The Vanishing Monuments is edited out of documentation of several actions which took place in Helsinki, Finland in the winter of 2009. The actions all include monuments, or acts of memory in public spaces. Each action includes its own negation, causing the monuments to vanish: to melt, break, or be erased.
The first monument is based on a 1940 letter from Joachim Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister of Nazi Germany to Joseph Stalin. The letter, declaring the eternal friendship between Germany and Russia, was sent only several months before Germany invaded to Russia, intending to seize land within Soviet borders and repopulate it with Germans. In my video, the correspondence is casted into shoe soles. I wear the shoes and walk in the streets of Helsinki, casting the letters into the snow. The promise of eternal friendship perpetuates itself through the footprints, until the shoes stand, or until the snow melts.
In the early 1900’s, tango music was introduced into the Finnish culture by travelling musicians. By 1940, it became one of the most popular musical forms in Finland. In the second monument, I play a Finnish wartime tango song inside a series of empty spaces. Each time the song is being played, it is being recorded over itself, together with the sound of the space in which it is played. Eventually, the sound of the empty rooms become more and more dominant, causing a resonance effect. Resonance is an acoustic phenomena which happens when a sound is reflected from a surface, causing a prolongation of its own frequency. Eventually, the resonance of the empty spaces take over the melody, and the song is erased.
In the third monument, the narrator of the video, an all-knowing, Finnish speaking voice-over, reveals the fact that she in fact is reading phonetically from a page, and does not understand her own words. The all-knowing voice-over, which was at first perceived as accurate and objective, reveals itself as a fictional position. Is this a cynical move, turning the person reading the text into an instrument? Or, instead, does it make her more human?
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
