Mise en Scene: Farm Tableaux Finland Google Street View
2015
Sylvia’s groundbreaking series in collaboration with John M Lynch marks the first known and on-going artworks created specifically for Google Street View. Mise en Scene: Farm Tableaux Finland work illustrates food culture in a way that moves us beyond lifestyle magazines and TV reality shows. This series builds on Farm Tableaux Canada. In both series Sylvia's images of farming and food production reflect the on-going realities of farm-work from field labour to food processing. An unknown fact to many audiences is that Finland actually contains half of the world's arable land north of the 60°N latitude, and produces everything from reindeer meat to greenhouse grown lettuce.
The artist’s portrayals or ‘tableaux’ of farmers in Finland reach far beyond the romantic notions viewers might hold, and the subject matter covers sustainable farming in Lapland to intensive farming production techniques. Each of the various tableaux have been produced collaboratively with food producers and in a unique partnership with Google Trusted Photographer, John M Lynch. The outcome is a pioneering initiative using the Google Street View platform in which the resulting tableaux form a compelling ‘Mis en scene’ or staged visual narrative about agricultural labour and farmers in Finland.
Sylvia is interested in challenging the presentation parameters of how her staged scenes can be explored directly within Google Street View as three-dimensional photographs. By staging a tableaux vivant for the camera Sylvia also revisits photographic histories, for example, in which portrait sitters in the 19th century were required to pose motionless for several minutes while the camera recorded their likeness. As such the artist has cleverly reverse engineered traditional photographic documentary practices in the use of the Google Street view so her subjects become portrait sitters caught in multiple viewpoints in both space and time. Through this process, the artist questions the framing of history, perceptions of viewing culture and screen-based mediation in relation to its role in representing farming and agricultural landscapes within contemporary art and new media.
2015
Sylvia’s groundbreaking series in collaboration with John M Lynch marks the first known and on-going artworks created specifically for Google Street View. Mise en Scene: Farm Tableaux Finland work illustrates food culture in a way that moves us beyond lifestyle magazines and TV reality shows. This series builds on Farm Tableaux Canada. In both series Sylvia's images of farming and food production reflect the on-going realities of farm-work from field labour to food processing. An unknown fact to many audiences is that Finland actually contains half of the world's arable land north of the 60°N latitude, and produces everything from reindeer meat to greenhouse grown lettuce.
The artist’s portrayals or ‘tableaux’ of farmers in Finland reach far beyond the romantic notions viewers might hold, and the subject matter covers sustainable farming in Lapland to intensive farming production techniques. Each of the various tableaux have been produced collaboratively with food producers and in a unique partnership with Google Trusted Photographer, John M Lynch. The outcome is a pioneering initiative using the Google Street View platform in which the resulting tableaux form a compelling ‘Mis en scene’ or staged visual narrative about agricultural labour and farmers in Finland.
Sylvia is interested in challenging the presentation parameters of how her staged scenes can be explored directly within Google Street View as three-dimensional photographs. By staging a tableaux vivant for the camera Sylvia also revisits photographic histories, for example, in which portrait sitters in the 19th century were required to pose motionless for several minutes while the camera recorded their likeness. As such the artist has cleverly reverse engineered traditional photographic documentary practices in the use of the Google Street view so her subjects become portrait sitters caught in multiple viewpoints in both space and time. Through this process, the artist questions the framing of history, perceptions of viewing culture and screen-based mediation in relation to its role in representing farming and agricultural landscapes within contemporary art and new media.
