Countryside Borderscapes in Finland

This article focuses on a particular kind of fence (riukuaita) that visually fragmented the nineteenth-century rural landscape in Finland and deeply affected everyday mobility in the countryside. Expanding on observations made in a previous article, the first section situates earlier depictions of the Finnish countryside within the broader confrontation between classic and romantic landscape painting and presents the idea of a countryside transformed into a borderscape of sorts. The second section examines the cultural practices within the Alderman institution that sustained and administrated these borders and divisions. The third and final section explores how artists of the so-called Golden Age of Finnish Art depicted these bordescapes, and how it might affect the way we read and experience landscape paintings, especially when considered from the phenomenological perspective of actual and imaginary walking into the depicted scene.