Autochthonic Fantasy

The video witholds video footage depicting a “storyline” that has a starting point in a historical situation in the town of Pori (a small industrial city in Finland) when the city burned downed in 1852 forcing people to travel to the outskirts of the city and to dig holes on the ground as their dwellings creating a so called Finnish slum (named Holetown). This kind of living lasted for many decades and the area inhabited so much as 500 people the most. The video itself consists of various texts and narrations as well as visual documentation of the building of a recreation of this kind of “house in a land hole” in the area of the town where they originally used to exist which had then turned into a more traditional working class housing area and more recently a picturesque bourgeoise neighborhood. In addition to that there are dramatized scenes where a resident of this dwelling looks at an erotic animation from a phenakinestoscope (19th century looking device), goes through and cleans tools and gets haunted by modern house electronics at night. An epilogue brings us to future dystopian society where people are living in underground disaster shelters due to years of economical and political upheavals. The project functioned as a public art project during the summer of 2014 when the reconstruction of a hole dwelling was left in the park as a sort of a monument and place for discussions and lectures.