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Midsummer – A Sleepless Night
Frank Motz
Group celebrations are among the basic endeavours
of our species – just like the fundamental struggle to live
in communities, or secure food and shelter. The eccentric partying
that goes with the Midsummer Festival, a celebration of a physical
phenomenon – Summer Solstice – which accounts for a sleepless
night, is a well-rehearsed routine up north.
On St. John’s the sun won’t go
down at night. Since the dawn of time, the drinking and shouting
has been part of a tradition still upheld, which despite its religious-sounding
name is of pagan origin. In Mäkipää’s Midsummer
(subtitled Act vs. Plan), the party has reached its peak, and the
patrons start going out of control. Hypnotised by the fire and sun,
drunk from the wine and vodka, and prone to orgy – as if in
response to the sun’s restlessness – they follow their
innate drive to procreate the next generation of Nordic Barbarians.
There is no darkness swallowing the shady corners of life; what
was deemed secret creeps out into the open, feelings and experiences
surface. Just like Tea Mäkipää’s Finnish origins.
No time to sleep. It remains open to speculation whether the camera,
were it to dwell, would catch moments of boredom, lament, or violence.
We are shown the unfiltered, undistorted
collision of Pagan folk and Christian tradition grafting its own
significance on the event – as it did with Christmas, originally
the celebration of the darkest day of the year –and the questionable
logic of a consumerist and progress-crazed spiral striving for an
ever more comfortable life, making dystopia become more real than
ever.
Frank Motz is the founder/director of the
ACC Galerie in Weimar and the curator of Halle 14, Stiftung Federkiel
in Leipzig (Germany).
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Atlantis
