Opening night

Installing the exhibition

Jeanne, Ilona and Gisela and
Janne Ruohonen & Emilia Saarenpaa

Workshop (3)

Workshop (2)

Why

What is the purpose of this collaboration?
I believe the viability of cultural development are founded on genuine bi-directional interaction. Experience and insights generated by the arts are important building blocks for invisaging the world differently and giving us a sense of control over our lives.

The Kollaasikaupunki workshop and the resulting exhibition links to this broader social concern. The notion of the constant flux between people, cultural residue and consumption fuel the collaboration. Through the physical gestures of cutting, rearranging landmarks | (land)(marks) and recycling the products of our consumption, the students each construct a different Rauma, thereby making the landscape their own.

Our conclusion?
We do not disappear against the background. Neither do we function independently from it. We are constantly functioning in places - We inscribe our presence on the landscape as we move along the paths of our daily routines. In this way the landscape becomes part of us, part of how we assert ourselves as individuals in the world. There is no figure without a ground. We are bound to where we are - always a common place. Hence it is important to know our environment and to understand our presence in it.

Sharing our collaboration

Our project concludes with an exhibition at Galleria Gylich which open on 7 May 2008 at 6pm.

The exhibition takes the form of a collage constructed from our inquiry into the landscape/cityscape of Rauma as “home” and “foreign place”. I envision the exhibition as a visual conversation between myself and the students about the shared landscape – my experience as a foreigner and theirs as 'locals' who grew up with this landscape.

On the night of the opening the students from Lukeo will facilitate an interaction with the gallery visitors. A work table, old postcards, scissors and glue will be available to visitors, who can participate in our visual dialogue about the local landscape by making their own collage designs.

Workshop (1)

Lukio school postcards

From the top:

Noora Taavitsainen

Ilona Joensuu

Kosti Uusi-Kartano

Emma Turunen

Who, Where & How

Collage city is the title of a series of workshops on the relationship between people and place (landscape) with Rauma high school learners held in Autumn 2007 and Spring 2008. We investigated this theme on a practical level by re-using discarded cultural residue (in this case old postcards of Rauma), and collage. During the workshop students made new images of Rauma suited to their image/experience/memory of their home town by collaging cut fragments of the old postcards.

Rauma Water Tower, Postcards by Luseo school learners, 2007.

This spring the workshop continues. The focus will now shift to collaboration and the notion of Rauma as a shared landscape. The theme of collage and recycling will be taken a step further. The students will make a sculptural ‘collage’ by selecting parts of their postcard images and building them three-dimensionally out of discarded cardboard packaging and magazines.