The series explores both artistically and philosophically the theme of encounter in all its subtle variations – between people, between languages, between concepts, between colours, between mind and arising thoughts. These unique and unpredictable encounters always leave a trace or an imprint of some kind. The purpose of the series, including the present exhibition, is to highlight some of these visible and invisible, familiar and uncanny traces, which make us what we are, but also which we conveniently or creatively use to model the world into desired shapes and sounds.

Both artists, with a bilingual and multicultural upbringing, have carried traces of two completely different traditions and customs all of their lives. This has had consequences. They have lived without a fixed sense of nationality, without a stable homeland under their feet, but also without the very need for this stability.

The present exhibition, the first in the series, concentrates on the theme of home and the variety of ways in which we conceptualise and experience home and its counterpart homelessness.

Artists want to convey by the audio-visual elements the idea that all of our experiences are based on the variety of traces – that somehow seem to come from the past and pass on to the future, while manifesting themselves only in the actual present of the here and now.

The visual part of the exhibition consists of Elina Moriya’s photographs taken over a period of ten years in the forests of Finland and Japan. Her photographs depict trees. Trees appear as living organisms for biologists, building material for carpenters and shelter for recluses. Trees also produce elemental oxygen for all complex life on Earth, enabling our very breathing, which is irremovably present in our every experience of home and homelessness.

For whom does a tree or a forest become a trace of home?

When does a scratch on the wall cease to be a trace of home and manifest itself only as a visible object, an ordinary scratch on the wall?

These kinds of questions have been the driving impulse for both artists.