Varkaus

A documentary about the state of an industrial city in Eastern Finland. The project also stages an objection to the media representation of the Finnish countryside as dying and desolate.

Varkaus is a city that was born around a paper mill in the late 19th century. Far into the 20th century the mill was the raison d’etre of the community, as every residents livelihood was somehow connected to it. However, in the 21st century automation, the financial crisis and pummelling demand for paper caused by digitalisation have led to the mill cutting down on employees. This has caused it to lose the hold it once had over the way the residents viewed themselves and their city, leaving a void to be filled. The community is in limbo, trying to find a new cornerstone to build their identity on. If Varkaus is no longer an industrial city, then what kind of a city is it?

In the Finnish media these types of small communities struggling with the effects of globalisation are often portrayed through a grand narrative of an emptying and dying countryside, a hopeless situation. Regardless of financial and political flows however, everyday life carries on for the city’s residents. They have their hobbies, aspirations, relationships and struggles. It is this layer of the usual and everyday that I’m interested in portraying in this project.

At the same time the project lays a critical gaze on the documentary photographer as narrator into the form of the work. I am from the southern capital of Finland and have never lived in Varkaus. The perspective in my images will always be one of an outsider. As a part of the project I have spread cameras to people I have met while working and asked them to document their own life and surroundings as a part of the project. The resulting project will be presented in a polyphonic form rife with contradiction.