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Explore these artworks online as dimensional photographs at: Viskaalin Farm, Muhos, Oulu http://tinyurl.com/o3bafzo http://tinyurl.com/nzhhla7 http://tinyurl.com/y93q7dbq http://tinyurl.com/nae3ty9 Flour Mill, Kinnusen Mylly, Utajärvi, Oulu http://tinyurl.com/qexm9ph http://tinyurl.com/o4t4j5s http://tinyurl.com/o8h652b Hannu Lahtela´s reindeer farm: Maltiolan Jaloste Oy, Salla http://tinyurl.com/p4urmfm http://tinyurl.com/pf6n74y http://tinyurl.com/pxey8px Chefs Tero Mäntykangas, Jouni Toivanen, and Viljo Laine at work, Laplandhotels Sky Ounasvaara, Rovaniemi http://tinyurl.com/nhaxucl http://tinyurl.com/qc44jx8 http://tinyurl.com/nssxn4v |
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More about the processes and ethos behind the development of FARM TABLEAUX FINLAND
by Sylvia Grace Borda, May 2015
How does a project begin – it often commences with a question or an aspiration to accomplish certain outcomes.
Throughout regions of Finland a high percentage of agricultural space is inhabited and worked on by a small percentage of the country’s overall population. While these agricultural spaces are critical to maintaining a healthy food supply, modern day thinking about contemporary life has become nearly synonymous with an urban existence, and consequently there is often little thought given to the wider role of farming. Not dissimilarly, there has been a limited perception of farming as a subject matter for contemporary art: it remains hidden as an activity confined to the ‘countryside’ or in a marketplace separate from its source of production. After all where does food on the dinner plate come from if it is not for farming?
By extracting farm work as a commodity in terms of production and labour, my photographic series ‘Farm Tableaux Finland’ seeks to provide new representations about an age-old subject. In contrasting space, time, and labour through the creation of this portfolio of artwork, I intend to create a contemporary dialogue about farming to include farmers themselves, the consumers and other stakeholders. As an artist, I am interested to take the subject of farming and develop it into a contemporaneous concept, as well as prompting audiences to take a second look at what is being portrayed.
In deciding to represent farming I aspired to work with food culture in a way that moves the subject beyond the marketplace, lifestyle magazines and TV food shows. My photographic images of farming and food production reflect the on-going realities of farm-work from field labour to food processing.
How does a project such as ‘Farm Tableaux’ evolve?
In a post-modern framework, a multidimensional response to farming does not yet exist. Modernist notions have largely remained unchanged in the period 1950s-70s of the perception of farming processes. Consequently, I am drawn to engage a wider latitude of audiences who can access the subject of farming but also how aesthetic values and a re-appraisal of the social context of farming can be explored.
In this way I am attempting to move my arts practice from being solely object-centric and entering a frontier in which the imagery can also reflect on wider social conditions. Artists working to portray subjects as both art worthy and as part of a social condition is not unheard of. Nineteenth century artists such as diverse as Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) to Eugène Atget (1857-1927) individually depicted farming landscapes and the products of farm labour. Each of these artists depicted intimately these agricultural spaces, the people whom inhabited them, and the daily labour that occurred within them. In this way these artists were embedded in the communities, and were not subordinate to the activities. Resulting artworks produced by these practitioners were appraised by the public as not atypical, but rather residing as examples of the avant-garde.
As I have commenced engaging with farming communities, I, too, envision the work I am leading to continue on this trajectory of avant-garde as it enters a sphere in which debate about representation, production, and authenticity can be fostered.
Consequently Farm Tableaux acts as a reflector of social interpretation and ownership. Through this work, I provide a communication channel about the global challenge of achieving environmental and social sustainability. Equally these artworks also extend the notions of how ‘staged’ photography can be aesthetic objects and signifiers of current events.
The result is supported by open questions.
- Can the artworks become a platform to drive debate about local and global efforts in how local issues can be experienced?
- Can the artworks affect the viewer to become more astute to greater concerns beyond the image frame?
While it may be presumptuous to directly state that a photograph can inform social policy or sustainable development – it can offer a visual platform to its viewers and, in so doing, shape a renewed awareness about farming environments.
Partnerships
For a project about contemporary farming to succeed, it requires collaborators and close working partnerships. As an artist, I am working with numerous stakeholders in an effort to portray ‘real’ portraits of Finnish farming. To produce such a body of work, many voices are required to help inform Farm Tableaux Finland and to illustrate the contradictions in perceptions of farming in the present day. Organizations representing farmers and producers such MTK, MSL, Ruokatieto, Luomuliitto, Viskaalin Farm, Hannu Lahtela at Maltiolan Jaloste Oy, Kinnusen Mylly, Visit Finland, Aki Ajolan from the former Eat & Joy's Market, and the Elo Foundation have been offering guidance and time to assist in the development of the project. Without such support, the artworks would not be able to adequately address the real tensions across economies, distribution, and production.
