During 2017, I developed a project called “Performing with Plants,” which consisted of various actions like repeated performances for camera with two trees in Helsinki, two trees in Stockholm, a tree calendar in the Helsinki region, and other experiments. “Sunday with a Pine” was one of these other experiments.

As an artist-in-residence at the Nida Art Colony on the Curonian Spit in Lithuania, I had been walking up and down the forest slopes with an action camera and posing with various pine trees for a camera on tripod. On my last Sunday, I decided to do one time-lapse video in my usual way, to visit a pine tree up on the dunes with two-hour intervals for a day, 8 am to 8 pm, depending on sunlight, and to write brief blog notes after returning from each session.

These “primary” performances (the video and the text) were created to be used as material for several “secondary” performances. Various performers and types of performances were involved in this process: the pine, the sun, the wind and me performing for camera; the blog writing, the screening of the video for various audiences. Perhaps the most interesting performance, in October in Helsinki, consisted of a screening augmented with a live reading. I read the blog notes as a live voice-over to the video, in a double gesture of combining romantic landscape imagery with the prosaic descriptions of a tourist site.