In summer 2016 HAM Corner will showcase Suddenly Last Summer, a video work by Juha Mäki-Jussila from 2013. The title of the piece refers to the eponymous play by Tennessee Williams which is set in a wildly overgrown garden.

In the video, actors are replaced by animated plants who present fragments of dialogue from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1959 Hollywood film based on Williams’s play. Characters glimpsed in the bushes include a surgeon specialising in lobotomies, a rich but mean widow with Sebastian, her debauched poet of a son, as well as a female cousin who has lost her memory.

There is no real plot, the themes of the play blossom forth and wilt away at random.

Suddenly Last Summer is also a documentary about the Finnish summer where everything happens fast, things grow and wilt in a moment. Mäki-Jussila has documented the growth of plants in his garden in Karkkila and in the Åland islands. The video footage consists of extreme closeups made using traditional animation techniques. The visual model of the video are the photographs of plants in Urformen der Kunst by the German photographer Karl Blossenfeldt from 1929. Mäki-Jussila’s work belongs to the collections of HAM.