During
11th to 13th May, 2023
Thursday
The snow is melting on the side of the roads
More lies here than down south
But it’s passable, not as muddy as we’d feared
We find the bikes in the house
And, after a while, their locks hanging up behind the door on the other side of the building
The tyres are pumped and they ride well
We only have to get off to walk up one hill, the steepest, as the bikes have no gears
After we went to the supermarket
And before we caught the bus
In the hour or so we had of time to wait
We walked over to the library designed by Aalto
The art section is at the far end of the first hall and there are four books about Reidar on the shelf
One has his name markered in on the bottom inside cover
Reidari in thick black on the hardback board
Later, at the museum
Anne lends me her copy of one of these books
Arctic Elements
And I slip it down into the back sleeve of the rucksack
In the evening we’re too tired to read
I leave it on the breakfast table
There’s never enough time, I say to you
Sometime between leaving the museum and going to sleep
Friday
Anne’s voice is soft
We talk for a long time
You are wearing headphones and holding the H5
Capturing everything Anne says
And my questions
Our feet shifting weight
Background noise inside the gallery
And the sound of the wind in the trees as we push the door open and stand on the flagstones
The earphones mean that when you ask a question, it comes out into the room a bit louder than expected
We eat sandwiches from a small stack wrapped in plastic on the steps at the side of the gallery
Our feet and knees face the foundations of the old studio, the one that burnt down
The beams on the side of the gallery wall behind our backs are scarred darker from the fire
We’re a bit done
So, after eating we agree to capture some sound and images for the remainder of the hour
And cycle back to the farm at four
You go down to the river to record the sound of the water
Your footsteps, the birds
I go into the gallery with the camera and the tripod
I’m on my own in there
There don’t seem to be any other visitors this afternoon
And if there are, they don’t come in
I take some photographs of Reidar’s paintings, knowing they will be bad ones
And that I can’t use them anyway, so I shoot them with no effort
Just for me to remind myself later of which ones were hanging in that congregation together
There’s a self portrait of Reidar hanging centrally on the wall with the open doorway
It’s low, above a heavy wooden bench
A rhombus of light hangs on the opposite wall, floating above the top of the middle image
I think about what Anne told us about the rights usage of showing images of the work
How, when a film crew were here, there was an agreement with the estate that artworks in the background were fine
It was OK if they weren’t the main focus of the shot
I get the urge to film myself in the gallery
To put Reidar’s paintings behind me in the frame
Turning them into sixteen to nine landscapes that stretch to the edges of the image
I place the tripod several metres away
Zoom the lens in until the surrounding wall
The wooden frames
The chains that they hang from
Are all eliminated from the shot
Just paint, cropped
I walk into the frame from the left
I turn when I am close to the painting and I look back into the lens of the camera
I try to relax my shoulders
My hands tend to go behind my back and clasp each other
So I release them, leave them to hang loosely at my sides
I breathe out
I try to pay attention to the camera and to stay awake for it
To not go onto autopilot, or zone out
I can feel myself want to drift
And I pull myself back to this act of looking into the camera that is looking back at me
How to make a self portrait?
How to be here and stand in Reidar’s world and make a portrait of myself?
How to fold time on top of itself?
My life onto Reidar’s?
I step out of the frame, also to my left, making a circle back to behind the camera
Press the button to stop the recording
I make the same motion again and again, always entering and leaving from the left
I stand in front of all the paintings in the room
Apart from the low self portrait above the bench, where, instead, I sit
When I watch it back on my computer screen upstairs at the farm, I think I like this take best
My head is obscuring the face of Reidar in the painting completely
My face is in place of his face
The rest of the smaller, square painting radiating around me
In the gallery, I am reminded again about the comment from last summer that this place is like a church
Maybe Saana said it, or whoever was working in the café that day
I don’t know why it comes back to me now
I think about being able to stand here and to have the space to do this
On my own
No one coming in for this time we have together with the paintings
Reidar, the camera and me
Half an hour or so
I never had a chance to do this before
It’s a brand new thing
To stand alone in a gallery with no one watching me
Just the paintings and the ghost
It feels like being blessed
Saturday
We go back for the last time on Saturday as planned
We sleep late
Take a break from morning training
But our bodies still ache for the fourth and fifth cycle
It’s warmer
The sky is blue and the sun is up there hanging
Blasting the dust
And the glittering snow melt that rushes in the ditches next to the road
It’s Eurovision day
The grand final tonight
Maybe it’s the gayest day in the calendar year
This feels apt to me, somehow, as I fold this fact on top of the trip
I’ve been skim-reading the book about Palsa that Anne gifted to me yesterday, at the end of our conversation together
Hunting out the awkward facts that are absent from all the timelines in the books about Reidar
He proposes to Palsa in the February of seventy-eight
Seven years after Yrjö dies
The studio burnt down on New Year’s Eve of seventy-seven
It’s only the second month of the year
The new studio won’t be complete until October
Reidar doesn’t paint that year
Palsa’s paintings are graphic
He’s twenty-two years younger than Reidar
Uses collage, watercolour, tempera
Toothpaste because he can’t afford paint
They connect in the funeral days of their mutual friend Mukka
Dead at twenty-nine
And in the same year — seventy-three — Palsa paints Knights of the Chocolate Hole
