On siblinghood
Text: Antti Nylén
English translation: Jean Ramsay
Whoever it was who came up with the three key concepts of the French Revolution was wiser than you’d think. Freedom and equality are obvious, important things. Anyone can understand this. We all are in favor of freedom and, at least in principle, agree on the fact that the person standing next to us is worth as much as we are, and equally deserving just because we are of the same species.
Fraternity is the odd one out of the three. In Finnish, the litany is always recited so as that it comes in the middle, like a punctuation mark or a side note, while in French (and subsequently in English) it comes last, and leaves a strange aftertaste: fraternité… What kind of brotherhood are we talking about?
It seems to require more than eager nodding from our part.
Fraternity – or siblinghood, if we want to translate the word into non-patriarchal language – introduces a touch of carnal reality to the realm of ethical ideals. It introduces contradictions.
It is precisely contradictions that give meaning to things. They make everything uncomfortable.
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In her work over the last decade, Nelli Palomäki has focused on this quite common and familiar phenomenon of life, which nevertheless raises a strange uneasiness.
Siblings are people who’ve irrevocably been born into the same situation. And since the situation is the same, it follows that the requirements of equality and justice are an inherent part of being siblings. Thus siblings can demand the same – after all, Fate has granted them sameness!
However, siblings rarely get the same. They only get a part. They have to share. They are forced into solidarity.
And solidarity is not simple, but paradoxical: you have to defend those who are different to you, because they are similar to you!
Moreover, the situations into which people are thrown as newborns are diverse, and each of them sets its own demands for solidarity. An individual’s belonging to something is usually understood to expand circle by circle: family and home, nation, society, ultimately the human species and the entire universe… Seemingly, it was the outermost circles of siblinghood – social and cosmic – that were referred to with the Revolutionary phrase “fraternity”.
Palomäki, on the other hand, usually focuses on the innermost circle of siblinghood, biological closeness, young people whose origin is in the same flesh. The importance and haunting permanence of this bloody source is emphasized by the fact that we see no more than a glimpse or an inkling of the parents. Yet they are unspoken, inevitably and unrelentingly present. But probably precisely because the rest of the family has been removed from the picture and the siblings are alone, the questions become existential.
“For God’s sake! Where do we come from and why?”
That’s what the children who look from the pictures ask. Nobody answers.
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Siblinghood is fated, i.e. inescapable, thus also human, and typical to our species (although we do share this experience with a variety of other mammals). Thrown into this world fragile and unfinished, human offspring are by nature in need of long-term care and security, i.e. what we have agreed to call ‘a family’.
Family is just as mysterious a concept as being a sibling. It is a haven for the most dreadful angels and loving demons.
Anyone who’s had more than one child can ponder in astonishment on how siblings can be so different, even if they’ve been raised according to the same principles and under the same conditions… Does upbringing not have an effect? Do circumstances dictate everything? Does the good will of the parents mean nothing? Well, certainly we have to accept that people have congenital, and thus fated features. But in addition to this, the hierarchical positions of siblings within the family are different. One comes into the world later than the first. In addition to a common fate, each has their own. The resulting diversity is as indisputable as the sameness that defines siblings.
Being a sibling is not clean or ideal. It is not necessarily deep or warm, nor even particularly binding. It is not necessarily anything. It is arbitrary. Also, the “unique” ties between siblings are perhaps a myth wrought by fiction: Cain and Abel, Hansel and Gretel, The Brothers Karamazov, Little Women or Cocteau’s Elisabeth and Paul in Les Enfants Terribles…
True siblinghood often constitutes only a few shared memories from past decades. Quite typically not even that.
This, too, seems to be taken into account in Nelli Palomäki’s photographs, which present people she rarely knows outside of these film frames. The pictures have only been dramatized in the slightest detail. Perhaps there is no great story, no intense love/hate relationship worth mentioning? Maybe there is nothing but an interpersonal relationship born out of chance, or a twist of fate – and this alone has been recorded in the image, as if in accordance with the instructions of filmmaker Robert Bresson: “No psychology (at least the kind that discovers only what it is able to explain).”
The fact that all people have a mother is shocking enough.
But the fact that my siblings have the same mother as me seems downright counterintuitive, a bizarre cosmic mistake.
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There is something exigent in Palomäki’s portraits. I can’t think of a better word for it. Hands are clenched into fists. The situation is loaded, but never unravels. The works don’t say much, but they mean every word they say.
This feature tempts hurried explanations, and the use of words like ‘fairytale’, ‘mythical’ or ‘nostalgia’. Nowadays, the absence of signs of contemporary life and the austere aesthetics of black & white are usually read to connect with the past, even though they could just as well refer to the future. Why should this be interpreted as escapism? After all, it could also signify focusing on what is most important. Without a doubt, a “timeless” appearance diverts precise social observations, but also stands in the way of cheap psychological assumptions. The roles have been stripped.
The solemn and the serious is what we are dealing with. Solemnity does not exclude humor. Even the humor in Palomäki’s photographs is serious.
Something is hidden (but in such a way that it can be discovered). The seriousness of the young sitters conceals a swarming plethora of devilish thought and angular emotion.
Isn’t the act of confronting life’s absurdity and contradictions – its whole laughable dreadfulness! – with a straight face a kind of heroism? The victory of irony over something that by default is invincible, something that we have no power over, namely: fate?
There is also the issue of dependency. Referring to that, Palomäki’s sitters often touch each other – some maybe do it naturally, some when directed to do so.
Fraternity, or siblinghood, exposes the limits of freedom, and reveals who equality must be shared with.
We all have the same worth and the same rights, but always in relation to someone else, someone who preceded us and surrounds us. With this in mind, Palomäki’s patient work with siblings also carries within it a very subtle ecological undertone: life, in its fated and confusing form, cannot be manipulated. It is what it is. Like it or not, we’re stuck with each other.
