Volunteering is important to me and one thing I do on my spare time is to volunteer for Seta’s Gender Diversity Committee. For the Trans Day of Visibility (TDOV) in 2021 as part of the Seta’s activities for the day I offered free, digital portraits for those in the gender minorities. I named the project Mä nään sut, which is Finnish for I see you.
I instructed the participants to send me a selfie they’d like me to use as a reference. For some trans people TDOV can be quite stressful as well: many people cannot be visible comfortably or even safely. So it was up to the participants to decide, whether I could publish the portraits and if it would be okay for me to name them as my models. I was very grateful that all of the participants gave me their consent to publish the final portraits, though couple of them wanted to remain anonymous.
In 2022 I reprised the project, offering six portraits to other 6 people. In August of 2022 the digital paintings were displayed in my solo exhibition in Monikkosali, Klaukkala, Finland.
