See the visits to the pines in January and February 2021
This video, recorded on Monday the 31st October in Helsinki, on Halloween actually, in beautiful sunny weather is not really about composting in a strict sense but more an example of my method of revisiting and some other methods, and is more related to recycling or regurgitating than composting because it is about layers and combinations rather than decomposing. Of the prompts provided I guess this would relate mostly to the idea of moving towards the other slowly - I'm trying to connect with the pine trees - and of course the question of what are the methods to stay open for oddkin relations or not necessarily only to stay open but to develop and nourish them or train for them even. So, what I did was I returned to the two pine trees that grow on Shifferholmen or slate island outside Helsinki, which I used to perform with in the middle of the pandemic in January and February 2021. And the layers of methods, we could say that this act of returning to the site and recording an image of the site now, I have explored in other works before with a longer time between the original work and the revisit than this less than two years in this case. One layer is this revisiting. Another layer of methods is of course these two actions that I here try to remember, what I did with the pines daily. First with one of the pines in January I was holding onto the pine, standing next to it and touching it, which was actually recycling something that I had done with a juniper many years before. And the other action in February daily with the other pine was an exercise that I called becoming tree based on an article in a yoga magazine, it's actually doing the two-legged tree pose, so simply raising one's arms and then standing, trying to balance on one's toes. And doing that with a tree you can of course try to reach up to towards its crown. And the videos compiled originally of these materials that are now, or these repeated daily performances, provide another technique, namely time-lapse videos. So taking one image of the same action or of the same space, the same place repeatedly here once every day, sometimes you can do it once every week or every hour, but that's of course one way of producing material. And then I combine, create those videos by editing, just a short clip of the practice and not using the beginning and end, the entering the image and exiting but removing those. Then of course one important layer of methods is this idea of juxtaposing the two videos and that can of course be done without inserting them into the revisiting, if you want, but to create, if not of compost then a pile in a way by adding material next to each other. If I would summarise these different methods that are here combined but that could be very well sort of used separately in other contexts and for other purposes, would be this idea of encountering, here encountering the pine. Then the idea of daily practice of performing for camera, which is a way of generating material through accumulation. Then this idea of repeating the same image to create a time-lapse that I mentioned, which can sometimes be quite interesting depending on the site you choose. But perhaps most importantly the two layers that I really wanted to share with you, this idea of revisiting an old site of work, but why not revisiting an old text you've written, revisiting, sort of returning to something that was important at some point and and seeing how it has changed. And then last but not least this idea of compiling different, here different temporal layers, but it could be the compiling of other types of variations. And of course here I'm combining and creating layers of video images, but you could do that with sound or you could do that with text. And not only this idea in video, I'm inserting images within the frame of a larger image and of course you could do that in a mise en abyme type of way but with sound or with text you can use other modes of mixing and remixing than this type of inserting. Yes, so I hope that this idea of - well you could say repeat revisit recreate - this method could be useful for somebody else, but of course for me the main suggestion maybe for today's theme is this idea of encountering and meeting and befriending these two pine trees and returning to them now when quite a while has passed since our time together when I met them daily. Alright, that was all that I had to say so thank you for your attention.