Päivi Tuovinen – Elsewhere Finland
Gallery Kellokas 10.3.–30.4.2025

On the outskirts of remote villages, in the backcountry, there are places with curious names. To get there, you will have to leave major roads and travel past small built-up areas along increasingly narrow gravel roads. Finally, you have to continue further on foot, often plodding on tussocks or wading in snow drifts. These are places with vulgar names. However, once you reach your destination at the end of a long journey on rough terrain, you are faced with an experience impossible to foresee based on a trail map or satellite images.

The photographs in this exhibition are documentary glimpses into remote regions in Finland – wilderness and rural areas – places where you will not have to wait for your turn to get to an observation deck or compete for a prime sunbathing spot. In the increasingly urban Finland of growth centres, these places are all but forgotten. Their unusual names pop up in headlines every now and then, but over time, the connection to the history of the names has been severed.

When I was a child, I spent time camping at a pond with a vulgar name, and decades later, I wanted to revisit it. I wondered why this beautiful, remote pond had been given such an odd name – whether the name originated from the shape of the pond or there was some other explanation for it. This tiny pond surrounded by forest, a mossy neck of land and a larger lake has an inky dark bottom. According to locals, the pond may lie on top of a spring and have two bottoms, as fish with various degrees of darkness have been caught in the lake.

Vulgar place names have remained on Finland’s map thanks to oral tradition, and they are part of our cultural and linguistic heritage. Looking at the geographical characteristics of the places may still reveal hints of the origin of the names. Originally, the names did not convey the sort of humour that we may associate with them these days. Historical name collection data reveals interesting stories of the kinds of lives that were led in these places before our times.

There is something I find familiar and hold dear in these remote places. I toured these places with vulgar names whenever travelling through Finland to my northerly birthplace. I travelled tens of thousands of kilometres. I spent nights in small towns, villages and forests. When the most common nature spots near cities fill up, crowds were nowhere to be found in these places. Some, however, see these landscapes as places for cultivation or hunting or hiking sites not far from their backyard. The few local inhabitants I happened upon during my visits wished to be included in the photographs in their own ways, as a part of the place and its history. The name Elsewhere Finland also refers to tourism. There is none of that in these places, but how will it be in the future?

Contact details of the artist: ptuovine@gmail.com