Utu-Tuuli Jussila
Härmä / Hoar

Exhibition Details

Utu-Tuuli Jussila’s grandmother lived to be 94 years old (1925-2019). Until the very end, she wished to live alone in her countryside home in Ylihärmä, Finland, kilometers away from the nearest town.

She had early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, which is why she occasionally imagined that strangers visited the yard or the basement. A motion-sensing surveillance camera was installed to ensure that the intruders would be detected. Eventually, the camera ended up monitoring her instead.

When Jussila first sees the surveillance camera images, her grandmother has already passed away. They become a new and unexpected meeting ground. Photographs that weren’t intended to ever be looked at, instead turn into an archive to dig in. A place in which to spend time observing, searching for details: an expression, an object, an unusual framing.

We see the grandmother working in the garden. She carries a bucket, sweeps the floor, pushes a cart. We will never really know her, but we learn to read the patterns of her days. In the movements’ repetitiveness, we find the courage of her autonomy. The garden, always framed in the same way, becomes familiar. Peering through an archive of unauthorized memories, we wonder to which extent we can look.

The grandmother moves in and out the edges of the frame, her clothes changing with the seasons. The camera sometimes captures images of crows, rabbits, cats. It will continue to do so after she is gone: in the last photographs, dated 2022, fawns and the shade of trees are what remains. At the end of it all, the garden is an organism that keeps breathing.