I’ve got to be honest with you: I took this job for the money. After applying, getting the job, then witnessing and writing about every performance in the NPT Biennale programme, I definitely think there must have been an easier way to earn these 500 euros. But this opportunity happened to appear in front of me and I needed every penny. I saw it as a win-win situation, because I wanted to experience the festival anyway, but it would have cost too much, and I couldn’t have afforded it otherwise. Yes, I thought — yes! I am a fan of performance art, and I would bitch about it anyway, for pleasure.
Oh, you might think we are starting with a rather low bar. Hmmm… Well, this belief that performance art can still be something, that it can still break through some formal boundaries and expectations, goes so far as to make me a neo-peasant, barely earning the means to live and work. I tell myself, wait a minute, this living is not so bad. Is that a low or high bar to clear?
Here, in the paradoxical state of low and high expectations, realities of survival and commitments, all embedded in bodily existences, I find myself face to face with performance art, perfectly suited to absorb it.
Maybe you don’t believe in art or something?
The biennial’s curators seem to believe in it too: Coming Together is the title of the festival. Well, it is a self-fulfilling promise for the festival in the post-Covid era. It will certainly happen, I thought, unless they mean something dirty by “coming together”, which would probably be at the upper end of the expectation scale. That would also not be so easy to achieve, even if we were to proceed to be “entangled” in “performance as encounter, through tension and friction”, in “intersections” of “people, actions, places and communities”, “in dialogue” through “meaningful, critical and playful ways of finding each other”, over six days, amidst “acute political and environmental challenges in focus”[1]. This is the seductive magic of a performance art event programme, all-encompassing but focused, full of falling, bumping, and running into other people in expected and unexpected ways. You can be a cynic or a believer, but either way, once you’re in, there’s really no way out. Besides, you can easily be both: a cynic and a believer at the same time. Here is an example of my inner dialogue:
Believer (disappointed): You said you were a fan of performance art, that it could be something else entirely. OK, fine, but why?
Cynic: Because it is not a genre, it is not even an art form.
Believer (indignant): Not an art form?
Cynic: No.
Believer: But why? Maybe you don’t believe in art or something?
Cynic (surprised that the Believer is not as naive): Exactly, I don’t. Art today is a training programme for the petty bourgeoisie to become a proper middle class, and the speculative market for the middle class to become an upper middle class. The rest is irrelevant as a direct audience. The rest are professional audiences. If they do well, they overlap with the first category. If they don’t, they’re starving artists dressed up in a puffer fish costume, so you can’t tell exactly how much they’re starving. Looking good, looking good.
Believer: Yes, you can flatten everything and turn it into a “political” rant that is not so political at all. Maybe there is some value in art being a symptom, you know, for you to rant about.
Cynic: Sure. Let’s just enjoy it. The state is defunding art institutions and art education, making room for big corporations to look better, to brand themselves as saviours of social and environmental problems, so that we as the audience can be made complicit in the suffering, but immediately made to feel better by understanding it.
Believer: But… you know… in performance art, the artist has to drag their body with them and be there, with their art, as it happens. And you know… all the others, the audience and supporters, “collaborators”, “communities”, “audiences”, you know, because this is such a strange thing, this “art”, and the audience… all the subjects of the art are there. They all drag their bodies consciously or sometimes accidentally, you know… because performance art… you don’t know where it’s going to happen…
Cynic: Exactly, so through this necessity of “coming together” performance art is more than art, OK? more painful.
Believer: Why painful? Can’t it be pleasurable?
Cynic (becoming a believer): Ohh… but it is both. This mixture of living bodies, struggling, consuming each other, and money and artificiality, low bar realities and high bar expectations… believe me, it is painful enough. And yes, you are right, this mixture, under the right circumstances, when they meet, is not to be underestimated. This is the potential of performance art. It can blow your mind, you know… or just blow up! So, in that respect, I think performance has a chance of not being art. It is better. It is an art that is uncontained, spilled out, inconsolable, lived. It’s an urgency to go, to do, to try or to leave. It is an urgency to stand in front of, beside, or behind something in all the complexity of being here and now. It is not an easy urge to become a ‘real work of art’, to hang or lie somewhere, to be owned and to gain value over time, because anyone can do it, by taking part… and so it is what it is. Sometimes something important comes out of this mess, something that needs to happen, and sometimes it does happen… almost by accident, by trying… trying something that is only potentially worth trying. And once it is, it cannot not be. That is why you go to a performance. Because something might happen, and by seeing it you make it happen, and yes, often nothing happens… So you see, happening is a risk.
In his stand-up set on the opening night of the Biennale, Jamie MacDonald said: “I once performed in Singapore and people there told me ‘you’re very brave’, I told them ‘Don’t tell me, please, just now, how brave I am. I don’t want to know in how much risk I am right now’”. Today, here at this festival, we are celebrating. Jamie is a “Canadian-Finnish transgender nuisance” […] who has made a name for himself in the “red-green bubble”, as he says about himself in a biography. He is an opening joker, a “host”. So this is us, the bubble. I locate myself and the festival audience, slightly pinched over a glass of bubbles. Ohh, the politics of recent years have become unbearable for us. So much is getting worse, there’s so little you can do, so much that needs to be done. Sometimes, when it doesn’t feel desperate, it even feels like a cruel joke, so maybe someone needs to work professionally to make it even lighter and much heavier at the same time; so that we, the bubble, can catch up with the sense of reality, to return to the possibility of articulating what is happening. Jamie does this well, his joke spins and seeps into further events, like narrative threads with the thrust of polemical power.
