My grandmother lived to be 94 years old (1925–2019). She wished to live also the last years of her life alone in her home in Ylihärmä in South Ostrobothnia, kilometres away from the nearest town.
She had early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, which is why she occasionally imagined that strangers visited the yard or the basement. A motion-sensing surveillance camera was installed to ensure that the intruders would be detected. Eventually, the camera ended up monitoring my grandmother instead.
The surveillance camera images form the material for this series. In them, my grandmother does repetitive yard work in the twilight of her life until she no longer appears in the pictures. The yard, however, is not emptied, but life after human presence continues.
The exhibition was supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland and Oskar Öflunds Stiftelse sr.
Utu-Tuuli Jussila (b.1985) (they/them) often works with found images and tries to develop collaborative photographic methods. The themes of their artistic practice include, but are not limited to, gender diversity and politics of visibility. They had their first solo exhibition in 2016 and they have participated in group exhibitions in Finland and abroad.
