Inheritor – Perillinen
Short Movie 17’40”, Harri Larjosto © 2017
The masqued Inheritor, ghost from the woods, awakens faces from a forgotten mine. A local story becomes a part of the global world, the nature. Antropocene. Modern human follows certain practises that have orginated a long time ago.
Link to Inheritor Movie
Synopsis
Inheritor is a story of man as a part of the continuum of life. It depicts a mystically beautiful vision of nature and of man’s mark on it. Modern human follows certain practises that have orginated a long time ago. The masqued inheritor, who is an actor as well as an observer, awakens faces from a forgotten mine. A local story becomes a part of the global world, the nature.
My artistic production has mainly been centered around nature and how human being acts in it. I often look at the relationship between the two from a rather critical standpoint. An example of my critical approach is my video O-zone, which came out already in 1996. Global awareness of the very same issue only occured 20 years later. It is paramount to me to observe human impact on nature, and to understand what is repairable and what is irrevocably damaged. Inheritor is, however, not a critical film, it doesn’t look for someone to point a finger at. Instead, it focused on the silent mystery of the relationship between human and nature. A faceless person finds several faces. Right beside beauty and light, there is frustration and humble powerlessness when we are faced with matters that are our beyond our grasp.
This fictive story was shot in Orijärvi, by a coppermine that was closed in 1958. The action blends in with the landscape and the nature. The shootings lasted relatively long because we sometimes had to wait for certain light or certain natural phenomena for weeks.
The story
Inheritor ascends from the woods. A mystical, faceless figure who hides himself behind a costume, wanders to the abandoned mine, to the side of culture. He lifts his discovery, a face of a man, on branches of a tree where it sways in wind and in time.
The woods
There are green strings in the picture, set up from tree to tree like a gigantic web. The masqued inheritor, a scary sight in his 3D-chille outfit (used by snipers, assassins and hunters) is found in the woods. He wanders back to the woods, like he has been summoned, and leaves the picture.
The mine
Inheritor walks in the former mine site, bombing the water puddles with small rocks. He then ends up by a tailing pond, and the rocks get bigger, no longer small enough to throw. The rocks are now massive blocks that need to be rolled and pushed. Due to the copper, the water is of turquoise color. It is also crystal clear as the high metallic content has killed majority of all organisms. The video also shows how the rocks hit the water and sink under the surface. After he finishes throwing the stones, the character is in a boat in the tailing pond, searching the bottom of it with a drag. Faces ascend from the bottom, large masques with their ”fishbones”.
Return to the woods
Inheritor hangs the masques he drags from the depths, the faces, on strings that he sets up in the woods. The faces sway in the wind like insects caught in cobweb. The visual metaphor creates a poetic experience of the shadows of violence, the beauty of nature and the cruelty of circle of time, change. The light in the photographs is an essential element in creating the right viewer experience.
(The story behind the masks: the roughly one hundred masques that were used as props were made for an installation in 2013. Their design is inspired by the thousands fishheads and fishbones that I witnessed hanging in the wind in Icelandic fish drying racks.)
The choir piece, Inheritor, on the soundtrack is performed by chamber choir, Kampin Laulu, lead by Kari Turunen. The composition is by a Lithuanian on contemporary composer, Egidija Medeksaite. Libretto is a poem by Harri Larjosto.
Writer, director/producer Harri Larjosto’s CV
Harri Larjosto was born in Turku, in 1952, and currently lives in Vantaa, Southern Finland.
Class teacher’s degree, Turku University 1976. Teacher at Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, 2002-2008.
First private exhibition in 1978. Harri has made photographs, videos, installations, collages, paintings, conceptual art and more. Outside of Finland he is best known for his videos that have been shown in several European countries as well as Japan and USA. Yleisradio’s art channel frequently show his videos as well.
Harri Larjosto received the Finland Prize in 2006, and Vantaa Culture Prize in 2002.
Since late 1980’s Larjo has concentrated on creating a number of photography series along with videos.
He combines trational cinematic narration with visual means of video art. In 2008 AV-ark funded Larjosto’s DVD-collection Moving Suites.
Larjosto is a poetic and absurd humorist. He wants to depict the energy of chances and changed views.