In collaborating with others, the process of art-making is able to embrace a ‘slow-art’ platform in which the contributions of partners and farmers, themselves, can be brokered and positively impact the production values of the artwork. By slowing down the art-making and design process and incorporating the input of collaborators in relation to their industries, the artwork becomes more real.
This cross-over of applied design thinking to empower artist and community adds layers of contextual depth. These layers encompass various levels of engagements and partner investment, as follows: (1) the context of farming in local communities; (2) reclaiming the subject of farming in contemporary art-making; (3) and creating a platform for dialogue about farming and food production and sustainable approaches.
Multi-dimensional portraits
In a unique partnership with Google Trusted Photographer, John M Lynch, I have been able to pioneer staged visual narratives about agricultural labour and farmers in Finland whilst also creating ‘multi-dimensional’ photographs.
The art processes in Farm Tableaux are not linear. I have mediated simultaneously in portraying farmers and their stories, whilst also using an unconventional technology platform for dissemination, namely, Google Street View. Google Street View offers an immersive space for the public to examine the subject of contemporary farming and it provides a new medium in which contemporary art can co-exist.
By staging a tableaux vivant for the camera in Google Street View, I also revisit earlier photographic histories, for example, in which portrait sitters in the 19th century were required to pose motionless for several minutes while the camera recorded their likeness. In a comparable scenario, I attempt to reverse engineer traditional photographic documentary practices in the use of the Google Street View so my subjects become portrait sitters caught in multiple viewpoints in both space and time. Through this process, audiences can ultimately question the framing of history, perceptions of viewing culture and screen-based mediation in relation to its role in representing farming and agricultural landscapes within contemporary art and new media.
The multi-perspective use of the Street View engine and the art being staged within it create an identifiable and navigable space. While there are many views from which the Farm Tableaux scenes can be explored, there is equally a plethora of varying perspectives as to how an image can be interpreted. It remains with the viewer how to consider these as a part of their everyday or adaptive experiences, and at a conceptual level, as an emblematic or allegorical space hinting at how we might ‘read’ and interpret.
Visual narratives: e-xperiences
Whilst considering the social factors behind Farm Tableaux, I have also been interested how the photographic platform used in this series can reflect the state of digital imagery and the viewer’s ubiquitous use of media tools to explore virtual space. In particular, I have been motivated to use Google Street View since this platform remains one of the most ubiquitous ways in which the public can experience virtually the built and natural environment. The rethinking of photography and photographic media through the use of Street View in order to portray something larger beyond the single frame is well suited to the recording of farms. Farms and food production facilities are often inaccessible to the public and they represent large physical spaces not easily captured by a single image.
In art history, a comparison can be made with the advent of Mondrian’s neoplastic artworks, or Josef Albers ‘Homeage to the square,’ which marked new shifts in terms of what could constitute a finished artwork. For over a century, photography has resided in a stasis in which the notion of the fixed frame delineated what is captured and presented to the audience. This delineation has become a standard of how to view and experience an image.
Farm Tableaux is an extended platform from which to explore within and outside the ‘frame’ in the introduction of dimensional images. Within this paradigm of how one can experience a photographic image – the very practice of image making has altered. One could argue that with the advent of affordable digital cameras a democratization of image-making through web distribution has created an unparalleled equity. Everybody has the means to make digital images, to create, post, distribute, and receive imagery instantaneously and in multiples.
In this way photography has become more closely aligned with an experience rather than a process. Photography no longer occupies a mere state of being as an image, artifact, or record of an event – it has moved away from the private or intimate photo-album to become part of a wider public image engine. Image creation is increasingly less about aesthetic agency and more about gaining meaningfulness by being ‘networked’ or linked to social media platforms.
