VIIVI HÄKKINEN

Born 1985

Photographer / Filmmaker

It was 2007 when I first picked up a camera. It was just to do a favour to my brother and take pictures while his band played. Right away the steady pace of the shutter compelled me. I learned to love and appreciate the art of photography, cinematography and later on directing.

All this has brought me to wonderful people and amazing places. It has given me a new perspective and new way of living.

It has been a journey to home.

FORGET ME NOT

In Forget Me Not I have been studying death in all it´s forms.

In today’s society death is always somewhere far away, in a sterile morgue or at a chappel. We no longer sit hand in hand at the moment of the death, or care for the body after they have passed on.  The lids of our caskets are closed and the dead preserved in mortuaries.

Long gone are the days when death was truly present as a part of life. When we would decorate our departed with flowers, place them in the middle of the room to be surrounded by their loved ones holding vigil.

Through these photographs of ”Forget me not” we take a step towards this past. We are brought to actually look at death and to pay homage to it. We also pay our respect to the animals in the photographs – the ones that might otherwise present themselves to us as merely trash along the highway they died on. Roadkill that we would probably not be too bothered about – at most something seen as unpleseant to the eye. They have been placed on their final resting place with the very rituals reserved in the past to the people most cherished to us. They have been groomed, combed and dressed up. A vacant obituary echoing our emotions and thoughts.

In this series of photographs we can see death eye to eye. We see the beauty of it – the releaf of eternal sleep that gives peace to the restless and consolation to the longing. But we are also faced with the fact that death is not always pretty or painless. Death can hurt and death can tear us apart. It does not ask for permission or forgiveness and it is as inevitable as it is indiscriminatory. There isn’t always an open casket.

Sometimes death cuts off pieces of us and leaves scars that never heal.