The Black Forest Clinic
The Black Forest ClinicA look at images by Finnish artist Ilkka HalsoBy Raphaële Bidault-WaddingtonRestoration is the title of a series of photographs by astonishing Finnish artist Ilkka Halso, whose work explores the artistic and cultural dimensions of natural history in a quasi-scientific way.Very much in time with our advanced environmental consciousness, Halso’s photographed installations present veritable ateliers for healing and conserving our natural heritage. The artist reveals them to us like so many workshops, tucked away in museum basements, where ancient masterpieces are restored. “As we all know, nature’s in bad shape. It has to be fixed!,” he says cheerfully.But the images are formidable. It’s hard to believe that these works are only aimed at a kind of “museumizing” of nature, expressing an intellectually conservative point of view that we all know only does harm to the city and inhibits an enduring evolution and collective re-creation of our living space.Paradoxically, the “day-for-night” ambiance is overtly created by glaringly artificial lighting. Like the vast in situ operating rooms we’re presented with, it literally distorts the very subject of Halso’s work — the so-called “natural” landscape. These quasi movie studios are a series of fictitious spaces that open up before us, becoming imaginary sets for a hypothetical “Black Forest Clinic,” to borrow the title of the dark 1980s German television series.Lying somewhere between technological Utopia and dramaturgy, between ecosystem therapy and landscape cosmetic surgery, the beauty of Ilkka Halso’s images offers us a persuasive artistic prescription for a healthy examination of nature as fantasized reality, while proclaiming the urgency of environmental intervention to boot. Finland is nonetheless slightly ahead of us on that.
