Premio Combat Prize

Artwork descriptionRelique is a study on found object identity. It started in France where I stayed in 2009 and 2010 and is continuing in Finland and around Europe. In the series I portray in photographs fabrics that have been abandoned by humans to their environment.Walking daily along the Rhône river I noticed how there seemed to be pieces of fabrics laying about everywhere. I started to wonder why those clothes were there, under the trees and covering rocks by the river bank. Sometimes a piece of clothing would disappear from a location the next day I had seen it. They seemed to excist between ownership and abandonment. A sight has stayed with me of a man who was changing his clothes in a dim corner of a huge sewage pipe. I only saw his dark silhouette against the faint light as he changed from black shirt to a white one as if shedding his skin. Documenting these clothes and how they presented themselves as representations of these people living in the shadows became important. I chose not to take the clothing away from their original light and location but portrayed them in their original natural lighting and later disconnected from their background. Through naming and displaying these clothes I'm giving them a second identity. Does abandoned material exist in the same way as it did when it was in contact with a living being or is it forever forgotten? Abandoned clothing to me is a like a shell of a body that used to inhabit it but decided to move on. Why is it so easy to abandon something when it is not needed anymore? This question to me is larger and has to do we how we are connected or disconnected with nature and our environment and also to each other.BiographyPhotographic artist Virpi Velin was born in Karkkila, Finland 1978. She studied music, psychology and performance before entering the Helsinki University of Art and Design in 2004 from where she graduated with an MA in Photography in 2010.She has worked several periods abroad including Canada, Ireland and latest in 2009-2010 École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles France, where she started the "Relique" project - an investigation on found object identity.Since 2006 she has taken part in several exhibitions in Finland and abroad including The Helsinki School New Photography by TAIK in the Finnish Museum of Photography and Art Forum Berlin.