Pasi Mälkiä
Mushrooms
3.9. – 14.9.2008
Galleria Huuto Uudenmaankatu
“The people of ancient Mesopotamia lived under a flat sky that curved over the earth like a dome. The universe was hand-made by a god that resembled a human being. Based on faith and culture, this was unarguable.
As everybody knows, water is the first and most important element. The ancient Greeks already knew this. On what basis? – On subjective discoveries. A philosopher observing nature in the woods saw the rain fall and the soil become fungi. During the dry season he saw the fungi burn and go up in smoke. Soon it rained again and there were more fungi. An everyday observation had explained him the sequence of the elements: Water, earth, fire, and air. The three latter ones were forms of water, which is the first and the most important one… But can an everyday observation be depended on? Will the composition of the world be unraveled by studying fungi?
We live on Tellus, a rocky planet that has lately gone from a pancake into a fairly round one. Today, our planet floats in space, which makes expressions such as ‘up’ and ‘down’ redundant. However, when watching the starry sky, we have a strong illusion of being far beneath the stars. Wherever we are on the spherical planet, the experience is unchanging. It is based on an everyday observation and would be the same even if we were watching the stars from another planet.
Pasi Mälkiä raises important questions about being human. The visitor is led into considering whether matters could be looked at from a totally new, unconventional viewpoint. Is it possible to examine hierarchies and structures without a firm basis to which they are fastened? How reliable is the empirical and cultural information based on everyday observations and tradition, and what kind of scale is it valid in? Have a couple of millennia been enough to change anything in our mindset?”
Tapio Tuominen
