GOOD FEELINGS EVERY DAY (2020–ongoing)

GOOD FEELINGS EVERY DAY is an ongoing series of 35mm analogue color and black-and-white photographs. The title comes from a sign I noticed in early 2020 on the wall of a karaoke bar in central Helsinki. I photographed it during the first months of the pandemic, and the phrase—equal parts hopeful and absurd—became a kind of mantra, a reminder of how fragile and constructed our sense of “goodness” can be.

At first glance, family photographs—both mine and the ones found in many homes—tend to present a curated happiness. Looking back at my own childhood albums, the images suggest a warm, healthy, joyful upbringing. The reality was very different: a childhood shaped by alcoholism, sexual and physical abuse, and the weight of intergenerational trauma. The gap between the documentation and the truth is vast, and it is precisely this gap that the project confronts.

GOOD FEELINGS EVERY DAY offers an intimate, unfiltered view into the daily life of a foreign family living in Finland. The photographs capture tenderness, exhaustion, small joys, disappointments, domestic rituals, and the quiet absurdities of raising a child far from one’s place of origin. They resist the pressure—reinforced by social media and cultural mythologies—to present a sanitized, endlessly optimistic version of life.

For me, Finland is the first place where I have come to understand not only what a home is, but what it feels like. The work is less about the geography and more about the ongoing process of healing, choosing honesty over performance, and building new emotional lineages.

Rather than promising constant positivity, the series acknowledges that life is inconsistent: grief, anxiety, and uncertainty coexist with moments of joy. GOOD FEELINGS EVERY DAY becomes a visual narrative grounded in truthfulness, shaped by humor, and committed to breaking the cycles that once defined my family history.