ITÄKESKUS DANCING TREE

a RUMARYHMÄ video by TEEMU MÄKI

13 minutes 30 seconds
2002–2004
Teemu Mäki
4:3, production format DV
Distributor: AV-arkki

Script, camerawork, audio recording and editing: Teemu Mäki
Performers: Pia Karaspuro and Päivi Rissanen
Music: Jouko Kyhälä and Outi Pulkkinen

 
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RUMARYHMÄ (Pia Karaspuro, Jouko Kyhälä Teemu Mäki, Outi Pulkkinen and Päivi Rissanen) is a collective that has made performances, exhibitions and video works. In the video work ITÄKESKUS DANCING TREE there are four dancers: a tree, two women and one camera. Jouko and Outi made the music for it afterwards. They used the audio of the original video clips as their source material, molding it and then playing and singing on top of it.

This is often said to be the most boring of my video works – probably because 10 of its 13 and a half minutes shows just a stump of a tree without any camera movement. I myself very much enjoy the 10-minute shot of the stump. I see real metaphorical importance in it. And it does have loads of little movement for example in the form of foliage quivering in the wind. As a relatively low resolution – in comparison to the abilities of human eye – video image this view also has in my opinion an interesting tension in it: on one hand it has a naturalistic look (just a stump of a tree shot in neutral daylight) and yet simultaneously it can seem almost abstract image, a two-dimensional slab of brown and grey dots and lines slightly shaking.

After the 10-minute-long "informalistic painting" comes the short burst of two women dancing, rapid-cut and shot with flailing camera-gestures.

Even though on the video you can mainly see trees, grass and a couple of dancing bodies, from some shots and from the margins of all the shots you can tell that it's shot in urban and industrial environment. Actually just a stone-throw away from Finland's first shopping mall Itäkeskus. We wanted to turn our backs to the compulsive treadmill of production and consumption that consumer society is and make room for bodies in non-productive yet vitalizing acts. And ask: what can we learn from the tree-stump? Or from looking at it?

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