Two days of mist and rain. Yesterday I walked on the slope of Saana toward Saanajärvi, but turned around half way, scared of the fog, or perhaps tired and cold, too. Today the weather was a bit clearer, so I walked up towards Jehkas on the nature path and marveled at the open landscape on the "paljakka", above tree level. I begin to realize why people want to wander up on the fells. I saw all the German remains, too, of the airplane that crashed and the camp for prisoners, weird rusty evidence of a war that seems so far away in time. The rivulets had turned into rivers in some places, and the snow was treacherous, hiding the water underneath. I managed to circumvent a few problematic places but in the end I came to a river that was too much to wade across. I did not want to come back the same way, so I took a deep breath, abandoned the path (which was cut off by the river) and started walking towards Saana, since I calculated that the circular path would come back somewhere there. It felt scary, although there was of course no way of getting lost in an open area between such mighty fells. Nevertheless I was very, very happy, when I finally saw a stick with an orange colored top, the sign of the path.
After the majestic views and timeless emptiness on the "paljakka" it felt somehow sad, like when the party is over, to return to the slopes with vegetation, well trodden paths and murmuring brooks. I continued with some small experiments I tentatively started yesterday, for lack of any better ideas, that is, recording the small brooks of melting water that are cascading or trickling down everywhere on the slopes. The very first work I did by myself with a video camera in 1999 was following two mountain brooks in Farrera de Pallars in the Pyrenées to the point of their confluence, during my residency at Centre D'Art i Natura there. So like a reflex, I tried to look at the brooks again, prompted by their omnipresent sound. I expected to get som picturesque but probably uninteresting imagery and used video mainly for the sound.
The still images I took on the same spots that I videoed looked really strange, when I transferred them to my computer. The grey sky is reflected in the water, and turns the images with water running over last years' grass into flat surfaces, rather fascinating in their blandness. So what to do with these? Luckily I need not decide that now...
