Research, maps and haiku

Maps, mapping and impressions of a place. A map is a two dimensional abstraction of a location, so how can it tell us something relevant of a place? And what is relevant information, and relevant for who?

These are questions I've been thinking about while researching the Espoon keskus area for some mapping of my own. What has been told, what kind of information is being distributed and is this information at all useful?

Most of the material I've come by is...honestly...quite horrible and useless. I hope to make something more interesting and fun with my own project.

And there might be some inspired poetry on the way.

river bed of past
highway to a promise
of a future lost

First Test

Our project with Tiia is finally coming along.
From the very beginning we had the idea to work on a typographic installation in Espoo but we had our fair share of troubles regarding the material and the placement. After a few different ideas here and there, we turned back to our first desired location, the river.
We found some sort of an insulation material which we can mold into letters and due to its foam-like nature we hope that it will float on the river. Material itself is grey so we decided to paint it white to make it more visible on the brown background of river but we had doubts regarding whether the material would hold the paint or not, we did the first tests last week and everything seems to be working.

Here we go :)

Spray paint didn't do any harm to the material and was not effected by the water.

They float quite well in the sink.

We inserted metal strings to mold the tubes, we will also use cable ties to fit the letters and tubes together.

Material is very flexible, they mold very easily with the help of the strings.

URBAN PRESENCE & IDENTITY II

PRESENCE AND IDENTITY

Last week I was talking about the subjects of urban presence and identity. From what I have gathered so far, Espoos center is mostly a functional center. Transportation, residential and administrative hub. Nothing else. Its a patchwork, in all its levels. What is keeping it from being a weave instead of a patchwork? Movement is necessary, people interacting, density not more spreading…

I was trying to focus my intervention on making a “social art pavilion” to “fix” that, but trying to figure out what I would put inside, I found that that was the actually the interesting part. I thought about how art can make a point of this urban absence.

Doing this in a visual way:

Having images around at different scales, populating the urban landscape (live photos, thread, sculptures, visual)?

Making a sarcastic point? (people watching point)

Trying to physically change the situation with nomad gallery?

Talking about identity and inclusion:

Collection of peoples ‘most finnish object they own’

Espoonian of the year (give away mask of an unknown person from Espoo: masked crowd   changing urban landscape, unifying...what?)

             

URBAN PRESENCE & IDENTITY

My walk around Espoon Keskus was quite enjoyable because of the weather, but I was really surprised on the small amount of people and activity I saw compared to the central mall and station area. I also appreciated more variety than I had expected between some areas, but not within them. Walking through the town was more of a visual delight than I had expected. The center of Espoo seems like a dead end for many great plans like the 70s development, and I think for the more recent additions as well.  The mix of vegetation and sudden ruptures of different building typologies, and many many urban voids, made me understand why there is no identity or real center of Espoo. The urban separations between areas and also cultural separations are clear even to a wanderer like me.

I think that the people that live around here, have no motivation of going anywhere else than from the train station to the mall and their house. They have nothing to distract them along the way, which means that there is no interaction of these people in “transit” and therefore all the richness that Espoo has to offer, culturally, gets locked up.

It all falls into the folder of what i call, urban presence.

It is clear that in Espoon Keskus, the strongest presence is concentrated in the central place divided by the railway. But this presence is caused only by commercial and transportation affairs. On the other hand there are very nice spots I saw when I was walking around where you could imagine things happening. Places that were probably initially designed to be used, but are now isolated because they have become obsolete.

I would like to propose a way of re-activating some of these spaces in a way that everyone that lives here can interact with them. A way of Espoo of showing to itself that it does have cultures and identities, but for the time being they haven’t fully been let out or interacted with each other.

                         IMAGE OF ESPOO “INTENSIFIED”

My first ideas for the intervention, have been revolving around making a physical structure that serves as an outdoor-indoor gallery, a light and demountable one that will hold different art and functions according to its location.

I would like to fill it with work from the community, mabe some artist resident in Espoon Keskus or the people who live there, not necesarily artists. My goal is to bring some Espoo cultural diversity to a more clear plane in the urban lifestyle. Here are some drawings of what ive been thinking...

random thoughts

The two things that I’m interested in are stairs and wire fences. The rusty and shabby outdoor stairs are attractive structures for me to install something. I walked up the stair right next to the abandoned building, which gave me a fresh view of the area. The transition of view and emotion was quite interesting.

I walked around the area alone for the first time last week, and I got to know that it’s really uncomfortable to cross the platform, which I didn’t realize when I just walk behind the others. It was quite hard to find the entrance of the only bridge and to go to the opposite side. When I got there, it felt like I’m in a totally different town. The dark and old buildings in alleys, teens sitting in the middle of the street and a man drinking on the street... were threatening enough to an Asian girl. Anyway I had to go back to the other side soon, and as I walk into the train station, I started to feel stable. I don’t think this is only a matter of familiarity. While I cross the bridge(the station) which connects two separate areas, I experienced big emotional and environmental change. I don’t know exactly how the residents of each area feel, but I think there must be some kind of psychological differences. In that sense, the bridge has a very important role not only physically but also semantically.Therefore the bridge could be a good metaphor as the connection.

I don’t know how to explain the reason of stiffen feelings from the buildings of the area. I can’t blame the buildings for being rectangular, can I? Though, one interesting point for me is that there are strangely many grid fences and wire meshes. I can find the structures so easily without any effort, so I’m thinking about a piece that can be hung on the mesh and can be moved around the Espoon keskus area by the hands of residents.