Interactive

Bohomazov in Finland for "Local History"

An interactive storytelling map reconstructing the 1911 Finnish journey of Ukrainian Avant-Garde artist Oleksandr Bohomazov, locating the works of his "Finnish series" in the places where they were painted.

The sound of the journey

The page carries a background track — a Finnish folk runo-song of the kind Bohomazov may well have heard on his travels. It invokes Väinämöinen, the central figure of the national epic Kalevala compiled by Elias Lönnrot: an old and wise man possessed of a potent, magical singing voice.

Runo-song performed by Kiila, from “Minor Musics Finland” (Free Music Archive).

The 1911 route through Finland, with the works of the “Finnish series” located where they were painted.

“Богомазов у Фінляндії” — storytelling map

An interactive storytelling map reconstructing the 1911 Finnish journey of Ukrainian Avant-Garde artist Oleksandr Bohomazov, locating the works of his “Finnish series” in the places where they were painted.

Bohomazov (1880–1930) — painter, educator, and Cubo-Futurist theoretician — left Ukraine only three times, and his travels through Finland were his sole journey abroad. The map accompanies Nataliya Teramae’s study Oleksandr Bohomazov. A Century Later, which reconstructs the trip from the artist’s Finnish correspondence, his “Finnish series,” and interviews with local curators and historians, identifying for the first time the specific locations behind the paintings.

The cartography carries that research into space and time. Fourteen map positions structure the narrative, each resolving a stage of the journey against the administrative-territorial division and historical place names of 1911 — a reconstruction complicated by a Finnish geography that had shifted substantially over the intervening century. Period boundaries and settlement data were drawn from census and imperial-administration GIS datasets, terrain from Finnish LiDAR models, with contemporary base geometry from OpenStreetMap.

Color shema

The visual language is derived from Bohomazov himself: the palette was built from index colours sampled directly from his works with ImageMagick, extending the artist’s own chromatic register across the map surface. Two three-dimensional models — the Ramona steamboat and Olavinlinna (Olaf’s Castle) — were prepared in Blender to anchor key moments of the route. A custom coordinate tool, reporting map centre and zoom, allowed each position to be tuned separately for desktop and mobile.

Designed and implemented for the multimedia platform Local History, in Ukrainian.

Cartography and design: Fedir Gontsa. Research and text: Nataliya Teramae. Idea and coordination: Alina Broda, Vitaliy Lyaska, Nataliya Teramae. Collage: Galina Andrushkevich-Ardan. Literary editing: Anna-Maria Volosatska. Supported by the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, 2021.

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