W A S T E
2016-present
Jan Ijäs
It all started with the vignettes. I was collecting these short stories long before I found the title, actually. And the title wasn’t really my idea originally. A friend of mine, with whom I was working on another film, gave me the idea. Every week we would have a coffee together, and I would tell her the new stories that I had found. She suggested that I turn them into films, and suggested Waste as an umbrella title for them all. And in fact, you can really fit all of these vignettes under this one title. So, I thought about her suggestion for about five seconds, and then I decided to use it. It has been a long journey since. I’ve been working on this series for perhaps too many years.
All that you see and hear is one-hundred-percent true. But it’s the truth as I remember it.
In the case of Lampedusa, the topic of migration was very popular at the time we were filming. The island was full of reporters and news crews in search of the same images. They were looking for boats filled with poor refugees—the same images that you have seen everywhere, in every documentary or news report about the African immigrants landing in Italy at the time. I felt that we had to find another angle for the story. We decided to film only the touristic sites of the island, and to do it from such a faraway distance that you could not recognize any human faces.
Throughout the series, I use the same images for different stories. What I filmed in Lampedusa, for example, was reused in a different story in another episode of the series where I speak about the Raft of the Medusa. It seems like I’m telling the same story, yet it’s different. The images of the sunken ships in Wreck, shot in Lampedusa, told the story of contemporary African refugees that landed in Europe. When I reused the same shipwrecked images in Raft of the Medusa, I told the story of Europeans on their way to the African continent to colonize it. The stories and the images cross over.
About The Artist
Jan Ijäs is a media artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. He studied documentary film directing at University of Art and Design Helsinki, and creative writing and art education at Jyväskylä University. Ijäs works with documentary, fiction and experimental film. His films deal with serious and difficult social themes, like migration into foreign and hostile societies. Ijäs’s films have been shown widely in film festivals and as installations in museums and galleries. He has won numerous awards, including Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition Jury Award in 2012; the Finnish Risto Jarva Prize in 2011; Amnesty International Award at the IndieLisboa Film Festival in Portugal 2018 and many more.
The text above is excerpted from Eneos Çarka’s interview with Jan Ijäs. The full interview transcript can be read in Spectator vol. 42, no. 2 (Fall 2022).
Images in order of appearance:
Explosion from Waste No. 3 - Boom
Shipwreck from Waste No. 2 - Wreck
Hart Island from Waste No. 4 - New York, New York
Miner from Waste No. 6 - How Great
Cars from Waste No. 5- Raft of the Medusa
Woman from Waste No. 1 - Money
Raft from Waste No. 2 - Wreck
All images from Waste copyright Jan Ijäs
”Waste” audio copyright Philip Meyer, 2022
Web design by Taylor Crawford