What significance does the romantic sublime have in a landscape developed for tourism? In 2012, a group of young photographers from Helsinki travelled to Norway’s Lofoten Islands to get to the bottom of this query. The mountainous island region once inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘A Descent into the Maelström’; for the Maanantai Collective, it served as the background for an associative, poetically absurd play with the road trip as a genre, the mountain as a leitmotif, and the horizon as a metaphor for life. The group of works Nine Nameless Mountains emerged through a collective process, and – with its diverse approaches and genres, from traditional analogue photography to video, improvised happenings, drawings, and cell phone photos – also brings the notion of authorship to the fore. In the studio, by discussing and developing their work together, the artists later created a kaleidoscopic portrait of the landscape.¹ This collective mode of working is underscored by the hanging in FOTOFORUM that has removed any definitive attribution from the works: Further I will not venture alone is a manifesto of friendship, photography, and chance.

Text: Nicole Alber

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