As a lecturer & photographer, I am interested in these convergences and tensions of popular digital photographic processes, themes, and distribution channels whilst also considering how these mechanisms of distribution can be remapped to benefit and evolve fine art photographic practices.
Photography itself as a historical process is not without some affiliation to a political and social agency. The establishment of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho was accomplished through both the photographic and written arts. Images and texts written by explorers helped to attest to the region’s physical environment and natural beauty. As such members of Washington Congress upon examining photographic images from Yellowstone directly supported legislation to protect and establish the United States of America’s first National Park in 1872.
The intimacy afforded by the Google based artworks lie in our relationship to the images and the numerous ways we can view them. Critically these images are digitally captured representations of real places and real people. As such the Google Street view Farm Tableaux Finland series provide portraits of people placed in situ in their everyday working environments. In this way, these Google Street view tableaux represent a present reality and not an idealized fiction. The intimacy of experiencing farms from the comfort of a home computer, personal phone or tablet enables viewers to experience in their own time places that are, for the most part, inaccessible environments to the public. Similarly, a certain realization of the scale of each of the depicted farms unfolds by navigating around the landscape using the Google Street View tool. Thus by having the ability to explore both the physical landscape and food production, audiences can become more aware of what comprises a local food chain.
Fostering community dialogue and ownership
As the Farm Tableaux Finland series has evolved, I discover that as an artist I have also become an ambassador, not only representing the aesthetic delivery or the project, but championing the voices of the various collaborators. Each of the artworks is produced collaboratively with food producers so that the work in its entirety has evolved into a platform for art sake and for communities. The project is building partnerships as a practical and reciprocal step in demonstrating how art can connect people to larger concerns surrounding environmental challenges related to the every day. Farming networks are coming together through Farm Tableaux Finland and, in the process, there is a seeding of the idea that, perhaps, art can support visual education and a capacity to champion Finnish food production.
What has already been realized from the proof of concept stage (completed in October 2014 with funding support from Helsinki International Art Program) is that the project is presenting real opportunities for open public conversations through the development of a contemporary and community based artwork. Participants are using the project as a platform from which to embrace each other. Rural and urban communities are starting to discuss the intersections between farming, contemporary food production, and the ideas behind preserving quality Finnish food. These cultural responses are informing open engagements about the environment from a private to a public experience.
As an artist-participant, the process is not just about brokering conversations but about offering representations of the partners’ narratives and social values through exhibitions, forums and debates. These artistic actions are less about becoming stand-alone activities, and rather about moving subjects away from traditional biases and allowing new ideas to formulate. Communities brought together by the project are constructing new ways to narrate and depict stories of the people and of different contexts surrounding Finnish food production.
Thus, there is a strong desire amongst the project partners to consider the artwork in terms of representing a wide spectrum of farming views and being part of a consolidated debate about what food sustainability means to Finland.
Stakeholders are responding to Farm Tableaux Finland because it offers a neutral framework driven by artistic expression. So far, the project concept is gaining a growing momentum and it is in an unprecedented position to potentially facilitate the realization of wider public benefits.
Through the artworks there is an aspiration to stage a colloquium amongst the different food producers as well as food right campaigners in order to create a draft Food Charter for Finnish parliamentary debate. It is hoped that a Food Charter might be amended to the constitution, thus, protecting the rights of Finnish citizens to access local foods now and into the future.
Lessons learned
It is not adequate to simply represent the subject of farming. There is an equal need to partner closely with farmers and stakeholder organizations in order to contextualise the content to a level of understanding and its subsequent development into an artwork. Equally as an artist I needed to be prepared to invest in communicating the artistic and social value of the work through public engagement and debate. By providing mechanisms for the public to participate and respond to aspects of the project, a wider remit of what is being represented can ultimately be realized and debated. This is where frontiers can start to retreat and platforms for dialogue can activate what is next in terms of sustainable food production.
