Mika Taanila & Harry Salmenniemi - Tectonic Plate (Mannerlaatta)

”In the ’camera-less’ experiment Tectonic Plate, visual-artist Mika Taanila’s photograms and poet Harry Salmenniemi’s stark intertitles simulate the jet-laggy anxiety of international air travel. Pages from security pamphlets are distorted into rough particles of grain; a five-minute zoom-out transforms words into geometric patterns. These shifts between legibility and abstraction often literally force the viewer’s eyes to refocus, dislocating both cognitive and sensory perception; the resulting dissociative panic produces a very bodily feeling of free fall. The physically droughts photograms, which alternatively evoke encephalographs or airport x-rays of carry-on items, anchor the out-of-body paranoia in an unshakable tactility. Opening the stylish bound book of Salmenniemi’s text in the box set (which also contains two shorts by Taanila) reawakens the sensory trauma: ”I am an accident that is happening to someone else.” – Chloe Lizotte, Film Comment