single channel video with sound, 23′ 42′‘(excerpt)

In the video, five Russian-speaking women read the text from /Foorum/, a program on Estonian Television, where the new Employment Contracts Act (active since July 1st , 2009) and the unemployment caused by the economic crisis are discussed by politicians, representatives of employers’ associations and trade unions, as well as the program host. Women participating in the video are all amateur actors. Most of them have lost their job during the last year. The choice of actors was based on the fact that all the societal groups that are affected by topics related to the new law were represented on the program exclusively by middle-aged, Estonian-speaking men. The goal of this video is give the workers themselves a voice through the model of a workers’ theater. In addition to the delivering a text from tv-show, actors are sharing their experiences about being unemployed.

series of 15 photos 49 x 49 cm (c-print on aluminium) & 49 x 107 cm (lambda print on aluminium)

The series Fall of the Manufacture portraits a partly abandoned Textile Factory Krenholm in Narva, the border city between Estonia and Russia.

Krenholm Manufacture was established in 1857 by baron Ludwig Knoop. The main production fields of the factory were spinning of linen, as well as weaving and rendering of textile.

In addition to the production buildings the factory complex included following facilities: worker’s barracks; shops; a sauna; a day nursery and a hospital. Since there were a considerable number of under-aged and illiteral employees, the factory also owned a two-grade school.

With it’s 40 000 workers Krenholm was one of the largest textile factories in Sovjet Union. It was privatized in 1994 and since then it has reduced it’s fields of operation by degrees.

Today the large factory complex standing almost unused embodies the fall of the industrial age.

single channel video of photos, voice over, 7′

The movie combines archive photos of Krenholm textile factory (Narva, Estonia) and an excerpt from the play „What happened after Nora left her husband or pilars of society“ by Elfriede Jelinek. In this particular scene, Nora comes to the factory to warn female workers for the closing of the factory. Women don’t take her seriously because of their unshaken belief in the protection of social democracy. Their speech is a speech of slogans which corresponds to the pictorial language of the archive photos taken in the Krenholm Textile Factory in the 50ies and 60ies during the Sovjet regime.

Krenholm with it’s 12000 employees was one of the biggest manufactures in Sovjet Union. In 2009 there are 400 workers left in this company and a large complex of factories is staying empty embodying the fall of the industrial age.

6 photos 81 x 100 cm (lambda print on aluminium)

Trauma is a series of six works depicting different psychological and psycho-physiological disorders that strike soldiers on battlefield and after returning from mission. Monko describes the shell shock – a sickness that World War I veterans were often diagnosed, its symptoms being loss of voice, paralysis, headaches and sleeping disorders. The soldiers who lost their minds in the trenches were considered to be cowards and deserters. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the repeated reliving of war events along with anxiety, helplessness and anger. Sleeplessness, agitation and impulsiveness are added to the list. A large number of different physical symptoms – rash, muscle ache and headache, stomach cramps – form part of the Gulf War syndrome, all of which can spread on to other members of the family.

Monko asks questions which cannot be openly answered neither by the military nor by medical experts: what are the consequences that we are risking when sending soldiers on a mission? How to protect the psyche of the soldiers and their families? How to facilitate soldiers’ return to civilian life? How to defend the country from a foreign assault as well as from the soldiers returning from mission?

Text by Anneli Porri

series of 6 photos 73 x 85 cm (c-prints in frame)

An impulse for making this series came from Lacan’s notion that communication is a failure – if people understood each other perfectly they wouldn’t need any words. On the other hand, verbalization has been one of the fundamental issues of psychoanalysis. As put by the Joseph Breuer’s patient Anna O. – the talking cure.

In his theory of four discourses Lacan introduces communication schemas from which in my opinion the most interesting appears to be the Hysterics discourse. In this case, Hysteric is not necessarily a pathological subject but someone who’ s challenging the Knowledge (Lacan himself could be understood as a hysteric as well). Knowledge, language and symbolic order therefore is represented by the Master. The relationship between Hysterics and Master can just as well be interpreted as a relationship between child and parent, student and professor, citizen and police etc. Hysteric turns to the Master asking: “Tell me who I am, tell me what I desire.”

This work is a small study of my childhood relationship through the perspective of Hysterics – Master schema. There are portraits of my mother and both grandmothers as well as images that comment on different key concepts of psychoanalysis.

The project Studies of bourgeoisie deals with neurosis of the 19th century – hysteria and it´s residual effect on contemporary image of woman.

According to family model of bourgeoisie, gender roles forced upon male and female differed a lot. Hysteria was diagnosed primarly by female patients and was most likely caused by a conflict between their role and the reality.

Most famous researchers of hysteria in Europe were Jean Martin Charcot and of course, Sigmund Freud.

Charcot captured and distributed a large number of images of women suffering from hysterical attack in Hospital of Salpêtrière, Paris. Those images were later admired by surrealists who adopted the concept of convulsive and mysterios female.

Freud is known as a creator of the psychoanalytical method. Both doctors practised – though with different purpose – hypnosis.

As psychoanalysis and hypnosis are part of the contemporary forms of therapy, so stays the concept of woman ceased by hysteria and its images in the end of the 19th century, still persistent.