Allowing the project to evolve requires I also develop a sense of confidence and conviction, but also an ability to share ideas and to change the parameters in the process. In taking on a form of social responsibility with stakeholders in the depiction of contemporary farming, there is inevitably a need to learn through the collaborations, and to be prepared for responding to wider social critique.
The successful reception of Farm Tableaux Finland to date has evolved through a reciprocal and in kind investment by all parties to invest energy, enthusiasm, experimentation, experience, and empathy. Subsequently, the legacies arising from the creation of Farm Tableaux Finland are not just related to the artwork and time invested by myself but largely to the involvement of collaborators and the public by continually re-adapting the artwork through individual and community response.
Timelessness in this respect is about the creation of an adaptive platform for shared and new legacies to be realised beyond the timeframes in which they were produced.
Awards
For Sylvia's collaboration with John M Lynch in the production of Farm Tableaux, the two authors were awarded a LUMEN AWARD for best innovative net art series by an international panel in September 2016.
The Farm Tableaux series was nominated and won a Lumen prize. Described by the Guardian as the most preeminent and global digital arts award to date. See http://lumenprize.com/
Project reviews:
2020
www.surrey.ca/arts-culture/surrey-art-gallery/gallery-publications/exhibition-catalogues/shifting-perspectives
2016
Parhar, Katherine. "Farm Tableaux" in Feature essays, July edition, Photomonitor Magazine.
http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2016/07/sylvia-grace-borda-farm-tableaux/
Castro, Xosé on PRENSA RTVE (Spanish National TV) for the Arts, reviews Farm Tableaux. 27.09.2016
http://www.rtve.es/rtve/20160927/escritora-espido-freire-hablara-su-debut-como-actriz-teatral-esta-semana-atencion-obras/1414824.shtml
2015
Neimi, Suvi. “Pohjoinen ruuantuotanto kuuminta nykytaidetta” (Finnish language review: “Viewers can now visit farms, slaughterhouses and reindeer round-ups virtually as a series of artworks” in Maaseudun Tulevaisuus, January 30, 2015.
Neimi, Suvi. “Google pyörähti pohjoissuomalaisilla maatiloilla” in Maaseudun Tulevaisuus, January 29, 2015.
http://www.maaseuduntulevaisuus.fi/google-py%C3%B6r%C3%A4hti-pohjoissuomalaisilla-maatiloilla-1.82850
Mantta Summer Art Exhibition review
http://www.mantankuvataideviikot.fi/en.php?k=100875
Oulu Art Museum project review
http://paikantuntu.fi/checkpoint-leonardo/sylvia-grace-borda/
Artist reflection on living, working and producing art in Finland
https://witness.theguardian.com/assignment/54639d68e4b0f33efafdaa91/1255499
2014
Lampi, Santeri “Taiteilija: Kuva maaseudusta on jumiutunut 1800-luvulle” (Finnish Language review: “Pictures of the countryside seem stuck in the 19th Century”) in Suomenmaa July 5, 2014.
http://www.suomenmaa.fi/edoris?tem=sm_lsearchart&search_iddoc=6992417
Artist discussion about the development of Farm Tableaux Canada & Finland (June 2015)
Project reviews:
2020
www.surrey.ca/arts-culture/surrey-art-gallery/gallery-publications/exhibition-catalogues/shifting-perspectives
2016
Parhar, Katherine. "Farm Tableaux" in Feature essays, July edition, Photomonitor Magazine.
http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2016/07/sylvia-grace-borda-farm-tableaux/
Castro, Xosé on PRENSA RTVE (Spanish National TV) for the Arts, reviews Farm Tableaux. 27.09.2016
http://www.rtve.es/rtve/20160927/escritora-espido-freire-hablara-su-debut-como-actriz-teatral-esta-semana-atencion-obras/1414824.shtml
2015
Neimi, Suvi. “Pohjoinen ruuantuotanto kuuminta nykytaidetta” (Finnish language review: “Viewers can now visit farms, slaughterhouses and reindeer round-ups virtually as a series of artworks” in Maaseudun Tulevaisuus, January 30, 2015.
