A study of humankind, environment and community

Home means more than just a roof over your head. It means the place a person considers quintessentially his own (more his own than anything) which is ever-present in his being a human. Its loss may gouge rough grooves into a person, leaving a sense of permanent deprivation. Then the presence of the missing element will appear as an indelible absence. Something that was is now represented in a person by a trace, an experiential groove. That trace is a sign that at some time something real existed in that place. So longing is born: a ceaseless yearning for a lost home. Perhaps at the same time the person is longing for his distant childhood which still lives inside him as a remembered landscape. Is then the very idea of an adulthood home impossible?

The landscape presented in that photograph brings back a flood of memories. The summers were leafy, warm and fragrant. There again, the autumns were rainless, exciting, beneath star-spangled skies. The winters in turn were cold, with heavy snowfalls, made for skiing and for skating.

(Itkonen, M. 2017. "Spatial Savonia. A study of humankind, environment and community. English translation by G. Hughes. Forthcoming.)