PROSESSI / DER PROZESS

Prosessi / Der Prozess

15June – 6July2021

Welcome to the dual exhibition which shows the results of the Prosessi / Der Prozess (The Process) project! Upstairs, at gallery Napa, you can find Savu E. Korteniemi’s and Simi Ruotsalainen’s exhibition Käskyjä ja kuiskauksia (Orders and whispers). Studio Mustanapa downstairs displays Michael Marnin Jacobs’ exhibition No edge nor center – The summer of 1942.

The starting point for the Prosessi / Der Prozess project are the stories telling about the fate of wartime Jewish refugees at labour or internment camps in Lapland and in Suursaari island in the Gulf of Finland. The project has mainly been carried out by Savu E. Korteniemi. They invited the media artist Simi Ruotsalainen and visual artist Michael Marnin Jacobs, who is currently working on his doctoral thesis on the diaspora of his family, to contribute to the exhibition. In this way the subject of the project was extended and resulted in a dual exhibition where different approaches are in dialogue. The creators of the exhibition share an interest in investigating how the dark heritage of World War II manifests itself in Finnish, and especially in the history of Lapland. At the opening of the exhibition, 80 years has passed since the beginning of the period known as “German presence” in Lapland.

The Käskyjä ja kuiskauksia exhibition displays Savu E. Korteniemi’s drawings and sculptures, and a collaboration work by Korteniemi and Simi Ruotsalainen, the animation Hyvä maa (A Good Country), which tells an imaginary story of a Jewish refugee. In Michael Marnin Jacobs’ exhibition No edge nor center – The summer of 1942, locations, distances, time and perception are tangled into a whole.

Savu E. Korteniemi elaborates the background of the project as follows:

“Prosessi / Der Prozess got started from a documentary in the radio named The shadow of the holocaust – three episodes on the presence of extermination (Yle Radio 1, 2017). I was captured by a wartime story from Suursaari island, where the Jewish refugees ported to the island with obligation to work were told to make barbed wire by their bare hands. According to the documentary, the work was painful, because the barbed iron tore their hands. The refugees prepared a tool to ease their work, but the guards forbade its use.
I decided to take a closer look at the events that led into the story of a Finnish labour camp and the tool for making barbed wire. I also thought whether this tool to help bending the wire and forbidding its use could be approached from the perspective of sculpture.
The bilingual name of the project refers to various processes: on one hand to the developments which led into the handover of people to Nazi Germany by Valpo, the predecessor of the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, and on the other hand to the story of (literally) manual manufacturing process of barbed wire. The name of the project can also be seen as a reference to the original name of Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial. This exhibition ends the first stage of the project, but the subject matter will continue to be processed using sculptural motifs and cartoons.”

The cartoon drawings presented in the exhibition have originally been published through social media channels by two series of posts made by Savu E. Korteniemi. In addition, the topic is discussed in a series of articles written by Savu E. Korteniemi published in the cultural magazine Kaltio in 2021. The article investigating the background of the story of making barbed wire entitled Käskyjä ja kuiskauksia (Orders and whispers), was published in issue 1-2/21, and the article discussing the heritage of white Finland Kun oikein valkaistaan (When truly whitewashed), in the June issue 3/21. The third article, which will be published later, will discuss the role of Christianity in the history of antisemitism.

The producer of the first part of the Prosessi / Der Prozess project is Artists’ Association of Lapland, and it was financed by the EVZ Foundation from Germany. The project is part of the EVZ funding programme named Forced labour and forgotten victims. The executor bears responsibility for the content of the project, and the publications do not represent an expression of opinion by EVZ.

Any feedback is welcome! You can write to the address:

Project website: www.korteniemi.eu/prosessi