Neimi, Suvi. “Google pyörähti pohjoissuomalaisilla maatiloilla” in Maaseudun Tulevaisuus, January 29, 2015.
http://www.maaseuduntulevaisuus.fi/google-py%C3%B6r%C3%A4hti-pohjoissuomalaisilla-maatiloilla-1.82850
Mantta Summer Art Exhibition review
http://www.mantankuvataideviikot.fi/en.php?k=100875
Oulu Art Museum project review
http://paikantuntu.fi/checkpoint-leonardo/sylvia-grace-borda/
Artist reflection on living, working and producing art in Finland
https://witness.theguardian.com/assignment/54639d68e4b0f33efafdaa91/1255499
2014
Lampi, Santeri “Taiteilija: Kuva maaseudusta on jumiutunut 1800-luvulle” (Finnish Language review: “Pictures of the countryside seem stuck in the 19th Century”) in Suomenmaa July 5, 2014.
http://www.suomenmaa.fi/edoris?tem=sm_lsearchart&search_iddoc=6992417
Artist discussion about the development of Farm Tableaux Canada & Finland (June 2015)
The following video illustrates how the various Farm Tableaux Finland projects can be explored online
Directing manager of Viskaalin Farms, Tuula Kukkola-Raina, speaks about her involvement in the development of Farm Tableaux Finland at the Oulu Art Museum (Interview: January 2015 | Finnish language)
FARM TABLEAUX FINLAND
Katherine Parhar, July 2016
Over a coffee, Sylvia Grace Borda tells me Finland is big on growing lettuce and beet sugar. It also manufactures tyres and tractors. Somehow, I can’t see it. When I think Finland, I think flat plains, forests, a coast latticed with lakes and cabins. I think of the Helsinki School – of Elina Brotherus’ self-portraits under vast white skies or the strangeness of Jorma Puranen’s icy blue reaches.
In other words, Finland, for me, calls up an austere Romantic sublime cultivated by the artists of northern landscape into the early twentieth century and still alive in Finnish photography now, in the Helsinki School’s pursuit of what Puranen calls ‘the poetic possibilities found in silence,’ [i] historical time, and the mysterious.
Brotherus adopts the sublime to shift its masculine gaze and assert female presence in the land. Puranen uses it to explore how art and history combine to exercise power over indigenous groups like the Sami. So the Helsinki School is hardly unthinking in its treatment of the Finnish landscape or the ideological tensions it bears. But in their search for an exquisite aesthetic of ‘silence,’ the actual conditions of life – and industry – this land sustains remain largely out of frame.
Sylvia Grace Borda, a Canada-born photographer based in Scotland, is working on a three-year project in Finland to widen the visual definition of its land and economy, making totally contemporary portraits of the nation’s agricultural life and industry by reviving the rural typology – or aides memoire – in the mode of Atget, Sander and the Finn I.K. Inha.
Atget’s earliest works, made with tripod and plate camera, were rural scenes from the north of France – ploughed fields, close botanical studies, items of agricultural technology. Even once established in Paris, he was drawn off its streets in the early twilight to canals, to orchards, and gardens, and to the edge-lands of his expanding city, still semi-rural in nature.
He intended this ‘visual index’, as Borda puts it, to aid city planners (as well as artists) in understanding how people used and inhabited such communal terrain, not least as a space of production. Like Atget, Inha – who travelled Finland expansively by bicycle – published folios of unsentimental images depicting his native topography.
Specialising in panoramas, which required several plates and great technical precision, Inha aimed to recreate the experience of being embedded in Finland’s vast landscapes. In the process, he made visual records of farms, illustrating their scale, labour forces, and types of production. These Finland’s government presented at international events like the 1900 Paris Expo, tying the land – and Inha’s work – to a vibrant discourse of Finnish self-awareness and national pride fostered over the late nineteenth century.
August Sander, too, in pursuing a collective portrait of the German people, linked nation to land, and thus to farming, in a kind of ‘origin myth.’ The first folio of images in his life’s work People of the Twentieth Century, indeed, is titled The Farmer. This opus follows a narrative arc through to urbanisation, which, by the 1920s, had supplanted agriculture as a locus of prosperity in Finland’s photography (if not Germany’s).
