality of war better than a documentary photograph that might come with questions about its authenticity, intention, and the possibility of being used for propaganda purposes. I am trying to create scenes that might have been, but also sometimes leaving the signs of the present day into the frame, to show traces of the past as a kind of remembrance. Although the subject matter is universal and not necessarily tied to a specific time and place, it seems to have a special significance in Finland within my own generation with our coming to terms with a recent past that for our grandparents and even parents, would have been an untouchable terrain.
Another current series, Postcards, is based on French official propaganda postcards from the First World War aimed to bring hope and comfort to those at home. I have re-staged the scenes from these old postcards in studio using contemporary costumes. My aim has been to create a way of thinking about contemporary warfare and military rhetoric through the historical imagery. The soldiers, their sweethearts, and the nurses conscientiously taking care of them are shown in modern day dress but acting out old-fashioned scenarios. At one level they are just comical enactments of a historical mode of propaganda. But they also act as a reminder that the sentiments accorded to serving soldiers are still part of an ideology of heroism being played out in contemporary warfare. We may think our contemporary imagery is much more sophisticated yet the content and ideology remains similar in modern portrayals of heroic soldiers.
