Vanishing home

Project named Vanishing home by Ljiljana Maletin produced during her artist in residence project atThe Regional Art Museum of Southern Ostrobothnia in Finland (Alajärvi, Kaartunen, 2016) focuses on different aspects of contemporary culture and tradition. Vanishing home confronts the viewer with the past. The old world is broken and life mobility is now part of the new way of living.

Finland is one of the OECD’s most rural countries, but the rural population is ageing fast and one-by-one the country’s villages are shrinking away. Younger people leave villages to find work in the cities while an older population is left to manage alone. The trend is that old enough people sooner or later move, they hardly ever sell their houses, but come visit as often as they can, staying for weeks and months when the weather is not too cold. Their houses still exist, but the inner relation to them is cut off. 

In our contemporary word, the concept of ‘place’ have become complex and problematic and has a variety of connotations (‘home’, ‘building’, ‘dweling’, ‘belonging’, ‘mother country’, ‘fatherland’). These photographs can have story-telling quality and pose many questions concerning alienation, gentrification, isolation, cultural identity: What is it like when we must leave our homes? What happens to those who seek a new home in a different place? What are the greatest problems of our post-industrial, globalizing society?