Since ancient times, a sauna has had an important role in the lives of Estonian and other Baltic Finnish nations as a building and an institution. When moving, the first thing people did was to build a sauna. Finns would use the sauna to live in, eat in and most importantly, give birth in. One could almost say that a sauna is a place that symbolises the circle of life. Another reason for its popularity is that in a cold climate, the sauna allows people a brief warmth. Old Finnish expressions tell: “if alcohol, tar and sauna do not help, the disease will lead to your death; the sauna is the pharmacy of a poor man.” Various rituals took place in a sauna for the purposes of cleansing one’s mind and body, harvestable crops and good family fortune. For example, a reason to bring your newborn daughter to the sauna was for the ritualistic birch branch beating that was supposed to bring future marriage luck. That was usually carried out by the parents of the girl, but this obligation could also be given to a witch or an (elderly) wise person, who, in fact, could have been one of the village lamenters (crysinger).
The lament is a cultural metaphor in the Karelian worldview, and its sounds and structures are part of a symbolic system that embodies the essence of the cosmology of the Karelian folk religion. The lament’s expressive structure and instrumentals engender a trance-like state necessary to make a successful mental journey. An old Karelian wisdom says that when someone faces a tragedy or has a trauma, it is best to say “cry, cry it out, cry until it’s ready”. The Karelian lament is a particularly striking example of the interplay between language, music and emotional expression, occurring as a fluid mix between speech sound and weeping.
As a result of deportation, most of its magic is lost. It had to be left behind or was just outgrown due to harsh conditions and confusing times, which resulted in loss of homes, traditions and possibility of modernization. The following offspring have almost no possibility of getting to know or experience one’s culture. It begs the question- is learned heritage something real, or is it bound to become fiction(al)? By romanticizing history, stories and traditions attach mystical meaning. The artist is capturing a feeling of something familiar yet unknown, thus grasping the line between interpretation and fact. She revives the emotions and feelings she has gathered from her heritage trips to the North-Karelian region, searching for the village bearing the same last name as her, “Lavonen”. These expeditions essentially started out of curiosity and common interest together with artist Sonja Ovaskainen which escalated to become a self-made residency, that has a life of its own on social media and which also became an individual project that you see right now. The research involved interviewing locals about their preserved customs and traditions, visiting churches, meeting a local shaman and searching for sauna buildings that (now passed) relatives have lived in.
Hanna-Liisa Lavonen (1994) lives and works in Tallinn. She has studied painting in the Estonian Academy of Arts on a bachelor level in 2017 and is continuing her studies in the master’s program of contemporary art. Lavonen has studied in the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where she studied in the faculty of intermedia. The artist has taken part in and curated many group exhibitions in Estonia and abroad. Varying installations, with an abundance of handful materials with an outcome of weirdly shaped objects, is the main medium in which the artist prefers to express herself. She also engages in live or social media based performances. The artist is interested in such topics as (materialistic) metamorphosis, gray areas and the unusualness associated with them, discrepancies and historical traditions.