Animated darwing ”Eden”, follows photos taken by a single visitor in Eden Project, a botanical garden in UK. Drawn from images uploaded to Google Earth makes ”Eden” a layered and distanced documentation of an artficial arranged nature seen via digital devices with eyes of unknown tourist. Sketchy drawn images combined with fragmented writing form a virtual visit to a setting which mimics natural environment.

”The lush greenery in the animation Eden entails a reference to the illustrations painted by botanists of the past accompanying explorers on their colonialist travels to wild exotic paradises. The time-consuming and dangerous voyage takes on a different form in the 21st century, with the pandemic restricting access to faraway tropics. Rannikko too followed in the footsteps of an explorer from a less distant past, a visitor that roamed the gardens of the Eden Project in Cornwall, UK, and documented his voyage with his camera phone to the platform of Google Earth. The animation acts as documentation of a documentation, a virtual antithesis of plein air painting documenting a man-made environment to mimic nature. 

 The sketch-like character of the lines and the texts describing the surroundings imply to an act of taking notes, and the fact that the pen strokes happen as we witness them, suggest that we share a temporal existence with the author, in the present moment. Virtual travels are always also travels in time: the imagined natural paradise beneath the domes of the Eden Project freezes an idea of a paradise of its time, and the photos added to Google Earth form yet another layer”

 Excerpt from Aleksandra Oilinki’s essay:  Creating Meaning Through Fragmentation ,On Storytelling Concepts of Vesa-Pekka Rannikko’s Art