HD video, 17min; 2021
The Girl in Green is an essayistic moving-image work built around the afterlife of journalistic images and the unstable value of what societies keep, circulate, and discard. The film begins and ends with verbal descriptions of absent photographs: one taken by photojournalist Massoud Hossaini after a terrorist attack in Kabul, the other published in a Finnish newspaper.
Between these two images, the film moves through fragments of interiors, public spaces, waste materials, and mediated memory. The visual track builds relations between images from different places and situations, while the voice-over follows questions of home, disposability, and social value.
The work draws on research by sociologists Lena Näre and Elina Paju on asylum seekers’ homes and the use of discarded furniture and materials in reception-center housing. In the film, this research context becomes part of a broader reflection on how people, objects, and images are valued differently depending on where they appear and who is allowed to belong.
The Girl in Green works through essayistic montage and absent images. Meaning is built through description, displacement, and the unstable relation between what is seen, remembered, and withheld.
