MIKKO ELIAS WALTARI (*1966 in Turku, FI)
Plays & documentary spectacles
I had a career in export sales and marketing before my studies in Vilnius Art Academy . For over 20 years I travelled for business around Russia, the Baltic States and Ukraine, even to Kazakhstan for few times.
The experience in sales and marketing gave me certain insights to the narrative: the closing process of a deal is comparable to creative story-telling where facts and fiction come successfully together.
I have struggled thru my life with certain challenges that made me miss out on many events: I simply was not really there. Capturing the time lost is actually an attempt to live those moments again, to feel that this all makes some sense after all. That I was not simply thrown into this world for no reason.
Hence I chose to focus on the representation of reality and the documentary truth in photography in settings resembling theatre as well as searching for potential spectacles in our social and political landscape.
I’m particularly interested in the period from the 1980s up to the current post-soviet landscape (this applies to Finland in certain aspect as well.)
I have two ongoing projects:
Україна connects to documentary spectacle by revealing traces of past events. I am collecting the images from my trips delivering humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine.
#_mikamaro is a collection of timeless monochromatic landscapes in Finland Proper. Riding my mikamaro bicycle within ~100km radius from Turku on is an essential condition of the job mapping out my youth.
I have also nimetön (nameless) album here. These are photos, which deserve a life on their own – even if there was no specific plan for their birth.