The idea for this project arose in March-April 2022. In February, we left Russia after the start of the war and spent the first few months in a small Finnish port town. After a few weeks, we ran out of topics to discuss; it was difficult to talk — the corrosive, ongoing war left no room for everyday conversations. Our only solace was found in daily, hours-long solitary walks through the Finnish forests. The silence of nature mirrored our inability to articulate the experiences we were going through. We asked ourselves: what will we leave behind in this forest? Will this place remember our presence in any way? In our homeland, a person leaves some visible trace — material, spiritual, cultural, etc. But what trace does a wanderer leave, someone who pauses momentarily in a place, passing by?

Will the trees, growing there for decades, remember the wanderer’s traces? Or the stones, lying there for millions of years? Or does the mysterious beauty of nature lie in its eternal renewal, leaving no physical imprints, one thing replacing another? There is no dying, only transition from one state to another. A trace indicates absence. And this absence can be both the absence of the past and the absence of the future. Perhaps our understanding of a “trace” is close to the contradictory definitions given by Jacques Derrida — the trace neither exists nor does not exist. The trace relates equally to nature and to culture. But essentially, a trace is the retention of the other within the identical.

In November/December 2023, as part of the Saari Residence, we developed our project, exploring the theme of traces and farewell. We filmed for 12 days on 16mm film, capturing 24 seconds of moving images and 360 photos of the landscape each day. By the end, we had 288 seconds of film and about 4,320 photos.

One of the structural foundations of the work was the book “Eternal Sorrow” by Unella Konkka, which explores the Karelian tradition of lamentations and songs at funerals and weddings, as well as various rituals—rites of separation, transition, and acceptance. In the Karelian language, there is no word for “death;” a person does not die but returns to the ancestors. What they leave behind is a question that often resonates in the texts of Karelian mourners. We collected 12 questions from lamentation songs at the beginning of our shooting; there is a special order or structure, which we followed during our work. We asked each other questions behind the camera and silently responded to them. We also collected micro-movements of farewells and audio traces.

We filmed for 12 days, and each day, besides the questions, we chose one object found on the grounds of the Saari Residence or in the second-hand shop in the village. These objects guided the story to the final point of farewell. Each day, we chose a different route for returning to the barn.

Similar to how an orphan in search of the deceased gradually approaches the house, noticing the street, the village, the fence, the threshold, the wailer gradually approaches the definition of the state of death. The lament contains images of intermediate states that resemble death in appearance (illness, old age, sleep). But death differs from them—primarily in its speed and irreversibility. These qualities are related to the category of time, its swiftness, and its unidirectionality. The time of lamentation is the time of crossing the boundary. It is the boundary between the old time and the time of separation, between time and eternity. The path is embodied in concrete images of roads and paths, and the motif of destruction — of the house, body, clothes (overcoming the difficulties of the journey) — is indirectly associated with the image of the path. On the level of abstract concepts, the path is a transition from one state to another, and it has a beginning (the portrayal of the mourned as sleeping, the separation as brief) and an end (the acknowledgment of death). According to Karelian beliefs, the six-week memorial cycle corresponds to the six-week journey of the soul from the world of the living to its new eternal abode. Folk consciousness places this entire journey in proximity and dependence on the home (the soul comes home to eat and wash, as if making stops along the way). But the duration of this road is measured, and just as the meters and kilometers of a real road cannot be altered, the hours and minutes of this journey are counted.

An interesting motif found in southern Karelian laments is the request to leave ant trails through which the deceased could come out into the light and visit their loved ones. According to beliefs not only among the Karelians, the soul of the deceased migrates into a bird or a butterfly. The idea of the soul migrating into a bird permeates all Karelian laments. In northern Karelia, there is a belief about the soul that when it separates from the body, it sits on the chimney post and watches from there as the deceased is washed and dressed. The soul sits there for three days, waiting for the verdict on where it should go, what place is destined for it. It sees and hears everything, so one must not speak ill of the deceased. Among the Baltic-Finnish people called the Votes, there is a belief that for six weeks after death, the soul stays in the house where the deceased lived. The favorite place of the deceased is under the table, so one must not stretch their legs while sitting at the table to avoid hurting the soul. In the hand of the mourner was a white tear cloth, with which she covered her mouth or wiped her tears. Most striking in the tombs is a small aperture in the side wall. Through this opening, the deceased can glimpse the radiant light, permitting the soul to venture out and visit home once more.