On the Way Home (2010)

On the Way Home is based on old 35 mm slides from my father’s archive. My family moved to Tanzania when I was a baby, and although we lived there for four years, I have no memories of that time. My father, who worked for the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was an avid amateur photographer, and he took hundreds of slides during our stay.

As a child, I used to watch these slides on a projector while my parents told me stories about the images and our life in Africa. Years later, I found the slide archive in disarray. Without captions or stories, the images were completely silent to me – unfamiliar faces and landscapes from unknown countries.

For this work, I reconstructed the experience of watching the slides with my mother. In the final version, the pictures themselves are absent; only my mother’s words are presented. The images are formed in the viewer’s mind, highlighting the relationship between words, images, and memory. On the Way Home has been presented both as a looping slide projection and as an artist’s book.

The work questions how memory and photography interact: do photographs themselves evoke memories, or is it the stories we associate with them that shape our recollection?

Although the work is based on my personal family album, the words invite viewers to recall their own memories and childhood photographs, creating a shared space between personal and collective recollection.