Temporary City Mountains
2022 (excerpt)
Temporary city mountains dresses a portrait of some of Helsinki’s street inhabitants during the winter season while addressing notions of perception, instability, and the search for the familiar.
Stacks of pebbles are placed on the sides of the city’s streets to be spread when low temperatures start causing ice formations on the roads. They are temporarily deployed to reduce slippery accidents, and then packed and put away in the spring until the next cold season.
Since leaving Lebanon, I have obsessively searched for images and appearances of mountain forms in urban and constructed spaces, a playful yet serious quest for a familiar trace. In the flatness of Helsinki, I perceive these stacks of rubble as temporary city mountains, ones that visit for a while and then leave, unlike their real counterpart which exudes permanence.
The relationship of these ‘mountains’ to time is much closer to the human time scale than that of real mountains. Here, we are the fixed points or constants, and they are the temporary or ephemeral presences orbiting around us. They become emblematic of a disruption of temporalities, where the human time scale and the geological one are reversed. The physical scale also shifts; here, they are humble-sized, a shy presence in the foreground while the city remains visible in the background.
This series becomes a reflection on how the experience and reading of a particular space can hint to the experience of a particular period, (namely that of instability and of the loss of a familiar) or conversely, how a certain temporal experience can influence our experience of a space, or of our surrounding environments.