My exhibition “200 000 Years of Longing” told about the long history of humankind and the feeling of longing.
One naturally craves to be with someone else, but approaching them can feel anything but natural. From all my experiences of longing, one is especially difficult to put into words. I long for a certain feeling that seems to have been lost somewhere in the past. It is a very positive experience that includes different visual sights in my early childhood. While it reminds me of my own past, at some level it also brings to my mind the early times of humankind. I started to explore a human world where words were hardly used, only a song mimicking the sounds of nature. The time of the human species has lasted from 200 000 to 300 000 years. Many essential characteristics of humans are even older than that, such as the use of fire and everlasting curiosity. Maybe longing is one of them. Even if we never managed to find common words for the object of our longing, the longing itself connects us to each other and to all the people who ever lived. Our common origin is in the familiar and the unexplored rocky ground that attracts us like a heart. The ground is like a drum that moves the body towards new places, trips, dangers, dancing. A boat is like a cradle, with which one floats upon the element of life. Countless palms have touched familiar rocks, leaving us a trace of a humanly red colour, just like a sign of longing. It is the same longing that we are feeling now. And each time that everything is lost, the most important is the story that remains. It is braided into a cloth and passed on to the next generation. It is hidden inside a perfectly shaped shell that someone finds tens of thousands of years later.
You can borrow some of my works from Rikhardinkatu Art Library in Helsinki
Aino Keinänen 