Into the white night puppies were born
into the golden light were thrown

This project is a reinterpretation of a dream about white light. During the white nights the sun sets for a moment, but its light can still be seen on the horizon. The night sky is blue rather than dark. The white light in Finland can cause insomnia in some people, while others experience vivid, strangely intense dreams.

It is a dreamy, calm story about the search for identity and postmemory. I have been coming to Finland for 10 years. Each time I return healed, calmer. For the last 2 years I have been coming together with my daughter, who is half Finnish, half Polish. She is discovering her Karelian heritage, learning a language she does not know very well, spending time in nature, which for a city child can sometimes be frightening, and she has to cope with all the beauty but also the fears of childhood. Her family comes largely from Finnish Karelia.

Finland had to cede part of Finnish Karelia to the Soviet Union after the Winter War of 1939-40. More than 400,000 evacuees from the ceded territories resettled in various parts of Finland, making up 10% of the total population at the time. The Karelian heritage is visible in family memories, postmemory, fading references in popular culture, in Orthodox Christianity, customs and the domestic environment. According to Marianne Hirsch, postmemory describes the way in which those who did not actually experience an event can "remember" it through "imaginative investment, projection, and creation" (Hirsch 2008, 107). Postmemory takes the form of stories and images of past events that can approximate memory in their affective force, expressed by successive generations.

Karelian beliefs, prayers and spells are part of the project. Karelian sources feature, among others, the figure of the tietäjä - the all-knowing one, shaman and intermediary - and the ritual of proškenja - healing.

"When I was young, I was weak and sickly until the age of fifteen. My mother did her best for me so that I would grow up healthy. She took me to the tietäjäs to be healed. When I was a girl, I went through the proškenja visit with a tietäjä many times. Arhippa's widow, a tietäjä, came to our house many times to take me for a proškenja visit. When she was unable to help me, my mother invited "Granny Fedota" to cure me. Granny was an excellent tietäjä, she cured me.- The divination showed that my ailment came from the forest. So a proškenja visit to the forest lay ahead of us. Granny took me by the hand and led me into the forest. When we were far enough away and Granny was sure that no one would see us, the bowing began…" (Suistamo. 1958. Paraskeeva Makkonen, aged 72)

Following Laura Stark's monograph, I worked with Karelian oral testimonies, dreams, legends and prayers from the region. I also included fragments of popular songs about Karelia. I would like to thank Terhi Salokannel-Stenberg for her help.

In the sound part of the project I used a generative AI voice, based on the cloned voice of the story's protagonist. Voice, age and accent cease to be a marker of individuality. But it is also an attempt to create the voice of shared memory and the collective subconscious, a voice speaking through a medium, for all the impossibility of that task.

An integral part of the project is a text by ariel rosé, poet, essayist and writer. The curator Agata Grzych oversaw the coherence and shape of the project.

I want to accompany the protagonist in this dreaming of Karelia. And to discover more, recreating and interpreting the general dream of childhood, of not belonging, of the Karelian past, of mystery and discovery.

Because the purpose of photography is not to document, is it?

People:

Jagoda Malanin - photographer. A graduate of the Sputnik Photos mentoring programme, the Nikon NOOR Academy and the Jastrzębie School of Photography. Finalist of the Sony World Photography Awards 2023 in the professional competition, in the “Still Life” category. In 2021 she published an artist's book in the Image Threads mentoring programme and took part in an online exhibition in Der Greif magazine (curator Anna-Alix Koffi). As part of SWPA 2023 her work from the series Cryogenia could be seen at Somerset House in London, the Museo Diocesano in Milan and, from 17 November, at the Willy Brandt Haus in Berlin. She has exhibited, among other places, at the Wrocław gallery Miejsce przy Miejscu 14 (curator Łukasz Rusznica), Galeria u Agatki (curator Agata Grzych), BWA Wrocław, and in Warsaw, Łódź and Porto. Co-founder of the collective Hydroza. She is interested in the idea of spontaneous architecture, the body and oppression, and works mainly with photography and objects.

https://jagodamalanin.com
https://www.instagram.com/jagodamalanin

Agata Grzych - curator, photographer. A graduate of the WSF AFA in Wrocław and of the UAP (formerly the Academy of Fine Arts) in Poznań, Faculty of Multimedia Communication, as well as of postgraduate studies in "Art Studies" at the University of Wrocław. She works as a lecturer at the WSF AFA and at the Institute of Journalism and Social Communication of the University of Wrocław. She has taken part in many exhibitions, including the Athens Photo Festival, Photomonth in Bratislava and the International Festival of Photography in Łódź. She is the founder of the girls' art collective #Thinkpink gang.

She has curated over 50 exhibitions in collaboration with BWA Wrocław, Galeria Entropia and the TIFF Festival, as well as in her own gallery, "Galeria u Agatki". She hosts her own programme about art, "Artefakty", on Radio LUZ. In her own work she takes up subjects related above all to religious kitsch, and sometimes engages in casual documentary photography.

ariel rosé - poet, author of an illustrated volume of poems published under the name Alicja Rosé: Północ. Przypowieści [North. Parables], Znak 2019, and morze nocą jest mięśniem serca [the sea at night is the muscle of the heart], PIW 2022. Nominated for the Most Beautiful Book 2015 award for the illustrations to J. Iwaszkiewicz's Kocia książka [Cat Book], Oficyna Wydawnicza Wilk & Król 2015. For the illustrations to Magdalena Tulli's Ten i tamten las [This Forest and That], Oficyna Wydawnicza Wilk & Król 2017, received the Warsaw Literary Award and was nominated for the International IBBY Award. Most recently translated from French and illustrated Laura Ulonati's book Dans tout le bleu, Actes Sud 2021 (Cały ten błękit, Wydawnictwo Nowe 2022) and Ilya Kaminsky's volume Dancing in Odessa, forthcoming from Pogranicze.

Member of Unia Literacka, the Polish Literary Translators' Association, Circolo Scandinavo in Rome and Litteratur på Blå in Oslo.

Currently co-creating the international project Both Sides of the Border Face East, focused on Central and Eastern Europe, under the patronage of Marci Shore. The project is supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation and the Renaissance Institute. This year's edition is devoted to the war in Ukraine.

https://www.arielrose.art/
https://www.facebook.com/rosealeira/

Acknowledgements:

The exhibition was printed courtesy of Epson on an Epson SureColor SC-P9500,

Paper: Epson Premium Luster

Linguistic help and support:Terhi Salokannel-Stenberg

The exhibition opening will take place on 26 October at 19:00

exhibition open: 26 October – 10 November 2023

Wednesday–Friday 16:00–20:00
Saturday–Sunday 12:00–20:00

You are welcome!
FPW team

Event on FB

Exhibition documentation: Joanna Szpak-Ostachowska