VESA-PEKKA RANNIKKO: Lions Eat Grass

The sculptures present themselves as artifacts in an imagined, post-apocalyptic, post-humanistic museum, where different visual forms are displayed side by side, hovering or standing on their equally eye-delusory pedestals. In a similar manner with the eclectic collections of home-museums such as the one of the Count of Källskär, where a sort of a democracy of objects prevails, the visual backgrounds of the sculptures are also considered equal. As if a future archaeologist had gone through our imagery and compiled and sculpted them to an exhibition. The lush greenery in the animation Eden entails a reference to the illustrations painted by botanists of the past accompanying explorers on their colonialist travels to wild exotic paradises. The time-consuming and dangerous voyage takes on a different form in the 21^st century, with the pandemic restricting access to faraway tropics. Rannikko too followed in the footsteps of an explorer from a less distant past, a visitor that roamed the gardens of the Eden Project in Cornwall, UK, and documented his voyage with his camera phone to the platform of Google Earth. The animation acts as documentation of a documentation, a virtual antithesis of plein air painting documenting a man-made environment to mimic nature. 

The sketch-like character of the lines and the texts describing the surroundings imply to an act of taking notes, and the fact that the pen strokes happen as we witness them, suggest that we share a temporal existence with the author, in the present moment. Virtual travels are always also travels in time: the imagined natural paradise beneath the domes of the Eden Project freezes an idea of a paradise of its time, and the photos added to Google Earth form yet another layer. The timeline of the exhibition is likewise fragmented with references to future through the post-apocalyptic dystopia imagined in the computer game Fortnite, to ancient past as a paradise lost via the bronze statuette of Hemaphroditus, and eventually to the paradox of all imagined paradises: ideas of future that become part of the past the moment they are presented. The staged and preserved quality of the residence of the Count at Källskär island, biblical visualizations of paradise as well as the fictive proposals of sci-fi can’t escape the frames of the time of their creation. In our present, on the lower part of the gallery walls, the grey beam familiar from touchscreens implies to imagine the space as a screen, a continuation of the animation’s virtual exploration almost suggesting to action – to swipe and to click.