Johanna Laitanen: A Spectacle of Nature #02, 2005, C-Type Print.

As a kid, my favourite thing to do was to visit The Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki with my big sister. And my favourite thing inside was a baby cow with two heads, four ears and four eyes. The Siamese twins, that were actually an oddity in a building for wild organisms, made me wonder: if they were boys or girls, what would their life have been like had they survived? What could they possibly think now, if anything? And above all, why did they have to stay in a box of glass? Were they still alive, I would have wanted to touch them.

I have a friend, Johanna Laitanen, who makes art about natural history museums. She photographs them to pose questions about how our culture observes, conceptualises and represents nature. My big sister bought a piece from Johanna last year, a photograph of, not the calves, but bears in a diorama of the same Helsinki museum. Looking at this “observation of the observation” of nature, as Johanna describes her work, makes me amused about the idea that living in a small town, surrounded by wild nature, as a child, the climax of my visit to the capital was to observe nature in glass displays.

Johanna Laitanen: A Spectacle of Nature #01, 2005, C-Type Print.

Johanna’s photography deals with the human desire to experience and examine nature through romanticised depictions. She explores how the scientific and taxonomic representations are, in fact, originally developed to meet mainly dramatic needs and aesthetic aspirations.  In the end, my awe of the museumised nature was not only based on the fact that you don’t meet a bear in the forest everyday, if ever, but also on the cultural ideas; the fiction it offered. “Today’s museum displays have roots in Wunderkammers [or cabinets of curiosities, collections of disparate objects, gathered by wealthy and at their height of popularity in the Renaissance] that were assembled with little or no care for scientific categorisation,” Johanna explains. “They were much more about story-telling through objects and about ideas related to pre-Darwinian spiritual natural history, where nature was understood in symbolic meanings.”

Scientists strive for objectivity, but is there such a thing? Johanna tells me about her artist friend who sculpts animal figures and whose biologist father is unable to understand this. “I think that they are both doing the same thing, trying to understand the relationship between humans and nature,” she says. “It’s sometimes forgotten that scientific presentations are never objective, but, as with any human creation, they always reflect the ideas and desires of their time.”

Johanna Laitanen: A Spectacle of Nature #03, 2005, C-Type Print.

A month ago, I visited a natural science shop, Deyrolle, in Paris. Carrying objects like old teaching apparatus as well as collections of preserved and mounted animals of all kinds, I was dazed by the simultaneous beauty and oddity of the shop. It would have been possible to buy a polar bear from Deyrolle. But looking at the gigantic, beaming creature on the shop floor with a hanging price tag, I felt scared. It made me miss the dioramas that present scientific objects, animals, as we often wish to see them: in a seemingly natural, yet magical setting, isolated by a glass pane.

Tour Eiffel by Armi.

The capital of boredom?

Le Monde recently wrote about Paris as the European Capital of Boredom (Paris, capitale européenne de l’ennui), comparing it to Berlin, London or Barcelona – cities “more cosmopolitan, more insane, and more free”. It referred to the imminent death of the Parisian nightlife due to the anti-smoking law resulting in noise on the streets and, ultimately, administrative closure of club nights as well as the low-cost aviation taking clubbers to the neighbouring cities (see e.g. Tobias Rapp: Lost and Sound – Berlin, Techno and the Easyjet Set).

However, I managed to come across some more institutionalised fun. For instance, one of the central figures of the Parisian night, the French composer and DJ Laurent Garnier could be found playing records at the Louvre. The evening, Inventaire avant disparition (Inventory before disappearance), was part of a series of events in the honour of Umberto Eco. It presented Garnier interpreting scenes from the silent film footage of the early 20th century life shot for philanthropist Albert Kahn‘s The Archives of the Planet project.

Also, some weeks ago at Palais de Tokyo, a Boston band Prince Rama of Ayodhya played an evening of psychedelic folk surrounded by Paul Laffoley‘s art brut, combining words and imagery to depict a spiritual architecture of utopia. The singer of the band, Taraka Larson, an assistant to Laffoley for four years, described how “the songs strive to reach infinite time”.

“To change ways of being, one has to first change ways of seeing.” – André Breton

One of the central figures of art brut was the French surrealist theorist André Breton, who believed that one way to discover who you are was to have your photograph taken. At Centre Pompidou’s La Subversion des Images exhibition, I saw Breton and his friends’ photos taken in the first photo booth, Photomaton, in the Paris of 1928. All the surrealists subjected themselves to the camera with their eyes closed, recognising “the omnipotence of the dream”, like Breton wrote in the first Surrealist Manifesto. These were photographs of dreamers.

Like the surrealists, also Jean Renaudie, the architect behind the social housing blocks of Ivry sur Seine in the suburbs of Paris, dreamt about changing life. Rejecting the structures of functionalism, Renaudie focused on creating housing that stimulated social exchange. The complex of eight buildings in the centre of Ivry from 1971 to 1980 must be one of the most interesting places I’ve visited. It proposes an alternative to classical and modernist urban spaces, offering different apartments for different people – all equipped with a garden terrace, and all mixing public and private space (see e.g. Irénée Scalbert: A Right to Difference – The Architecture of Jean Renaudie). Renaudie’s random room heights, shapes and sizes require the inhabitants to agree with a way of life, the apartments being stronger than them.

Renaudie believed in changing the social environment, and even social hierarchies, through spatial practice. However, the question is, does his architecture actually create behaviour or rather attract it, like my architect friend Pierre pointed out. Does the social housing at Ivry sur Seine actually change its inhabitants or rather bring similar souls closer to each other – more cosmopolitan, more insane, and more free than in Berlin, London or Barcelona?