Tatu Hiltunen

Pass The Knowledge, 2007

During 2006 I photographed recycled paper, cardboard and pulp in its different states, conditions and forms of existence. In the recycling space, these products are assorted, graded, screened, sized and sorted by its material into stacks. In this broken, unstable and vague world it is like heaven, because there are everything in classified order: here is newspapers, there is advertisements and there you see office pulp and so on. Just push the button, capture the prey and arrange the exhibition.

Unfortunately, in the means of sense, yet interestingly, these paper piles spread around and blend together many unpredictable, unclassifiable and incalculable ways in the big paper handling accommodation. For example, inquisitive prospector may find people´s personal notes and drawings in the middle of packaging materials or even discover parts of porn magazines amongst highly secret bank account information. You get information you don´t want to get and data you don´t expect to come across.

By choosing this subject I have tried to find microcosmos which has its own attributes, bearings and consequences which I suppose to reflect the society´s customs, choices and habits. These photographs are basicly recirculated repetitions, recycled reiterations, used reproductions and imperfected tautologies of our community´s everyday essentials. These paper installations or pulp sculptures exists only very short period of time. Whole building is shifting all the time: big lorrys are driving in and out continuously, paper is carried around by many bucket loaders in the same time, pulp is whirling from the cutters, papers are flapping and fluttering around because of hard draught of air. That noisy and dirty collage is like a stage where actors, props and scenes are in perpetual alteration and mutation. This spooky stage is standing still, because, for me, it presents boundaries of the world. I was first interested about this stage, then i was focusing more into ”actors” of pulp.

When doing this series, I was seeing these ”actors” were equal or symbolising with many fundamental things from our lives. Metaphoraly thinking, recycling center and paper piles embody our culture´s immanent outlooks and processes of establishing and forming meanings. It is like a theatre with constantly changing messy scene composed of pictures, effigies, figures, illustrations, images, impressions, views, frames, ideas, concepts, meanings, words, messages, logos, brands, trademarks, characters, letters, indications, notes, prints, imprints, taints, traces, weals, vestiges, marks, signs and symbols.

You see, I like to list things, even in illogical ways. That is my poor way to dominate my reality. As a photographer, I see ”everything stereotypically” in lists, categories, catalogs, directories, registers, schedules… Some people collect things, but that is just slightly more concrete variaton of possessing the reality.

Inspired and counterfeited by abstract painters these photographs are bending the time and perspective, destroying the drifts of reality, begetting the movement and vanishing the focus point. Lines or strokes in my pictures appears because of the moving of the film. The frame of the film is changing, while the shutter is open. This represents a passage of information into film and elapsing of time. Longer the exposure time has been, more data is blurred and further moments are replaced on by each other. If man can master time and dominate info, then he could be uncontrollable in this copy/paste -culture which is only rotating the old ghosts and broken has beens.

Tatu Hiltunen, 2007