In the corner of a house there is a garden lamp. When switched off, round flat lamp looks a lot like a human face. Electricity-system particles gleam through dim plastic and expose generic familiar features. It is an ordinary lamp. Some wires run out from the bottom, and lead around the corner, just by, into a regulating device with green screen and camouflaged buttons. This human face look-a-like is hanging on the stone wall rather confidently.
After sunset, the anthropoid lamp switches on. It gets darker each hour, and the light beam spreads in. Surroundings close-by are back in daylight, reaching as far as the yard on the other side of the river. This yard further is mainly obliged, as it reluctantly joins into the luminated realm.
Victorious light creates on a tight sphere, which closes the dark outside. But for a notice, the light is not able to penetrate certain obstacles, and numerous shadows appear. Face-lamp, peeking from its corner, tries to stretch for a better view towards the grim areas it is not able to lighten. Cramped in the plastic, it really cannot reach far. In its sight far-north side, big willow wavers suspiciously, and makes the lamp sweat. A white statuette and a sign pole stand anything but frozen. Chubby bushes and cracky stones frame the attractive, lil night-grim river. All the things this kind around the yard, are covering the streams the face-lamp tries to send.
Lamp on the wall gets anxious. It would like to keep a better watch on the shadows. Shadows, they only vaguely resemble the form of their light-blockers. They truly enjoy expressing their inherent mutantness: midnight movements and uneven, variously textured surfaces create perfectly unnameable forms and creatures. The face-lamp alone in the middle of its self-created sphere, cannot get its plastic dimmed eyes off of the unlit creatures. Every night, it feels indignant, scared and enigmatic the same breath, and follows the yard until the dawn.
The name on the exhibition is borrowed from a poem Conversation with the Stone by Wisława Szymborska
‘My world is worth returning to’
Online-exhibition / installation & a short story https://myworldisworthreturningto.cargo.site/
Rantala works and lives in Vilnius. Her practise is based on self-reflective field trip investigations, which comprises of gathering and sculpting of materials, knowledges and imaginaries. Primarily, thematics of her work is focused on dealing with questions on how human learns and passes on knowledge about material reality. In the background there is a notice, that human meetings and knowledge production with the physical reality are often rather humanistic and extractivistic. To challenge this situation and herself, she gather-forms stories from the field into textual and visual forms, often by playing with a merge of nature scientific and romantic approaches. Rantala have been active in the art fields of Northern-Finland, Finland in general, and recent years growingly more also in her master study city Vilnius, around where she has been organizing – individually and communally – exhibitions, events and workshops.
