On show at Helsinki Central Library Oodi: Tatu Tuominen: A Near Approach to Immortality (Hercynian Forest)

Tatu Tuominen’s video work A Near Approach to Immortality (Hercynian Forest) explores the lost European primeval forest. The work examines what art-historical images reveal about the human relationship with the forest, both in the past and in the present.

An art-historical landscape—whether based on perception or imagined—has often been presented as perfect, static, and complete. In the current ecological situation, proposing this kind of landscape seems impossible. The landscape no longer presents itself as pristine or permanent, because human activity has an impact everywhere in the world.

This is why, in Tuominen’s work, landscape is in a state of becoming: imperfect, in flux, and fragmentary—as is the world around us.

The historical point of departure for the work is Naturalis Historia, an encyclopedia by the Roman author and natural historian Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE). Pliny refers to the Hercynian Forest twice in Naturalis Historia. Hercynia is a mythical primeval forest that was situated beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, in the region of western Central Europe. In Pliny’s account, it emerges as an impenetrable and otherworldly place, representing untamed nature—a territory that not even Rome could govern.