The tree of knowledge is not that of life

"The tree of knowledge is not that of life" is a personal quest of photographer Saara Tuominen to connect with a part of her roots, only to find that time passed has made it impossible.

"The tree of knowledge is not that of life" is an exploration that I take on to find out about my family's past after decades-long period of exile and process of forgetting.

My Grandfather's family escaped the Genocide of Ingrian Finns in the 1940's. Ingrian Finns are a Finnish speaking Christian minority that lived in a region in the Soviet Union, near St. Petersburg. Their language and religion was seen as a threat to the Soviet Union and during the 1930’s a third of the whole people were killed. Before the end of 1940’s 150,000 Ingrians were either exiled, executed or taken to prison camps.

Because I can’t travel to Russia, I experiment with alternative ways to photograph Ingrian land. I use Google Street View as a basis for my photographs. The unreal scenery that is taken by an automatic machine and then manipulated and censored by an AI acts as a metaphor of distance and generational memories. I can travel through those places, but can only dream of reaching the past.

My mission with this project is not only to deal with themes of exile, but also to explore how fragile existence can be, in our collective memory as well as our own private ones.