Outi Koivisto, Emma Peura and Maria Valkeavuolle are three artists active in Uusimaa, united by the reflections on belonging, memories and places. They approach these themes through their own personal stories and relationships with places. Their place attachments stretch across Finland and, when asked about it, their go-to statement is: I come from nowhere. Sometimes it is easier to attach the answer to a specific location to more easily define a sense of local identity. The artists reflect on the experience of belonging.

What makes a place a home? In Finland, there are many local cultures, customs, environments, and nature. Koivisto, Peura and Valkeavuolle have all travelled different paths and eventually established themselves in the capital region. The memories travel with us, whether we want them to or not. The experience of rootlessness can also be passed on as a cross-generational experience in family history. Constant moving can affect present experiences and attachment; in a way, the moving never really stops. The feeling of alienation also contributes to the moving and the search for one’s place. If one always comes from outside and, therefore, cannot fully belong, even the attachment is fragile. The memories come to the exhibition as the artists return to personal archives, explore words, read maps, and travel to places. The memories must be processed anew. We must turn them into stories we tell ourselves.

Outi Koivisto was born in Oulu, lived in Ii during her school years, moved via Oulu to Espoo, from there to Helsinki, Vantaa and Helsinki again. For a time she also lived in the United States. At the age of 41, Koivisto has lived in 18 different apartments, in 16 of them before the age of 30. In her works, she processes belonging through place relations and fiction. She reflects on place identity both in her current home in Helsinki and in her childhood upbringing in Ii. She builds up her place relationships by reading Kalle Päätalo’s autobiographical novel series Juuret Iijoen törmässä. The books were present in the childhood experience world, but before 2023 she had not read a single one of them. She has now read all 26 volumes in the series and creates the exhibition’s works from this reading process. In Koivisto’s input to the exhibition, the private, documentation, memories and fiction are mixed into wholes of work.

Emma Peura was born in Kauhava and has lived in Rovaniemi, Halli, Santahamina, returned to Kauhava, moved to Alabama, returned again to Kauhava, moved from there to Orivesi, Imatra, Jyväskylä, Munich and back to Imatra. For the past eleven years, she has lived in Helsinki. She has spent most of her summers in Posio, Hautajärvi and Salla. At the age of 35, Peura has lived in 19 different apartments. She will move into her twentieth apartment during the exhibition’s opening week. In her works, Peura deals with the feeling of rootlessness and her childhood through a place that is of great importance to her, the family’s summer cottage. She has created art in collaboration with a bog near the cabin and collected natural materials for the works from the cabin’s surroundings.

Maria Valkeavuolle was born and spent her early childhood in Karstula, her teenage years in Nurmijärvi, then moved to Vantaa, Helsinki, and back to Nurmijärvi. She has also been homeless for a few months, and at 39 years old, she has lived at fourteen different addresses. Valkeavuolle’s approach to the exhibition’s themes is water– its role in memories and its multifaceted meanings in her personal history. The video, installation, and sound artworks all touch upon water or its absence in some way.

The exhibition features paper-based works, graphics, moving image, and sound. In addition to the exhibition’s themes, the artists are united by the importance of paper as material, substrate, and content for an artwork.

The exhibition has been supported by VISEK, the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Uusimaa Fund of the Finnish Cultural Foundation. The handmade papers were produced at Helsingin Paperipaja.