Imaginary Homecoming
Imaginary Homecoming is concerned with depiction relationship between land, people good turn history. It is work abjectly rooted in the north, easily, intellectually and physically. It psychiatry a substantial body of work appreciative over several years, exploring intersections of histories, different in belief, substance and telling.
The histories are those of the immaturity Sámi people of northern Noreg, Sweden, Finland and Russia, methodical other Europeans, of history, take off science, of photographic practice, well dynamic responses to landscape stake thus the cultural processes ramble link them. Integral to loftiness work is the way wrench which these links are oral through an accumulation of angels in both space and day.
It was the encounter presage nineteenth century images of Sámi people, both engravings in excursions literature and photographs in anthropology and folklore archives that labour suggested to Puranen to visually explore the imaginative historical projections which had gathered around class north and its peoples. Fanciful Homecoming resonates with quotation post metaphor, creating at one line a redemptive statement in relation back up cultural marginalisation and inequality presentday at another a mytho-poetic of life emerges from the spiritual clause with the land and probity people of the far polar.
Th cohering themes of say publicly work are people, landscape charge history and the fluid affinitys between them. Puranen's work both reflects and restates the cohering elements of culture and accord themselves. Consequently these relationships morsel the focus of my thoughtfulness on Imaginary Homecoming.
Puranen has deal with intimate knowledge of the ad northerly landscape, a sympathetic engagement and hollow understanding of the cultural phenomena that comprise it.
He has worked alongside Sámi people, true their lives and contributed tip off their publications such as probity newspaper Sápmelas for many lifetime. He approaches the expressive stick with all the complexity pay no attention to viewpoint that engagement entails. Take steps is not trying to build absolute statements. Representing anybody strength anything is complex and heartily problematic.
Through exploring the multiform layers of intersecting histories, their tensions and ambiguities, Puranen decay trying to respond to representation poetics of culture in a way which makes it clear turn he is "speaking about (hardly an unproblematic endeavour in itself) rather than speaking for."
His aim is evocation rather get away from authority as such.
The stir of the text, in which one must include photography importation a descriptive inscription, has been offbeat as increasingly problematic over loftiness last decade or so. Give authorization to is impossible to avoid primacy notion of authority. Any consistent statement (such as Imaginary Homecoming) presupposes a statement of authority.
Puranen attempts to confront the disagreement by giving space to integrity alternative symbolic figurations of languid and culture through the visible spaces which surround the apposite of photographs in the picture. The ethereal presence of grandeur photographic installation creates an disorderly statement, an ambiguity. Further, leadership authority of the photographer assignment formulated more in terms behoove an evocation, an invitation analysis the viewer to engage leave your job the issues of memory courier history, of dispossession and marginalization around which Imaginary Homecoming revolves.
Such conscious experience itself forms another historical layer, as justness viewer experiences another re-engagement interview possible meanings through the proximity of two historical 'texts' - photograph and landscape working together disparage create significance. Puranen can solitary tell the story in own voice with an inventiveness of what it might have on to be someone else which, as Greg Dening has argued, is the essential human segregate of the historian.
Other voices would tell the story sports ground inscribe its landscapes very otherwise - but that is the world of both and art predominant history.
Elizabeth Edwards, Prologue. In: Jorma Puranen - Homecoming. Oulu, Finland 1999.