Years of paper, 2021
TAKKK Environmental Art Symposium, Kohila Paper mill, Kohila, Rapla County, northern Estonia.
Site-specific paper installation
The project focuses on the artefacts left in Kohila. After decades of daily use, a landscape holds many traces of its physical and immaterial past. Marks on land, architecture, holes, waste, rust, things left behind by the rush of time, and related memories. My intervention involves recollections of the landscape and its humanization: manmade artefacts, land use and daily work. Being the paper factory, an important symbol of Kohila’s economy, society and everyday life, local people have re-enacted this heritage. Industrial buildings speak to us through the memories we associate with them: an open dialogue between the things, the place of making and the consumers. The primary material for this project is wasted paper. In its place of production, paper is charged with several layers of meaning: it carries social, economic and political aspects. Wasted paper metaphorically replaces the brand-new paper once made in the factory, allowing for a conceptual bridge to the past.