The Knot in Time project started with an accidental discovery by artists from Savonlinna: hundreds of old glass negatives, some buried in the ground, were lying in the basement of a dilapidated house known as Solmun talo, the Knot . In several of the glasses, the erosion had already done its job and the images had completely disappeared. In some, time has painted ghostly and shredde shadows on the figures, in others the picture has been completely preserved. There are glimpses of young people, adults and even families in the pictures.
The Olavi photography studio operated in the building until 1975. The photos were most likely taken by photographer Paavo Sihvonen. The discovery of the photographs tied together the stories of the people of the past immortalized by Paavo and the present: the artists who made the discovery and the new stories and visions evoked by the images. All the works in the exhibition are based on the glass negatives and the place of their discovery, and each artist has handled this material in their own way. In Lauri Ainala's works, sound and image intertwine, as sound transforms into image and image into sound. Sini Kosonen presents photo prints, installations and video works she made together with Ainala for the exhibition. Ville Erkki Tarke has photographed Solmu's house and the its surroundings, and modeled them into 3D models using photogrammetry technique, which he then processed into videos and photographs.Beautiful photographs of Juho Liukkonen reveal both the fate of the house and the process behind the exhibition. Ainala and Liukkonen have also created a soundscape for the exhibition based on the pictures and the sounds of the house.
The Knot in Time project is about photographs, preservation, disappearance, disintegration, forgetting - erasing the city's subconscious when the old buildings and the memories hidden in them are destroyed. The exhibition is a farewell to a house that is disappearing from the cityscape, a commemoration that captures the power of imagination to resist the banal and visionless mental landscape of our time.
Above: Sini Kosonen, Solmu ajassa II, digital collage, 2023
