Local Images of Tampereners as Self-Assertion and Self-Defence In a Globalised International Image Community
I started the ongoing Documentary project Tampere in the beginning of the year 2003. I'm photographing people of Tampere living their lives in different parts of the city. This historically "blue-collar" city in Finland has changed drastically to a modern Nordic city, but the city and its people have something unique. My project wants to bring out the special nature of this city through its people. I hope that this project creates better social life, and also better art. Tampere is beautiful!
Curator of the Project is professor Timo Vuorikoski.
During the last few years Finnish dialects have enjoyed great popularity in Finland. As a phenomenon it is European: the more you require Finns to give up tar, mämmi (traditional eastern food) or liquorice, the more furious they insist on them. The large-scale integration that began in 1990's started to melt and homogenise people in all levels of society and destroy their essential features. Because of this, the preserving of our own dialects became a value in itself, and in the same time it can be seen as a counter reaction to the dominance of English.
Typical for the dialect movement is that the dialects can be used nowadays in serious contexts: for example the Bible has been translated into various different dialects in Europe.
At the same time, different European countries are actually very similar in many ways. Photographers can be switched from one country to another without anybody really noticing or identifying the difference between a Spanish, French, or Portuguese artist photographer. One could say that our common visual culture can be changed between different European countries.
This same change has meant that economically and culturally strong Central European countries, like Germany and Great Britain, have reached a dominance in the state of contemporary art together with USA. These countries are able to spread their culture all over the world and they have the strongest institutes to "produce" their artists to be seen in the world.
This also creates possibilities for these artists to be critical in their self-expressions and theories with regards to their related positions in contemporary art. They are strongly visible in different webs of communication: in art magazines, internet, touring exhibitions, and with their state's grants or support. When they want to, they are in a good position to also give critiques.
The more an artist is influencing in the periphery of contemporary art world, like in Finland, the less his/hers art gets a really big attention when the work is exhibited in the global centres of contemporary art. The artist's potentiality for critiquing, and their credibility, is based on the institutional frames in which the art is exhibited.
Credibility is also tied up with the artists' economical position, and this is why support from the state or local authorities is often vital so that artists living in the "margins" of Europe can produce criticism in contemporary art.
Because many countries don't have the same kind of power as Germany, Great Britain, or the USA, artists in weaker countries follow the trends of the economically and culturally stronger ones. This are how they believe they can access to, for example, organised groups of photography and their collections. This way they get to know curators and exhibit their works in private galleries.
This is following the general international art markets, when artists share the trends of the market. Markets are not enthusiastic over localized expressions and languages, because they are not branded through effective and influential institutions in the international centres of contemporary art.
Local expressions in the international context
In photography, the answer to the problem of centres and peripheries has been international photofestivals, especially from the year 1989, when hundreds of special events of photography took place. Now there exists dozens of festivals. The newest one is Kaunas Photo Days in Lithuania. The oldest one is in France: Arles Recontres Internationales de la Photographie celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1994.
Although these multinational festivals take various forms, each one having its emphases and omissions, these rapidly multiplying festivals produce ventures for the most part selected from a fairly standard set of basic ingredients and offer up a usually predictable menu: some large-scale, fixed-site mix of public exhibitions, product displays, lectures, panels, workshops, film/video/CD-ROM screenings, award ceremonies, portfolio-review situations and informal collegial networking. These multinational festivals are currently European phenomenon, but they even exist in South and North America.
The multinational festivals in the art capitals - like in Barcelona, Paris, Madrid and Montreal - are exceptions, because they are mostly organised in small towns aside from the mainstream - like in Arles, Bratislava (Slovakia) or Houston (USA). In a number of cases, such as Arles and in Houston, this was simply because the founders were residents and/or natives sons and daughters of those particular locales who thought their home towns would be suited for such events and benefit both culturally and (through art tourism) economically from them. In most cases, the choice connected primarily with art-tourist concerns.
Yet in others, the impulse was a form of cultural self-assertion and self-defence in the face of an increasingly globalised international image community - putting oneself on the cultural map, as it were. For instance, the 14-years old Bratislava festival was created to prepare the groundwork for eastern European work, but it also presented notable work from elsewhere. The result is a decentralising effect: From the periphery and its inhabitation, a genesis or movement not toward but away from the world's established art centres.
If you look at local expressions and languages in this context, you can see them in relation to multinational photofestivals. Local expressions and languages share the same function in relation to the globalised image community: They are as festivals in their self-assertion and self-defence.
Home as the basic structure of photographing
Features of local expressions and languages rise from the concept of home. Fixing, or being grounded to the home, means to feel it as your own, and to entertain there. Well-being, happiness and criticality also characterise home. It comes together from very different aspects, and is not only living and housing.
Home is a mix of many kind of webs which include contemporaneously reason and emotion. It also means very different things to various people, which creates venue for criticism to different aspects and phenomenon's of the home. Improving the quality of life and its standards can be seen in general international art-markets as well, but their exhibited works don't tell the story of Tampereners or Finns.
"Not so long ago it was predicted that local cultures would vanish because of the integration of Europe. It was also feared that the overwhelming floods of global capital, goods, people, and thoughts would homogenise us. This in fact seems not to be true. Locality is nowadays a very positively charged concept, which comes up more and more often in webs of communication.
I started the ongoing Documentary project Tampere in the beginning of the year 2003. I'm photographing people of Tampere living their lives in different parts of the city. This historically "blue-collar" city in Finland has changed drastically to a modern Nordic city, but the city and its people have something unique. My project wants to bring out the special nature of this city through its people. I hope that this project creates better social life, and also better art. Tampere is beautiful!
In the Documentary project Tampere I'm photographing people of Tampere, and exploring how the local expressions and languages become their cultural self-assertion and self-defence in relation to an international and mainly globalised image community.Project is making the interaction between local and global worlds more humane.
"The European quest for legitimacy and new kind of a territorial sovereignty must (…) be anchored in the local and regional identities that have only become stronger under the onslaught of globalisation. But it will also have to embrace the transnational or universal reflexive values that have become an integral part of legitimacy of the 'international community'." (Matti Wuori, Human Rights in the World and EU Policy 2001, page 11)