Marja Pirilä: Strindbergin huoneissa 18–26, 2017/ kylä

Completion year: 2017

Technique: pigment print

Size: n. 2 x 4,5 m

Keywords: Camera obscura, Marja Pirilä, August Strindberg

The series In Strindberg’s Rooms was created in 2015 in an artist residence in France, the birthplace of photography. The writers’ residence in Hôtel Chevillon, the village of Grez-sur-Loing, became the test laboratory for light and photography. Converted into camera obscura, my rooms were like eyes and their walls like retinas on which the same landscape would reflect: the small village street and silhouette in upside down reflections in the changing light from one day to another.
One day I was told that August Strindberg (1849-1912) had lived in the same apartment in the 1880s. For me, Strindberg had always been more a pioneer of early photography than one of the most prominent and controversial authors in Sweden. The thought of him having worked in the same building inspired my work throughout my stay in the residence.
Strindberg’s experiments with self-made cameras with or without lenses of even without a camera had fascinated me a long time ago when I first started to use pinhole cameras. They led me to the camera obscura method in the 1990s.

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