Everything I Now Have, One Day I Will Have Lost

“Everything I now have, one day I will have lost” is the name of the sculpture featured in this book. It was exhibited in October 2011 in a small gallery in Helsinki. The exhibition showed a selection of photographs from another book, “Fleeting”, published around that time. In the exhibition, the sculpture performed the duties of an essay, similar to those that typically contextualise the work in an exhibition catalogue. For the duration of the show, it was assigned the difficult task of transforming from a three dimensional, living entity to an abstraction of ideas presumably present in the photographs. Despite the tender care of the gallery attendant, the tree did not survive the burden of representation. Instead, it became the idea it was based on, shed its leaves and lost everything. What remains of it are these photographs. But in time, photographs have the tendency to slowly replace the events they were meant to preserve in our memory. And all we remember are the photographs.

— Tuukka Kaila