maanantai, 3 helmikuun, 2014, 08:09
STAR GUEST Jouni Tossavainen: On Poemstone on Runeberg’s day
It was only possible to fit simple and easily interpretable signs on my parents’ gravestone. The four sides of the Poemstone, four stone plates, were haunting, the frame was constricted and the letters heavy as a priest’s tone. Earlier it was easy to waste paper, but to scratch the same bits into black granite ‒ although it wasn’t I who scratched them, but the computer of Kaavin Kivi. In the end, I trusted my empirical nature in my experiment: stone, wood, earth and water. As the birth words of death I tried Paavo Haavikko’s weighty advice: ”Write succinctly even when your text is not carved in stone.” Each word had to be veracious, to speak as much as a stone of a ruin, when you hit your toe against it. For Kaavin Kivi, Heikki Lamusuo folded a paper scale model on which Jaana Partanen’s pen drew the keywords I had hunted from here and there. When you turned the paper stone in your hands, circling the Poemstone from left to right, new verses were created in the four corners of the post. So they also grow at the Tervo graveyard.
Jouni Tossavainen, poet and author
Poemstone artwork has been made in cooperation with Jaana Partanen, Heikki Lamusuo and Jouni Tossavainen in 2006. © Partanen & Lamusuo
Here you can read more about the permanent and public artworks of Partanen & Lamusuo Ltd.
Avainsanat: public artwork, star guest