There are no animal metaphors to hide anything
Palsa paints the fucking, in watercolour, straight up
Blown up into disproportions
Giant cocks penetrating
Autofellatio
Cartoon fantasies and nightmares
A woman is being choked behind the men
He writes in his diaries about coming over to Reidar’s place
About drinking together and ‘gaying’
This is what Jaana says, searching for the word, attemping to translate from the Finnish term that recurs in Palsa’s writing
Homoseksi
It means having gay sex, she says to me, matter of factly
We go back through the grounds and the new studio one last time
I take slow video loops, zoomed in, scanning over details
And quick stills
The pond, the sauna, the fossilised electric cables
The frogs by the water in the long grass
I consider Särestö as a gay place
A site of Queer history
The swimming pool in the upstairs of the gallery
The glossy black tiles in the kitchen of the studio
The glittering shirt that hangs behind glass in the walk-in wardrobe
The animal fur spead over the bed under the painting of the arab model
The nude drawn in white on the blackened sauna wall
The books lined up on the shelves by the record player
Sci fi and erotica
The mosquito net that wraps itself around the small double bed in the centre of the room
The wide studio floor, and how you can see it through the internal window at the top of the stairs, looking down at the expanse of wood
I think about Reidar having money and fame
Booze and anti-depressants
Architects to build a custom new studio for him
I think about Palsa visiting, about the homo-sex they have, and where
If they are explicit like in Palsa’s paintings, spilling out like his imagination
Or if they become animals, like Reidar paints
Lynx and bears
Furry beasts with moustaches
Maybe it was wild here at Särestö
It was the seventies
Reidar is already gone by the time AIDS becomes a word
The first case is in June in Los Angeles
And Reidar dies at the end of May
He’ll never hear of it
In New York and San Francisco, it’s still the era of barebacking and orgies
Who’s to know what was going on up here at the farm
The studio’s been tidied up into a museum
It’s a fraction of Reidar’s belongings, Anne tells me, ruefully
The drawers in the kitchen are almost empty
The third one down holds a big bag of plastic disposable spoons
There are big house plants lining the window beyond the long dining table
And I wonder who put them here, and in what year
If they have anything to with Reidar at all
They sit in big fat pots
Their leaves strung up to the ceiling
One is frondy, with delicate fingers
A bit camp
The snow is melting on the side of the roads
More lies here than down south
But it’s passable, not as muddy as we’d feared
We find the bikes in the house
And, after a while, their locks hanging up behind the door on the other side of the building
The tyres are pumped and they ride well
We only have to get off to walk up one hill, the steepest, as the bikes have no gears
After we went to the supermarket
And before we caught the bus
In the hour or so we had of time to wait
We walked over to the library designed by Aalto
The art section is at the far end of the first hall and there are four books about Reidar on the shelf
One has his name markered in on the bottom inside cover
Reidari in thick black on the hardback board
Later, at the museum
Anne lends me her copy of one of these books
Arctic Elements
And I slip it down into the back sleeve of the rucksack
In the evening we’re too tired to read
I leave it on the breakfast table
There’s never enough time, I say to you
Sometime between leaving the museum and going to sleep
Friday
Anne’s voice is soft
We talk for a long time
You are wearing headphones and holding the H5
Capturing everything Anne says
And my questions
Our feet shifting weight
Background noise inside the gallery
And the sound of the wind in the trees as we push the door open and stand on the flagstones
The earphones mean that when you ask a question, it comes out into the room a bit louder than expected
We eat sandwiches from a small stack wrapped in plastic on the steps at the side of the gallery
Our feet and knees face the foundations of the old studio, the one that burnt down
The beams on the side of the gallery wall behind our backs are scarred darker from the fire
We’re a bit done
So, after eating we agree to capture some sound and images for the remainder of the hour
And cycle back to the farm at four
You go down to the river to record the sound of the water
Your footsteps, the birds
I go into the gallery with the camera and the tripod
I’m on my own in there
There don’t seem to be any other visitors this afternoon
And if there are, they don’t come in
I take some photographs of Reidar’s paintings, knowing they will be bad ones
And that I can’t use them anyway, so I shoot them with no effort
Just for me to remind myself later of which ones were hanging in that congregation together
There’s a self portrait of Reidar hanging centrally on the wall with the open doorway
It’s low, above a heavy wooden bench
A rhombus of light hangs on the opposite wall, floating above the top of the middle image
I think about what Anne told us about the rights usage of showing images of the work
How, when a film crew were here, there was an agreement with the estate that artworks in the background were fine
It was OK if they weren’t the main focus of the shot
I get the urge to film myself in the gallery
To put Reidar’s paintings behind me in the frame
Turning them into sixteen to nine landscapes that stretch to the edges of the image
I place the tripod several metres away
Zoom the lens in until the surrounding wall
The wooden frames
The chains that they hang from
Are all eliminated from the shot
Just paint, cropped
I walk into the frame from the left
I turn when I am close to the painting and I look back into the lens of the camera
I try to relax my shoulders
My hands tend to go behind my back and clasp each other
So I release them, leave them to hang loosely at my sides
I breathe out
I try to pay attention to the camera and to stay awake for it
To not go onto autopilot, or zone out
I can feel myself want to drift
And I pull myself back to this act of looking into the camera that is looking back at me
How to make a self portrait?
