Maikki Salmivaara
Toukola, Helsinki, Finland

According to anthropologist Tim Ingold  “Our actions do not transform the world; they are part and parcel of the world’s transforming itself”. Like an organism and body, shaped through the very tasks that themselves are shaped by the very landscape, its social norms, cultural aspects, nature.  Landscape is experienced and shaped in the process of living and by participating to the entangled social taskscape, in Ingold’s words by “dwelling” in it. 

How do my tasks sculpt my landscape, how do my tasks relate to others’?
 
As I walk on the pavement, no footprints follow me. When I talk on a street, I mostly talk to my smart phone. If I grow veggies, that is for fun.
 
The streets of my neighbourhood in Helsinki are named after exotic places.  When the names were given in the 1920’s their connotations and significance for the everyday life of the dwellers of this area was much smaller than today. Looking at the road signs today makes me think about the materiality of my taskscape. The computer I use for typing, the food I eat, the drugs I take for headache. 

My footprints are in the distant places sculpting those distant landscapes. My typing fingers connected to many others along the way for enabling my writings. For this, I would like to thank those places for making my everyday here.

Cotton and bamboo thread on brass wire