Animation

On the way from the Helsinki Airport to the City Center, the visitor is greeted by a public art work that represents an evolutionary sequence of 27 silhouette figures cut out of aluminum plate.
Seen from the direction of the airport, the cinematic series starts with a flying crane that slowly transforms into a mammal and continues to evolve through human and humanoid hybrid stages in order to return back to animal.
The work questions identity and the border between human and non-human. The title of the work hints to the animal inside us, to animist and totemist ways of thinking as well as to the Jungian concepts of anima and animus, the two opposing driving forces of the unconscious.
Animation also refers to early forms of moving image. The first experiments with moving pictures coincided with railway travel that revealed the cinematic in the new railway experience.

Total length  98 meters, height 3 m, CNC cut aluminum plate Commissioner: The City of Vantaa; Contractor: Jukka Merta/Selkiasema ; Construction engineer: Heikki Vanne/Pöyry; Building consultant: Ahma insinöörit