Longing for Roots

In 2015, I returned to my home country of Finland after more than a decade of living abroad. Soon after, our daughter was born. We still spend part of the year in Spain, because my spouse is Spanish, and so our lives together have been filled with change. Motherhood, living between two countries, and my return to Finland have all caused me to think about identity and home. I began photographing to try to reconnect with my roots and find a place of belonging. In Finland, we moved to a village in the archipelago to live in close connection with nature. It awakens a connection in me to the place, to the universe, and myself. Nature puts things in perspective and reminds me of the transient character of life: Trees lose their leaves with the autumn winds but the new ones will grow in Spring. In the same way, I am just part of the much longer chain of generations and lives. In response to so much change, I reached out for permanence. I started to photograph places I felt instinctively connected to on some deeper and mystical level. Later I read about toposphilia (based on the Greek: topos is place and philia love), the concept that humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan uses to explain humans’ emotional ties to places. Through different sensory stimulus – smells and visions, tastes and feelings – the places remind us of past experiences. Our relation to place is not defined by the place itself, but by the emotions it raises. In this sense, “Longing for Roots,” is not a search for places but for an emotional landscape of love, consistency, unity and security.