Borda, in her work, is neither nostalgic or nationalist; nor is she really modernist, but rather postmodern, in that she investigates the ways in which culture assimilates the land – and vice versa. A number of Finnish photographers – Esko Männikö, Ilka Halso, Kapa – do this by building bodies of work that often occupy an ‘uneasy space between critique and romanticisation.’ [ii]
Kapa, for instance, examines the scars left on the land by depicting barren ski-slopes out of season; but he does so in black and white, and his prints often bear marks reminiscent of nineteenth century processing. By contrast, Halso, who once enclosed trees (sacred emblems of the Finnish landscape) then photographed them, now does this digitally.
Borda’s work combines cutting edge digital technology with nineteenth century image processes, specifically the tableau vivant, to record Finland’s working farms in hybrid images that immerse viewer, subject and photographer, digitally and physically, in the land. All three, in this way, become vital participants in a complex nexus of debates about how we shape, work, and represent land for the future.
For Farm Tableaux, she has collaborated with Google Trusted photographer John M Lynch to make portraits of Finnish farmers at work, which are then embedded into Google Street View, a public resource that creates ‘multi-point panoramas for explorative viewing,’ much as Inha did, arguably, with the technology available to him, in his farm typologies.
To make Street View images, multi-lens cameras move through space, recording both video and geo-data simultaneously. To embed her work successfully into Street View, Borda worked closely with Lynch by mapping a range of locative points that were photographed to create ‘an illusion of continuous time and space as the user moves seamlessly through the scene.’ (Borda)
This technique of photographing multiple views from a node for use in Google Street view demands that Borda’s subjects, farmers, pose motionless for up to forty minutes, mirroring the protracted sittings of early portrait photography, or the ‘live freeze’ of the travelling dioramas and tableaux vivant that staged scenes of rural life (among other things) to entertain – and educate – the nineteenth century public across Europe.
Her hybrid approach, then, necessitates a prolonged interaction long disposed of in the camera’s historical development. A ‘reverse-engineering’ of sorts, it acts out Brecht’s dictum that ‘nothing comes from nothing; the new comes from the old, but that is why it is new,’ in that the farmers’ stillness, staging their everyday labour with Borda, allows her to build three-dimensional, experiential portraits of them in time and space, breaking (a bit like Cubism) with Susan Sontag’s notion that the photograph is a single significant moment ‘taken’ and fixed by the camera’s frame.
Recent viewers at Helsinki Photomedia week have picked up on this, suggesting that by breaking out of the flat photographic surface, Borda’s Tableaux create not a binary ‘text cube’ in ‘black and white,’ but an ‘e-cube’ of fully dimensional content. For some, this ‘e-cube,’ when viewed on a small mobile or tablet, mirrors some of the intimate viewing mechanisms of early photography – magic lanterns and stereoscopes (some of which were close to pocket sized).
Farm Tableaux is rife with such meta-puns on established – and new – systems of representation. For instance, Borda inscribes herself into the portraits, inspired by the likes of Breughel (the Elder), who painted himself into studies of work on the land, like Hunters in the Snow (1565). Though she places herself on the periphery of her vistas, not at their centre, Borda – like Brotherus – asserts herself as both witness and co-author to her unfolding tableaux of the land.
But once embedded in Street View, the Farm Tableaux exist outside the authorial bounds of conventional exhibition or publication (virtual or actual). Borda could not put the work in Google without her collaborator, John Lynch, in a partnership she likens to that of Hill and Adamson. While Lynch, who pioneers Street View for the use of business, is professionally rooted in Google, Borda is not, so in this context – this new virtual territory – her physical presence stands as a visual signature to the work, which is both unique art and a networked mass of public geo-data. Photography’s ‘mapping’ of physical reality, in these Tableaux, is both a ‘truth’ and a creative composite.
