At the Heart of it All

EDITION

2019

school

Aalto University School of Arts
Helsinki, Finland

links

petrijuntunen.com ↗

Conflict produces terror. Having a desire to live, but realising that death is inevitable is managed by embracing cultural structures or systems that act to provide life with meaning and value. The knowledge of this Absurdity of Existence transforms into social constructs and eschatological fantasies that try to make the sense of ending bearable. On a larger scale, societies build symbols: laws, cultures and belief systems to explain the significance and meaning of life, but on an individual level it is the individual contemplating his own mortality. How one looks at his existence, at the same time seeing the beginning and sensing the inevitable end.

After my father’s slow withering by a hereditary heart condition, I became conscious of how it was affecting me as well, this inheritance of mine. Slowly coming to terms with my own mortality, a cognition that I had actively suppressed. What resulted was a regression back to my youth, the time of perpetual displacement, resorting to the very same coping mechanisms; manifesting my internal worlds by recreating, constructing and making them real, to create spaces that solely I inhabit and control. Building places and spaces where time is in stasis, suspended between the Tick and Tock. The works have been photographed in different locations around Europe during a five-year period.