First, I made a hundred-meter long painting on a blank film in 2008 and named it Pori–Helsinki. Pori is the town where I was born and lived for the first 20 years. Then I moved to Helsinki. For me, the process of painting this first film was a mental travel between these two places. Tapani Rinne and Tuomas Norvio (aka Verneri Lumi) made the soundtrack. Pori-Helsinki formed the basis for the films following it.

The next film is Sea and I painted it on a 35mm negative copy made of Pori-Helsinki. This time the result was much darker scenes, but also what Freud called the ‘oceanic feeling’, ego submerging with the universe. The working title of Sea was Helsinki-Stockholm, as it was premiered at the same time in two cities across the same sea, Helsinki and Stockholm. Pentti Dassum made the soundtrack.

The third film is Attraction and I painted it upon a positive film copy of Sea. Attraction became much lighter, more playful – representation of nature and garden. Attraction refers to the early film term “cinema of attractions”. Emma Augustsson, Anton Svanberg and Jesper Eriksson made the soundtrack.

The fourth film is Beautiful Confusion and I painted it on a copy of Attraction. Beautiful Confusion deals with the nature of things, the law of nature and messenger pigeons. In this piece, I mixed layers of pigeon videos with the painted film. Like the image, also the soundtrack consists of different technical layers. It is a collage of P.P.Puska's and Zemlja's improvisations upon c-cassette recordings from the eighties.

So in this open-ended (life-long?) series, each new work is painted as a new layer upon earlier works. Old works trail off when new ones emerge on their surface. The method of using the old as a background for the new makes the resulting chain resemble the human psychic system. Both build up over time. In the psychic system, events of bygone episodes remain effective in the tacit substructures of one's personal history. Likewise, on my film the old images have not passed away entirely. They get restored underneath the film's visible layers and remain effective there.

ANALOGUE MEETS DIGITAL
In this series, analogue and digital technology interlace, which happens in many other things nowadays. Hand-painting on physical film and digital post-production were already combined in the first work Pori –Helsinki, but in each new work I used digital methods more than in the previous one. So, after each new layer of paint, I have scanned the film into digital format to continue the process. Lately, the effects of digital post-production have become more perceptible in this project than in the beginning.