Physical training would be a kind of ritual in terms of being extraordinary desired for self-discipline. It can be understood that motivations for the training is so dominated by strong willpower that it could look like a religious faith because that needs to bother to force oneself into a harsh condition.
There is Sisu of which concept is a clue to understand Finns mentality. Personally, I think an aesthetic for awakening of physical ability to which the power of Sisu refers can be realized at hard physical training. The mental state there would be introspective and stoic like seeking for perfection. Therefore it seemed to me likely that a harmony of the atheistic belief of Sisu and the religiosity of the training could show how a ritual performed in a true sense should be in this era.
An issue symbolized by being of Karhunpeijaiset today is to neglect the universal worship of nature. In the feeling of reality at facing the harshness of nature and forcing ourself into it with pleasure, we might be able to realize that and voluntarily to relate us with the natural environment. To train to fully feel the sense of the harshness of nature can play a modern role of ritual for that.
カルフンペイヤイセット, 2019
環境のドローイング
ラプア, フィンランド
フィンランドの民族宗教において熊は神聖な生き物であり、以前は熊が死に、食べられる時は「カルフンペイヤイセット」という熊崇拝の儀礼が行われていた。それは元々ヘラジカ狩りの成功を祝して行われる埋葬式を意味した「ペイヤイセット」と同様に、食料となった動物の魂を再び生息地へ返すための儀であった。
今日では、カルフンペイヤイセットは生活様式の変化によりほとんど行われていない。文化としての継続も、信仰心に繋がる畏れの次元が変わったことでその行為の価値が見出しづらくなっている。その一方で、たとえ信仰心がなくとも、儀式の役割は形式的に体験することで同じように果たされるが、かつての畏れは総じて現代の伝統行事に残された「時間の移ろいを祝う」という道徳観に代わり、今後それらが本当の意味で再現されることはないかもしれない。
このプロジェクトでは、そうした宗教的儀式の民族性の消失に伴う何かの消失を一つの畏れとし、地域性や自然と時間に見出される普遍的な思想に基づいた、現代の儀式のような行為を探した。
Karhunpeijaiset, 2019
Environment drawing
Lapua, Finland
In Finnish ethnic religion, bears are a sacred animal, and a ritual for worshipping bears, named “Karhunpeijaiset”, was practised whenever a bear was killed (simply died) and eaten. It is a ceremony like Peijaiset, which traditionally referred to burials after a successful elk hunt, to restore the soul of eaten animals to their former living place.
Today, Karhunpeijaiset is barely seen due to the change of their lifestyle. And it is getting harder to find the value of handing over it as a tradition to the future because fears awakening to a religious faith has been moved to another level. However, even though without faith, the ritual would play the role in a community like in those days by formally experiencing it; on the other hand, the ethical value to cerebrate the passage of time took the place of the fears, and it may never be performed in the true sense of traditional rituals.
In this project, I searched for acts like modern rituals based on the locality or universal perceives on nature and the times by facing a fear of the disappearance of something with disappearance of ethnicity of such traditional rituals.
