My name is Jonna Hyttinen, and I am a 24-year-old visual artist from Värtsilä. I mainly work with conceptual and photographic art. The conceptual nature is particularly manifested in the diverse manner of carrying out my work and in wordplay as part of the works and information on my works. I like to focus on coincidences and errors as well as things that often go unnoticed, making the unessential essential and turning something insignificant into something significant. 

The starting points for my Muistelmia work were errors and coincidences and the wordplay between “mustelmia” (bruises) and “muistelmia” (memoirs). The book looks like a pile of paper, and each page is a photocopy of the previous page. The text on the first page, Muistelmia, disappears as a result of copying, and only ever-changing ink stains remain. Among other things, the name Mustelmia first refers to these ink stains and the unpleasant nature of the memoirs. Ink stains may be regarded as memories stained by fear from the period of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Particularly at the early stages of an artist’s career, there is probably always uncertainty of the future. For me, graduating during the pandemic reinforced my feeling of uncertainty, because moving away from communality to working alone happened so suddenly, and the changes in society were major. After my graduation, my concern about my livelihood and health was combined with the idea of “now what”. Though the Covid-19 pandemic has partly increased my concerns, it has also provided me with career opportunities I probably would not have otherwise had.