Alluringly dilapidated

 Warmly welcome dear reader, you may have a lot of questions starting with the letter "w" and wonder who I am, why I'm writing or you're reading, what this blog is about and where it will take you. I will start from when. I have, until this point, been in your position, a reader of blogs. Right now I'm in my final year of master´s studies within the field of theatre art and acting. Part of the academic streamline, or depending on the day, meandering river is to write a thesis so you can be approved to graduate. My only problem is that I don't feel particularly inclined to open my notes and reflect upon my experiences statically. My comfort zone is also outside the attention of an audience so I'm hopefully done with performing physically for the time being (at least 'til the fire to express within becomes too frustratingly glaring). After four and a half years of ingesting theory and practice... The whining schoolboy going unwillingly to school, creeping like snail with his backpack, MacBook, scribbled notes, books and repulsive reflex at the thought of sitting in a library, synthesizing read theories with practical memories to deliver more text and then rehearsing further under gazes. I have tended a growing frustration arising from a need that seldom has gotten relief, that of moving outside the square spaces of our academic institution. 

Our institution before it was one, occupied on the brink of demolition by Oranssi ry in 1990. Idag är tillträde på taket förbjudet.

I have, until this point, been in your position, a reader of blogs. The only starting point I can suitably find for changing roles and perhaps indirectly give you glimpses of answers is to direct you to my all-time favorite blogs, some of which I've followed and came back to since I was a tender child exploring internet for the first time and some diverging paths which I've found later on only thanks to treading the path which the cursor a long time ago set my journey upon.

At first the infant... interested in abandoned buildings and their scary but yet intriguing atmosphere, offering unlimited world's, safely watched within mind's eye from outside. But I guess either my parents were too afraid of the dark, to let me go or they didn't feel particularly pulled towards the risks and inconveniences that trespassing into such spaces often requires, nor did I have the courage, statue or belief in myself to express my desire to be taken to such places credibly. From the web searches emerged Wormwood, Mortus, c8h11no2 and Nila, a collective who call themselves the Trestalkers, hinterlands, being one's urban explorers, another's trespassers, posting their logbooks online, opening doors to spaces in transformation across the nation and eastern Europe. I spent hours clicking on images, reading, getting exhilarated and dreaming to one day, maybe as a teen, have my own group. 

One of the multiple "urbex" blogs I ended up on is much more. The Esoteric geography and periphery-therapy contains rather against the conventions of the culture more text than images, often zooming out to wide symbolical allusions and metaphorical tangents that I scroll by to find more locations and images, I remember skimming past the multiple posts about nature and non-built landscapes, which I found boring on my quest to find bigger, vaster abandoned industrial sites, such as that of the behemoth lime mine, where I one day hope to set camp. 

I can't pinpoint the time when I became curious of the history of places. I guess the imagined pasts always were born when seeing something old, but the in-depth local history that was ingrained in each of those blog posts soon had me devouring text at paces that would have gotten my elementary school teachers jealous. 

As time has moved by, a lot of the domains of the "urban exploration" sites I used to visit have been frozen in time, such as the Trestalkers or Syrjäseutu mentioned above, some have changed hands and appear as eclectic mixes of advertisements (compare this to today), or been lost to the bit bucket forevermore. I have occasionally found my way back to the Society of Esoteric Geography. The blog has also been updated, albeit less frequently as time goes by, and not as frequently as I have been visiting, which has made me go back to old posts with a new focus on the content of the texts and their relation with the images. 

The places, the histories and speculation about things we cannot know of, the zooms between the micro- and macrocosm that appear in the relation between image and text arouse the imagination and awake the spiritual hunger of a young atheist adult who's grown into a materialist nordic urban environment and is trying to figure out channels for creativity. 

Micronesian stick chart, made by the native Marshallese to navigate the dynamic tides at the Marshall Islands. Built as an open framework, they were memorized before the trip, during the trip consultation would be sensorial, by feeling the canoes behavior on the ocean swells. "The charts, unlike traditional maps, were studied and memorized prior to a voyage and were not consulted during a trip, as compared to traditional navigation techniques where consultation of a map is frequent and points and courses are plotted out both before and during navigation. Marshallese navigators used their senses and memory to guide them on voyages by crouching down or lying prone in the canoe to feel how the canoe was being pitched and rolled by underlying swells. Individual charts varied so much in form and interpretation that the individual navigator who made the chart was the only person who could fully interpret and use it." - wikipedia

"The sense of place is not rational. It is a spontaneous, holistic psychophysical feeling, that pulls towards a certain place or repels from it - or in some specific cases doing those both at the same time. The feeling doesn't need reflections, but afterwards it might be good to analyze. It can teach a lot." - Marko Leppänen, founder of the Society of Esoteric Geography on his blogpost "Why Places Matter" (translated)

It strikes a chord. This is what I hope to graduate with: going out, alone, with groups that change and dissolve, absorb, vanish, accidentally get frozen in frame from time to time, following methodologies which happen to impulsively poke my curiosity during the day, or the one before, about ones before that, drifting, finding sceneries, serenity, safe hunger, shifting, thoughts and their translations, cold, bridges, passages, situations, derivations, theories, scales, breathe fresh air. Imagine. More images!