Personal War Stories of an Outsider

2004 – 2007

I examine the outsider’s experience of war and photography’s complex relationship to it as a documentary medium.

Personal War Stories of an Outsider constitutes a collage of images through which Silomäki explores his mediated relationship to war. For him, warfare is experienced only at a distance, as he has no direct participation in it. The work thus articulates the sensibility of a generation for whom war appears geographically and experientially remote, yet simultaneously omnipresent through its incessant circulation in the media. In this way, Silomäki underscores how war imposes itself upon contemporary subjectivity, compelling individuals to confront it and to assume a position in relation to it.

Upon closer scrutiny, the central concern of Silomäki’s practice does not lie in violence per se, but in the existential and ethical dilemmas that arise when an individual encounters realities that remain fundamentally opaque or incomprehensible. His work therefore shifts the discourse away from the spectacle of conflict towards the phenomenology of human response and the limits of understanding.

From a formal perspective, the project unfolds in two distinct yet interrelated sequences. In the first, Silomäki photographs the night sky and bullet-scarred walls in war zones, tracing imagined constellations in the perforations left by gunfire. This gesture transforms the residue of violence into a cosmological field, suggesting both fragility and transcendence. In the second sequence, the artist himself appears before the viewer, revealing his face and entering the scene only after the violence has subsided. These images evoke a sense of theatricality, as Silomäki inhabits the settings as though they were cinematic or Hollywood stage sets. This strategy situates the work within the broader discourse of post-documentary practice. While grounded in the evidentiary traces of conflict, the images foreground mediation, staging, and fictionality. Rather than offering transparent testimony, Silomäki interrogates the very conditions under which war can be represented, thereby complicating the viewer’s expectations of photography as a documentary medium.