One Saturday I found myself walking away from the spring sunlight into a dark maze of living pictures. Room after room offered stories displayed on all walls, voices spiraling down from the ceiling. Fishermen fighting the waves at sea, a woman mourning the loss of her dog, and Death paying a breakfast visit.

So many random thoughts swam in the air, intertwined by voices and moving impressions of our beautiful ruthless wonderful world.

Suddenly I stood in front of a most magnificent spruce growing sideways in the dark, its branches whooshing in the wind. How strange to think of all little lives gone by during the lifetime of a single tree. Which is larger than life, then; our sorrows and loves or the sole existence of an ancient tree?

And I walked back into the sunlight feeling very small.

(Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s collected film works at Kiasma museum of contemporary art; Helsinki, Finland, April 2013)