If blue is sad tell me what is red

2010 – 2024

I stepped out of the sauna building. I was naked, it was dark, and the air temperature was −17°C. I immediately plunged into a hole cut into the frozen lake. I lasted only a few seconds, under the calm gaze of the locals.
As I surfaced, I heard music coming from the main room. I peered through the window: a man, an accordion. The cold reminded me that I was naked and exposed. I went back inside, took a shower, got dressed. The man had disappeared…

The following morning, I returned to Italy and tried to track him down, wondering: why not focus on a single person to tell the complexity of a place? Contain everything within a single figure?

I tried.

The project If blue is sad tell me what is red is based on the idea of “using” the individual to tell the whole; inevitably, in an insufficient, misleading, fallacious way.

I returned to Finland several more times, taking photographs and shooting vast amounts of static-camera footage. Editing took up a great deal of time, while the word echo began to emerge in discussions and thoughts related to the project. Echo as a distant, uncertain, unreliable memory. Echo as an indecipherable, confused message from what once was. Elusive. Echo as the blurred reflection of an image, the reverberation of bodies vibrating through history. The background noise of memories resurfacing in still images and in the stillness of the camera.

A story reduced to its barest terms, stripped of the complexities of history to become a still, motionless image — a shadow. And so, a continuous flow of passing time, an abyss of music and silence, an empty yet active space for the viewer.

Alongside the video, a small series of photographs explores the “outside”, the body, the matter; whereas the video explores the “inside”, the revelation, the word.

A series of film stills, enlarged to an extreme scale, evoke the grain of memory, the immateriality of recollection, the fallibility of images as testimonial evidence of reality.