How to be here and stand in Reidar’s world and make a portrait of myself?
How to fold time on top of itself?
My life onto Reidar’s?
I step out of the frame, also to my left, making a circle back to behind the camera
Press the button to stop the recording
I make the same motion again and again, always entering and leaving from the left
I stand in front of all the paintings in the room
Apart from the low self portrait above the bench, where, instead, I sit
When I watch it back on my computer screen upstairs at the farm, I think I like this take best
My head is obscuring the face of Reidar in the painting completely
My face is in place of his face
The rest of the smaller, square painting radiating around me
In the gallery, I am reminded again about the comment from last summer that this place is like a church
Maybe Saana said it, or whoever was working in the café that day
I don’t know why it comes back to me now
I think about being able to stand here and to have the space to do this
On my own
No one coming in for this time we have together with the paintings
Reidar, the camera and me
Half an hour or so
I never had a chance to do this before
It’s a brand new thing
To stand alone in a gallery with no one watching me
Just the paintings and the ghost
It feels like being blessed
Saturday
We go back for the last time on Saturday as planned
We sleep late
Take a break from morning training
But our bodies still ache for the fourth and fifth cycle
It’s warmer
The sky is blue and the sun is up there hanging
Blasting the dust
And the glittering snow melt that rushes in the ditches next to the road
It’s Eurovision day
The grand final tonight
Maybe it’s the gayest day in the calendar year
This feels apt to me, somehow, as I fold this fact on top of the trip
I’ve been skim-reading the book about Palsa that Anne gifted to me yesterday, at the end of our conversation together
Hunting out the awkward facts that are absent from all the timelines in the books about Reidar
He proposes to Palsa in the February of seventy-eight
Seven years after Yrjö dies
The studio burnt down on New Year’s Eve of seventy-seven
It’s only the second month of the year
The new studio won’t be complete until October
Reidar doesn’t paint that year
Palsa’s paintings are graphic
He’s twenty-two years younger than Reidar
Uses collage, watercolour, tempera
Toothpaste because he can’t afford paint
They connect in the funeral days of their mutual friend Mukka
Dead at twenty-nine
And in the same year — seventy-three — Palsa paints Knights of the Chocolate Hole
There are no animal metaphors to hide anything
Palsa paints the fucking, in watercolour, straight up
Blown up into disproportions
Giant cocks penetrating
Autofellatio
Cartoon fantasies and nightmares
A woman is being choked behind the men
He writes in his diaries about coming over to Reidar’s place
About drinking together and ‘gaying’
This is what Jaana says, searching for the word, attemping to translate from the Finnish term that recurs in Palsa’s writing
Homoseksi
It means having gay sex, she says to me, matter of factly
We go back through the grounds and the new studio one last time
I take slow video loops, zoomed in, scanning over details
And quick stills
The pond, the sauna, the fossilised electric cables
The frogs by the water in the long grass
I consider Särestö as a gay place
A site of Queer history
The swimming pool in the upstairs of the gallery
The glossy black tiles in the kitchen of the studio
The glittering shirt that hangs behind glass in the walk-in wardrobe
The animal fur spead over the bed under the painting of the arab model
The nude drawn in white on the blackened sauna wall
The books lined up on the shelves by the record player
Sci fi and erotica
The mosquito net that wraps itself around the small double bed in the centre of the room
The wide studio floor, and how you can see it through the internal window at the top of the stairs, looking down at the expanse of wood
I think about Reidar having money and fame
Booze and anti-depressants
Architects to build a custom new studio for him
I think about Palsa visiting, about the homo-sex they have, and where
If they are explicit like in Palsa’s paintings, spilling out like his imagination
Or if they become animals, like Reidar paints
Lynx and bears
Furry beasts with moustaches
Maybe it was wild here at Särestö
It was the seventies
Reidar is already gone by the time AIDS becomes a word
The first case is in June in Los Angeles
And Reidar dies at the end of May
He’ll never hear of it
In New York and San Francisco, it’s still the era of barebacking and orgies
Who’s to know what was going on up here at the farm
The studio’s been tidied up into a museum
It’s a fraction of Reidar’s belongings, Anne tells me, ruefully
The drawers in the kitchen are almost empty
The third one down holds a big bag of plastic disposable spoons
There are big house plants lining the window beyond the long dining table
And I wonder who put them here, and in what year
If they have anything to with Reidar at all
They sit in big fat pots
Their leaves strung up to the ceiling
One is frondy, with delicate fingers
A bit camp