So I thought about writing some post-thoughts about our trip with Maisa. She’s been with me in Denmark for little over a month now. Maisa is thriving by the window and growing very big and very green leaves – so perhaps putting a house plant under pressure for a bit can actually freshen them up and make them grow even stronger.
So, a few expectations and how everything turned out in the end.
Stepping into uncomfortable.
My background is being a visual artist – painting, photographing and working with textile. So doing a performatic art work felt quite overwhelming and uncomfortable in the beginning. Carrying a visible, odd feature with me and having constant conversation about it with people I met felt exhausting at certain points.
My trip started from Pasila, Finland when I took a train with all my belongings to Turku to get a ferry to Åland, the island between Finland and Sweden. There was another cyclist on the train who saw Maisa in the bottle holder of my bike and said immediately “Oh, so you even brought your own house plant with you!”. I realised quite soon how unusual it looked having a house plant with me everywhere I went. Especially on the cruise ship – carrying Maisa with me made everything more prominent about the odd culture of cruises, these closed party boats where people get wasted in the middle of the sea. But as soon as I put Maisa on a table of a restaurant, she became invisible. She was back to her usual role as a decoration so people around me didn’t really question it.
Frustrating flatmate.
We bicycled in Åland for five days with a friend of mine and after arriving to Stockholm, I was on my own. Kind of – I mean Maisa was still there with me. I expected that she would bring me comfort during loneliness of my solo trip, but she just ended up being like a frustrating roommate. Whenever I had to move my bicycle from transport to another or up the stairs in Copenhagen to my friend’s flat in the third floor, Maisa was always in my way. And I was quite stressed out that I would forget about her, like a child that I was taking care of. I found myself thinking that Maisa wasn’t really a necessity for me during my trip, but she was also just supposed to be my companion instead of something to fulfill my needs. I guess she’s a good example of a nice, quiet company.
I was traveling with a moving home, a tent. So why not also bring my house plant with me? I met people who had the same houseplant in their caravan as a decoration of comfort. They experienced that the van became much more homely when it had some green leaves. Why was I not experiencing the same comfort on a bicycle? The idea of bike packing is usually to pack as light as possible, so the first thought of having a plant with wet soil on a bike seemed irrational. Also, why bring a green plant in a jar to camping outdoors, when you’re already surrounded by green?
On the other hand, we usually focus on minimising weight in equipment and don’t focus on decorating. Perhaps Glamping (camping with luxuries) has become trendy that way, maybe we just have a basic need for decoration in order to feel home. But house plant is an object of interior. First we create a space indoors, closing nature out. Then we realise how cold it is and end up some of the nature back in, but only with a curated.
Loneliness and interaction – how many people is it important to connect with?
When it was just me and Maisa, I felt like I was playing some kind of a play for no audience. The rest of the collective have been creating Flying Gardens in Finland, interacting with people in physical space. I would introduce the project to some people I met on my way but mostly my part of the project is posting on this blog. So I don’t always see the influence of my photos or texts. But one day I was having a conversation with a colleague and suddenly he asked “So how is Maisa doing?” and I realised I had forgotten that people could actually see our journey. Perhaps it’s not really about influencing hundreds of people but just to connect with few and hear their stories with their houseplants. Having Maisa with me made me see environments in a different way, so maybe bringing a house plant is a good idea after all.
