Venla Kaasinen - Tässä paikassa on monia

Tässä paikassa on monia (This place is many) is a photo series shot on film that seeks to broaden human perspectives and to bring non-human actants into visibility by exploring our relationships with places.

For the series I have shot five people in their chosen locations, and also the locations themselves that they have a personal relationship with. During the shoot the person collected different plants and other material which I afterwards used to make a film soup where I soak the film before developing it. The soup destroys parts of the emulsion creating new colors and textures on the photos. The place and its inhabitants leave their mark on the pictures.

You can see bits of the relationships people have with places and how they become personified in our minds. However, when I photograph people in these places, I feel that I am not so much photographing the person themselves, but that place and its inhabitants with human help, through the person. In the end, the human is only a presenter of the place and of the non-human actants. The gaze focuses on them instead of the human.

This series was made as artistic thesis for Art Academy in Turku Univercity of Applied sciences and was exhibited in the graduate show at Taiteen Talo, Turku in March and April 2023. Parts of it were exhibited at Realm of fine arts in Mänttä from June to August 2023. In 2025 it is exhibited in Pohjanmaan Valokuvakeskus in Lapua and in Photo North in Oulu.