Heavily Carefree

Gallery Hippolyte, Helsinki 2016
Photographic Centre PERI, Turku 2017



Get on the scales and take a deep breath. Look at the number on the scales and focus your thoughts on the concept of weight.
(Weight is mass, density of matter and gravity.)

Get off the scales and write a list of your needs for the day. Start with your basic needs and proceed towards more complex ones. Be precise and focus on the materials and interdependences. Which products and structures do you need? What they are made of? From where are they brought? From how far and how? What does it take for you to go from place A to place B? How do you stay warm? How do you communicate? What is the material foundation of your communication? Keep writing the list until you tire of it. Take note how long you were able to concentrate before reaching the point of boredom. Burn the list.

Go to a swimming hall, climb the diving platform and jump; in the air, you weigh nothing.



Heavily Carefree is a photographic study of how concern for the environment moulds the human experience of existence. The image entities in the exhibition are linked by themes of imprint, weight, touch and guilt. The pieces focus on the melancholy related to the heavy impacts of everyday actions. Equally important in the pieces is the individual’s aspiration towards levity and the attempts to act right and have a respectful connection with the surrounding reality.

The exhibition focuses on the individual in the middle of their actions; on the observation and emotional interpretation of the scale of humanity’s actions and their consequences. Subtle images of weights hanging from a piece of string, dislocated rocks, pitholes and surfaces of work sites engage discreetly in the examination of the significances of causation. Korpijaakko’s time spent in China and Japan is reflected in the visuality of the exhibition. In the pieces, the empty white of paper provides a place in relation to which the photographs set themselves.

Heavily Carefree is summarised by a conflicting idea of a kiss as a force of erosion. The space of the exhibition builds a type of gentle elegy of care, a proposal for an attitude and a focus on a detail: when thousands of hands wear down rock that has been declared sacred.