I.K. Inha worked as Borda does – in situ, recording en plein air a land in which he was physically rooted. She treats the farming world with as little sensationalism, or romanticism, as he did. When she records the Sami of the Arctic Circle, herding, tagging, and slaughtering reindeer, the still images that result show groups of men in high visibility vests, working slowly, methodically, through a mass of grazing beasts.The sky is flat, grey, as is the scrubland beneath it. The trees are sparse. The traditional costume of the Sami, their blue-eyed dogs, skin aprons, and home-forged knives are absent. Even the pristine wastes they traverse in the popular imagination are denied. This makes Borda’s work as radical and critically incisive as Puranen’s. Because this is land as work, not as symbol.
It is work that we, the viewer, can walk through, almost as if it’s live. Inserted into an ever-growing, changing seam of data that exists in a digital space between photographic and actual terrain, it is purely contemporary, not timeless. The rural work Borda records exists not as an abstract concept or an idyll, but – literally – in a networked relationship to the culture (and land) it supplies. This is the point of Farm Tableaux. By accumulation, the still images Borda draws from her Street View works reveal linked labour processes: a slaughter occurs in Lapland, as, elsewhere, an abattoir is cleaned; crops are harvested on a farm as accounts are checked at a flour mill. As her cameras pan, creating sweeping arcs of ice and arable land, barn roofs and hanging carcasses, these sites of production take on a monumental, almost cathedral-like form.
The prints let us see Borda’s ‘e-cubes’ unpacked, wound out on a flat plane, like a spool of continuous film. They are beautiful. But beauty isn’t the point. Borda isn’t channelling the modern photography of Sander’s era, through which artists like Renger-Patszch sought beauty in the new forms of mass consumption, aestheticising in close-up its factories and the things they made. Her panning style, necessitated by the technical requirements of Street View, demands veracity by default – she can neither avoid nor elevate (aesthetically) the details of the work at hand: cluttered shelving in a lambing shed, neon strip lights, or blood-soaked snow.
This is one sense in which the ‘objectivity’ of photography remains intact in Farm Tableaux. For Borda, indeed, ‘By slowing down the art-making process…the artwork becomes more real.’ The results are intimate – clear-eyed – portraits of contemporary enterprises, often run by families, which are linked, as a wider economic ecology, by their everyday practices. This ecology emerges as we walk through Borda’s work, embedding (even implicating) ourselves within its dense interdependencies, as consumers of food produce.
For Borda, whose practice is socially engaged, this effect is vital. She reclaims agriculture as a subject for art to make a point about the contradictory way we perceive farming today – we consume more, and more variously, than ever before, yet our vision of rural work remains timeless, bucolic. Tesco now labels its tomatoes the harvest of ‘Nightingale Farms,’ while its grapes are the pride of ‘Suntrail Farms,’ and its potatoes hail from ‘Redmere Farms.’ None of these farms exist. They are collective names – marketing spin – for products Tesco sources from multiple countries around the globe.
Against this backdrop, Borda’s Tableaux set out to create a neutral platform that facilitates public dialogue around sustainable, localised practice and its social value in Finland and around the world. Borda worked with conservation and farming unions, national and localised, to access the farms she photographed. All the farmers whose portraits she makes are, in some way, recognised leaders of best practice.
The intensity of her collaborations with them, over long periods on their land, watching them work, has helped Borda participate with them in a coalition to construct new ways of seeing Finnish food production – and to create new ways to legislate for it, too. With her partners in Farm Tableaux, Borda’s work has led directly to the drafting of a Food Act, outlining a set of national standards for food production, to be presented to the Finnish Parliament in 2018.
This powerful outcome was not one Borda expected for the work. It has sprung, I would argue, from the fact that the work is not pre-scripted by her with particular political or social messages. Though a typological approach like Borda’s is never truly neutral (indeed she presents best practice only), it provides for a wide spectrum of Finland’s farmers to engage freely, and multi-laterally, as the viewer does, with their place in the wider ecology of food production. In the next year or so, Borda plans to bring Farm Tableaux to Scotland. Perhaps Tesco should watch out.
