Licenciatura

Memories of the North in Literary Works of Rosa Liksom

“The further to the North, all objects and beings are shedding their firms forms and contours. The strictly organized cosmos is defused. The Universe is losing its spatial and time boundaries. The time also slows down, and being unable to reach the final limit, stops forever, turning into eternity”.

- Nikolaj M. Terebikhin

This quoteis perfect to explain how I can depict the ambience in the Northern countries as Finland. The weather is always monotonous, all the surfaces surrounded by snow and cold outside. The landscape on these territories are beautiful with thins trees covered by the snow and the perception that this Northern countryside will be immobile, eternal, and if you come back again few months later, you will findthe same beauty view.

At the end of the 19th century, the European arts movements pervaded Finland, providing them the National Romanticism. Theirs artists provided a new point of view, own characteristics, creating incipient nationalism that would carry out to the Independence of Finland on 6th of December in 1917; one of the most important works is the epic poetry called Kalevala. It’s knownas the “The Golden Age of Finnish Art”

In the paintings that we saw on the lecture is clearly to see that the authors want to paint a portrait of the Finns on a normal daily life. The “Northern” landscape is also described on it; there are only few people in the paintings with their daily routine surrounded always by beautiful, dreamful landscape with lakes.

Analyzing more deeply thesepaintings, there is a mutual balance between the people and nature. We can check that there is not rupture between them. It’s about Finns peasants wearing typical costumes of their social status, working or having a break during theirs working-day, always surrounded by the amazing nature that always would and will be the same in the “North”, no changes.

On those years, the most important socialclasses were the peasants. On these paintings we can observe traditionalism and local customs, which reflect the positive thing of a culture and a way of life different from the others; In few words, the latent nationalism.
However in my opinion, there is particular thing that the artists wanted to depict on the paintings. The human being modify the wild nature, but on these case, at the sametime they are a civilized people facing up to an extreme clime but they also can coexist with the nature in full harmony. There are not paintings that prove the men’s destruction of the environment as the paintings of the factories or worker’s art. It’s the other way round, it’s the life together between the human being and the “Northern” landscape with an elegant tune.

The next slide was thevideo made by Rosa Liksom. It consists in a trilogy of videos called Finlandia that shows women wearing a blue burkhas in different situations. The video that we could see is called Finlandia – National Landscape (2008) and the women are walking in different landscapes.. The other videos are called Suburban Landscape (2009) and Historial Monuments (2010) . The photography on this video is by KariPullinen, the editing is by Heikki Kotsalo and the music is by Roni Martin .

The relationship between this video and the paintings of the Finnish “Golden Age” is that it seems there is no communication between the characters and the nature, and also they don’t need it. It is pastoral theme. An interesting thing is that doesn’t matter if it is a cold weather, with many trees or lakes, the humanbeing always adapt to any environments, doesn’t mind Finland or Afghanistan; It is the astonishing thing of the human being.

This video has got lot of political and social comments. The first moment when I saw the video on the lecture I thought that was a way to condemn the hypocrisy that sometimes we see on the Western culture and also the hate to the Islamic culture, and above all after...