Maija Blåfield’s award-winning The Fantastic on display at the Touch exhibition

The Fantastic is a work on the relationship between imagination and reality. In the short film, North Koreans describe how they imagined the rest of the world, based on Western films smuggled into the country. Maija Blåfield’s work combines documentary footage with visual effects in an impressive way, forcing the viewer to question what is reality and what is illusion. At the same time, The Fantastic overthrows the setup of Westerners peeping at life within a closed state.  

“Maija Blåfield’s film is a take on how the human perception of reality is shaped. It explores how especially art and culture, film in this case, take part in the creation of worldviews and alter them. It also sheds light on the thin line between reality, interpretation and illusion,” says Laura Eweis, curator of the series. 

Maija Blåfield (b. 1973) is an award-winning contemporary artist and film director from Helsinki. Her works often address the ambiguity of experiencing reality. The Fantastic has been awarded at several festivals and was also nominated for the 2020 Jussi Award for Best Short Film. 

The Fantastic is the third and final part of a series of media works included in the Listening to Silence section of Saastamoinen Foundation’s Touch collection exhibition. The works of the section explore the different dimensions of humans’ inner world, including past events, traumas and ways of processing them. The series of media works has been curated from works of the Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection dealing with the human effects of war on individuals, communities and culture during different eras and across the world.