Pigeons and hens

"As human beings we we only see what we remember." the lecturer says.

My hairdresser has returned from her summer holiday. It is a pitty I do not have one specific picture of her hairdressing saloon from last summer. The door was open to the street. I entered. She was washing a client´s hair. On the floor there was a saucer, some seeds and a pigeon having a nice lunch. The pigeon was not expecting any more clients to come, but that being the case, she moved by side to let me in. Then she went on enjoying her lunch.

At that time I had just been reading Number One Ladies´ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. What I now saw with my own eyes here in Tampere, had been seen by Alexander McCall Smith in Botswana.

In Tampere the scene was a hairdressing saloon housing one experienced hairdresser with her long-established client. In Caborone the events take place in the office of Mma Ramotswe, the first female detective of the country. The other person is Mma Makutsi, the manager of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors and the assistant detective at Number One Ladies´ Detective Agency.

In Tampere we have a pigeon, while in Caborone the animal life is represented by a hen. However, there is one thing in common in these two pictures and that has to do with the author who describes the event. For one reason or another, both of them find the incident worth mentioning.

Maybe McCall Smith mentions it because seeing a hen walking somewhere in the outskirts of Caborone is something you could expect to see. It is more or less normal. Here in Tampere seeing a pigeon anywhere indoors is an absolute exception, seeing one enjoying her lunch in a hair dressing saloon is a once-in-a-life-time event.

Sorry, I do not have any picture of this, but I think that by now you have a picture, or a series of pictures, describing the event in your mind. Environmental art is like that. It exists in a visible form, it has spatial characteristics and an effect on the space and surroundings where it is located, it refers to change and movement, it is multisensory and it calls for a spectator reaction. As time passes an individual piece of environmental art fades away from where it was located, but it stays in the spectators´mind. You carry it with you and you can refer to it.

Maybe you now have a pigeon-hen; hairdressing saloon-detective´s office; two Finnish ladies - two African ladies event constructed in your mind. The African ladies are traditionally built and so are the Finnish ladies too. The sun is shining and the room is hot. The activity is directed towards a specific achievement. There is an outsider - an author or an artist - looking at the event, registering it for a later use.

We have pictures in our mind. We can change and mould them. We can connect them with anything else in our mind. Anyway, as far as I know, the result is not any environmental piece of art for one simple reason - the artist did not announce publicly that he or she is now starting to make piece of art. In that sense a piece of art embodies ownership, the artist has to take responsibility for what she wants to do. She also needs to be prepared to explain, defend and interpete the choices made.

All right. Let´s go back to the beginning: seeing is a learnt. Practically we see what we expect to see.

My hairdresser has a five-year old granddaughter. She was visiting her grandparents. All of a sudden she started crying, was in a total panic and wanted to go back home. Grandfather felt totally helpless with a reaction like that. Grandmother - my hairdresser who has for years actively worked for the Catastrophe Centre for Abandoned Cats, who normally has a couple old dogs and occasionally twelve to sixteen cats in her home - did all her best to find out what was wrong with the panicing child. The question "What happened?" resulted in a not-too-clear explanation that the child had been on a balcony. "What happened there? Did you perhaps see something?" revealed that the child had really seen something strange. "What exactly did you see?" "I saw a very small lady."

The grandmother finds out that the child had seen a small lady walking away from the house. She had fair hair like grandmother. Only the hairdo was different. She was the size of a big doll. And the frightening element was that the child did not know, if what she had seen, was a real event or just a fairy-tale.

A normal, five-year-old is an intelligent person. Maybe you know some of them. He has just found out that there was some life in the family before "you found me." A five-year-old wants to take part, he wants to help others and organise things. Once I found brand-new gloves and one of the finger tips had been cut open with scissors. I was astonished and asked what had happened. "I cut it out just to mark whose gloves they are." my five-year-old son explained in his very matter-of-fact way of those days.

A five-year-old has just recently learnt what is normal. She knows that normal life is made up of concrete events and it is performed by people and animals of a certain size and form. Now, all of a sudden, she sees with her own eyes something that is totally out of proportions. A picture of a small fair-haired lady of the size of a big doll does not correspond to the reacently learnt idea of the normal life. It is a message from somewhere not-real. To panic in situation like that to react normally.

When the child´s story comes out, the grandmother slowly finds out what must have taken place. In their neighbourhood there lives a lady who never grew up to reach the same size as the rest of us adults have done. Grandmother had simply frogotten to tell the child about this special family. The approximate explanation did not help. The child did not calm down until hearing that the lady in question has recently got a baby and she and her husband live happily not too far from the grandma´s.

What could we learn from this? Firstly, it is not before we learn to know enough similarities in one another´s life that we can stop fearing each other. Secondly, what we percieve needs to be connected to something we know beforehand, preferably with something we feel to be safe, nice and normal. Thirdly, it is very difficult to be prepared for all the exceptions that life offers us.