Härmä / Hoar

My grandmother lived to be 94 years old (1925–2019). She wished to spend the last years of her life alone in her home in Ylihärmä, South Ostrobothnia, Finland, kilometres away from the nearest town.

She had early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, which is why she occasionally imagined that strangers visited the yard or the basement. A motion-sensing surveillance camera was installed to ensure intruders would be detected. Eventually, the camera ended up monitoring my grandmother instead.

The surveillance camera images form the material for this series. In them, my grandmother does repetitive yard work in the twilight of her life until she no longer appears in the pictures. The yard, however, is not emptied, but life after human presence continues.

I received the images from my father after my grandmother had already passed away. There are over ten thousand images, and I’ve selected the ones that best tell her story. The sequences highlight the rituals of her everyday life. Sometimes, the automatic camera accidentally creates otherworldly colours, and one day, my grandmother suddenly turns into a bird.

The series depicts surveillance as care. A tricky balance between care and control exists in the private setting of surveillance. The motion-sensing camera was a way to make sure my grandmother, who lived alone, was safe. On the other hand, it was probably also a way for my parents to feel a bit more in control of something that was out of their control, which was the illness my grandmother had.

Utu-Tuuli Jussila (1985) (they/them) lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. They graduated with an MA degree in photography from Aalto University in 2020 and an MA degree in gender studies from the University of Helsinki in 2021. Since graduating, they’ve held several solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions in Finland and abroad. They exhibited at the Festival Circulation(s) 2024 and PhMuseum Days ’24 and were selected as a finalist at the Kranj Foto Fest 2026.