RITVA KOVALAINEN JA SANNI SEPPO
The End of the Rainbow

Most often if we want to go somewhere - somewhere we feel we belong - we go to the woods. Without the woods, we would get lost.

In the 1990s we worked as a team, making a long journey into old Finnish tradition and mythology, which linked the human fate to trees and the surrounding woods, into a time when the woods had no boundaries and were everywhere.

We have begun to measure woods in minutes - how long it takes to walk through the forest from one clearing to another or to a sapling stand. There are three-minute forests and five-minute forests, and very few 30-minute forests.

We have begun to rename places: Dead Standing Trees Clearing has been turned into Sapling Clearing, Pine Hill into Plough Hill, Bad Fish Sandbank looks like Broken Land Sandbank, Night Pool Marsh like Deep Drain Thicket.

And we have tried to see which new terms enwrap this landscape; silviculture, light tilling, scalping, protection zone, natural restocking...How about you, visitor: do these sights please your eye? Is this good? Necessary? Know-how! Of no significance? Or just plain tragedy?

This time, we have studied our contemporary relationship with forests and the wooded landscape. The process has been not unlike chasing the rainbowÕs end. The woods escaped us, constantly looming on the horizon. And gradually - after running breathless- we began to see the big picture; how meticulously the 50 years of efficient forest economy has crushed, torn, pulled, grooved, wounded, cut and chaffed almost every single square kilometre in our wilderness. It has also sown, planted and thinned, but a plantation of trees can no longer be called a forest.

The Finnish word for `forest´ once referred to a boundary, an edge, an end, beyond which there was another, vast realm. How many trees does it take in our language and landscape to form a forest?