Video, 2021
2024
together with Petri Hytönen ans Elliot's Crazy Compass
watercolour paintings: Petri Hytönen
video + edit: Mira Caselius
music: Elliot's Crazy Compass
published at Crazy Compass Gallery, instagram.com/elliotscrazycompass
2024
together with Petri Hytönen ans Elliot's Crazy Compass
watercolour paintings: Petri Hytönen
drawing + edit: Mira Caselius
music: Elliot's Crazy Compass
published at Crazy Compass Gallery, instagram.com/elliotscrazycompass
2024
together with Petri Hytönen ans Elliot's Crazy Compass
watercolour paintings: Petri Hytönen
video + edit: Mira Caselius
music: Elliot's Crazy Compass
published at Crazy Compass Gallery, instagram.com/elliotscrazycompass
Video poem, 2021
God is great
he loves greatness
he doesn't care for small things
like fleas and people and stuff
he laughs and tosses steel and granite
at their dens from the clear blue sky
a poor demon called Genius Loci
flees from her hideout
God hunts her down and tames her
and locks her up on the 101st floor
of his temple
where no shadows are cast
a temple too large, too grand
for this small people's town
that grows smaller and smaller
in the ultra-hard shadow
of its grey supremacy
This video was produced as a contribution to ViCCA Production 2021. I wrote the poem as a comment on the cult of money and urban design aligned with it, prioritising private profit over humanity, sustainability, wellbeing and aesthetics.
The idea for the poem was sparked by the presence of the massive headquarters of a bank at the edge of the idyllic, 100-year-old district of wooden workers’ houses in Vallila, Helsinki: a contemporary monument with a smooth, vector based façade of glass and granite, with no intent to blend in. I describe it as a monument not only in the half-figurative sense often used about prominent buildings but also because of its sculpture-like appearance. It is like a statue of power: abstract, showy, ridiculously large for its site. To enter is a different experience: the central lobby, open all the way up to the roof, is breathtaking. It is a sophisticated play of light, geometry and different surfaces, incorporating the façade of the neighbouring brick building of a few decades of age and forming a miniature quarter: a hidden, private reality just a 100 metres away from the old workers’ dwellings, separated from the surrounding world with a cold, uninviting wall.
The poem is documented as a video: I filmed myself reading the poem aloud and juxtaposed the material with footage of urban and natural environments. Some of the places featured on the video are, or have lately been, at the centre of public debate, while others have a more representational role. The site-specificity emerges through these places, while the actual site is not local but global and temporal: the neoliberal zeitgeist manifesting itself through architecture and urban design.
Music video for Elliot’s Crazy Compass, 2020
Directed by Mira Caselius and Joakim Guthwert, filmed by Janina Witkowski and the directors.
Produced by Eat This Music Oy. All rights reserved.