InCollection | Antti Laitinen: Chiming Forest

Antti Laitinen (b. 1975) is an artist based in Somero, Finland, who makes art from materials drawn from his immediate surroundings. In recent years, he has focused on transforming, dismantling and reassembling trees and forest landscapes in his work.

Chiming Forest (2025) is a kinetic installation – an artwork involving movement – that invites us to consider humanity’s capacity and means to shape the natural world. The work is constructed from wood sourced throughout southern Finland, including brushwood left behind in logged areas and root systems of trees felled by wind. These fragments of trees are reassembled into new, hybrid forms and arranged into a forest-like composition – an artificial landscape animated by mechanically produced motion and sound.

Natural environments often serve as a starting point for Laitinen’s practice, supplying him with both materials and ideas. Yet, as he notes himself, nature is not necessarily the subject of his work. In addition to installations, he also explores his themes through video and photography.

In some of his earlier projects, Laitinen has examined the repetitiveness of physical labour and human impact on the environment. He has, for instance, dismantled an entire tree in an attempt to put it back together, or tried to move a lake using only buckets. Laitinen describes his works as physical experiments, in which the process takes precedence over the outcome.

Antti Laitinen: Chiming Forest forms part of the InCollection exhibition series by EMMA and Saastamoinen Foundation. Each year, a work by a visionary contemporary artist is commissioned for the series. Laitinen is the eighth artist to be featured.