H O L V I the Lower Gallery
6.2.–2.3.2008
suomi
Anna Ruth: AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHT DAYS
Car drawings of Finland
Mapping the globe currently depends on reliable satellite photography, but the initial game of discovery (taming and controlling an uncharted world) was much more personal: people travelled, told stories, and drew pictures. Since that time, maps have collected information in order to exploit the resources of land and sea. More over, maps have been used to define the abstract concepts of place and ownership: employed as a concrete depiction of geographical reality.
Car drawings are the result of an accident: the outcome of my carelessness with a pen on paper combined with the movement of the car on the road. These drawings evoke a traditional type of mapping. Although they are not reliable diagrams, they do represent my surroundings. These new maps tell the story of a journey and offer an alternative definition of topography.
The initial objective of the Car drawings was to document an expedition. It was a way to define my environment, to mark and to claim my newly discovered territory. The lines created from the movement of the car on the road describe a sensory experience of the road itself. They represent my discovery and documentation of an environment unknown to me.
For the execution of this project, Juho Jäppinen agreed to cooperate as my collaborator and driver. We expected to drive an estimated 4000km around the perimeter of Finland, using only the roads closest to the border and excluding all roads on which we would have to backtrack. This would exclude several very important towns in the North from our itinerary leaving a huge area of Lapland uncharted.
The journey was anticipated to take a maximum of eight days and would be performed in 35 stages. One Car drawing or map would be made per stage and photographs would be taken, from within the car, before and after each stage.
Around the world in eight days was a success: completed within our time schedule, accomplishing all 35 maps of the Finnish car-driven territory; realized without accidents (and only one confrontation with the law). This journey was about finding boundaries: the physical boundaries of a country, our psychological boundaries of a marathon-like challenge, our respective physical limitations of exhaustion, hunger, desire, and control, and finally the testing of imposed and moral restrictions.
The initial questions of international topography and political definitions of identity lead way to personal questions of power and territory. The material Car drawings, in themselves, are also a game of power challenging the official and immaculate illustrations of the atlas, which represent an accepted reality. Car drawings attempt to depict a multilayered experience of travel, based on the sensory experience of a given moment. As with the pioneers of mapmaking, creativity and imagination are necessary aspects of these images of the road, to complete the grey zones: the unknown. Furthermore, the underlying motivation of my gesture compares to that of the world’s first cartographers: to discover, to leave my mark, redefine my territory and consequently redefine the image of the world.
Anna RUTH
on friday 29.2. at 16.30 teatime with Anna and Juho Jäppinen
Jyväskylä Art Museum, Kauppakatu 23, tel. (014) 626 856
Open tue–sun 11 am– 6 pm
