POPS IN THE ARCTIC
(Rovaniemi Art Museum, 18.01. 2000)
Dear quests, homo sapiens sapiens – people, dear visitors on the arctic!
In my arctic world the human enviroment lies north of the 60th latitude (north). In this sense, there are 10 million people living here, half of them are Finnish. So the term arctic personality means mostly Finnish people curiosity, if there is such a phenomenon, as I suppose.
Caesar Heine, a canadian psychiarist and a priest has told us with professor Erkki Väisänen from Oulu about this phenomenon in their article in 80`s in scientific publication Psychiatrica Fennica. How humankind and its social and biological nature has adapted to living enviroment where there is all too much cold, darkness, light and cosmic radiation, not forgetting the booze. As a fact, these excentric scientists say, april is the only month in the annual turn for a human being in north to live in good co-operation with other enviroment.
For adaptation in the north, human being has developed some kind of arctic personality, which I’m used to call arctic personality disorder.
A very famous Finnish hermit named Pentti Linkola has mentioned that for instance in Finnish peninsula there could live not more than 90 000 people at a time. More inhabitants would make it impossible for natural enviroment to adapt to these hard arctic surroundings.
Something like that came to my mind when reading last World-Watch annual report of our planet and its possibilities to come along with this enfant terrible, homo sapiens sapiens (vice, enviroment-robbing human kind).
In its report World-Watch says that climate and pollution will come to fatal point of ending very soon, if there are more than 7 billion people living and consuming here.
Kirsti Simonsuuri, famous Finnish intellectuel made her words very sharp in a article in the biggest scandinavian newspaper Helsingin Sanomat last Sunday. "People in Finland, having this arctic personality, are quite greedy, stingy and are lying way too much: especially about their feelings (love, hate, solidarity, sympathy, friendship etc)."
We here in Lapland and in its capital town Rovaniemi are trying to come along with these thoughts and fears. We are living occidentally seen in quite hard social and economical crisis. We are crossing pads about priorities when we are having less economical capasities than it’s needed for living in this nordic "wellfare society".
What do we need in our life when trying to populate this very sensitive arctic nature and utilize its possibilities? We need possibilities to get food, protection, reproduction and knowledge about these primary activities. (svenska = säkerhet)
In my opinion what we need is knowledge in some very important activities: we need to know our roots in the humankind and in a nature-enviroment. We need to know our identity as human beings and as arctic culture represetants. If we want to stay outside of the fourth world, i.e. outside of the society where people don’t have network neither to tell about themselves nor to listen other societes. This phenomenon is described by Manuel Cassals from Katalonia.
We need social responsibility with global and arctic enviroment and with the citizens who have dropped out from our hectic postmodern and post-traditional development of a society, where there is more relations today to mental images than to other fellow-men.
In these very essential activities and tasks we need in my opinion plenty of space to think and to feel our deep thougts. This becomes possible if we have the capasity to see and feel for instance the creativity and its fruits as we see them here in our contemperary Art museum with its beautiful works, where we often hear beautiful conserts of our skillfull Lappish chamber orchestra. These kind of activities offer us a possibility to renove and readaptate our souls, our psyche.
In this purpose, I wish that You, our dear guests, will enjoy your visit here on the arctic circle with all us, 5 million arctic Finnish homo sapiens sapiens, who are more or less vice human beings robbing this unique Tellus.