Jamie McDonald. Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa
BECOMING: …
So, we celebrate… The festival starts with Every House Has a Door and Essi Kausalainen’s performance The Fossil Record, part of a larger series called the Carnival of the Animals. This relatively large production, with nine people on stage and three behind the scenes, takes place on the small stage of the Turku City Theatre. It is thoughtfully conceived and carefully executed. It is articulated in fluid gestures by multiple, intergenerational, not-only-white people in performance, by turning philosophical thoughts into speech by objects and bodies animating objects and bodies.
Everything you see and hear, even if clearly articulated, changes. Everything is in movement and in relation to it… and that relationship changes. The flow takes care of it, wind, motion. Walking by becomes stepping, then stamping and dancing until standing, then whirling, and sitting. Then a little bit of swaying. Who does it? A human but a bird. A bird but a handkerchief, a yellow glove, and yellow chairs with two legs directly but two legs indirectly on the floor, six hands and two red cones. There are humans, their bodies, each different, dressed in soft, colourful fabrics. These fabrics are in fragments, dressing only parts of the bodies. Trousers, scarf-somethings, loose sleeves, and an extension. These limbs seem fragmented then, animated, framed, cut out, mending and un-mending those bodies other-wise. I am caught in between this necessary, unavoidable poetry, since what is unfolding is not conceivable, sharable, speakable in any other form. All this is useful and not useful, functional and dysfunctional, and it all flows, moves, changes. The bodies on stage mutate while doing, others follow while watching, listening. The wind becomes a breath, and a breath changes into sound; is it the wind playing? It is not “what is it?” but rather “how is it?” … It is generative, rounded; simple and difficult, where words are disconnected but elevated; pompous but simple; humble and grandiose at the same time.
The Fossil Record. Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa
The list of references for each part suggests that the background story is thick and the result distilled like hard liquor. Perhaps it’s best to shut up and sip. Yes, mmm… It does taste good. Must be an old one. Sip. I also want to say expensive… but I am somewhat worried to see unhappy faces… Sip. Perhaps homemade, experimented with for a long, long time, in a faraway cabin where the water is clean and the air is fresh. Sip. Or in an urban but very well organised space… Sip… I don’t know if you picked up on my sarcasm. I’m sorry, I do feel like a fraud here, pretending to know something that seems almost as if meant for better people, those who can still better themselves and understand those higher skills, for all our sake, for the world; those who have the ability to think better and dive into the meaning of a word, of a being, of a gesture. Someone else leaving the theatre says afterwards: “Jahaa. Semmosta.” An uneasy feeling. What to do? What to do? Maybe play The Fossil Record to the board of Shell Global, the past and the present?
These recycled costumes seem too real and too fake, almost offensive, appropriating something from the fake time they have brought back to life: an ancestral witch awakened one too many times.
For I, Earth by Joanna Rajkowska and co. we travel in a group by bus to the countryside, then we walk and gather around a crack in the ground, a pit, a crevice, a passage between down there, the four-metre-deep ground. Up here, the green surface of a hill with a beautiful view of the bay. We clearly expect the performers to be down there, as we carefully find places to sit around the hole, while receiving the handbill announcing that the performance is “an attempt to give a voice to the earth”. We know from the invitation that it will be a voice filtered through environmental scientists, writers, shamans, botanists, and artists. We read that “if you sit or lie down on the ground, you may feel the vibrations of the earth during the performance”. So, it seems, the earth will not only speak multivocally, but will also move. Bold promise, I think, and then I realise, oh silly me, the Earth is moving already. At some point during the concert, perhaps after the lyrics of the song proclaim: “Humans! You who live on us. And here you are with your smutty little machines” or “The murderer, the murderer”… I hear… Wait a minute, an electric chainsaw somewhere out there in the forest. The logic and the clash of these two ruralities surprises me. Did you mean realities? No, “ruralities”.
As the hole in the ground spills out the shadows of the sounds of earthly life — which I have forgotten, which I have never remembered, and only imagine that someone did, sometime then, in pre-industrial times — I hear the chainsaw singing along. I know this sound better, and even though it could very well be the sound of the “murderer”, it is so clear that this sound is not part of the concert. These two sounds have different rhythms, the chainsaw has a duration of the worker’s or land owner’s hand and the thickness of the wood, it is short. The singing from the pit seems timeless, fluctuating with the rhythm of breathing, the rhythm of a fragile body, rising up and disappearing into the crack. One shatters the illusion of the other. As the drone of the electric bow on a bass reluctantly leaks out, another sound interruption appears with a strong visual, the motorboat slicing the surface of the bay. You might think again: “This is clearly not part of this work of art”, and it is not, but the reality of the sound waves is such that they are indivisible. We, the art-fun crowd doing “our” thing in this PRIVATE forest, and those who own their pricey cottages in the breathtaking Turku countryside, are now connected in this concert.
“We” are sitting in the interdisciplinary pit-crossing, where the ancient and contemporary ruralities emerge thanks to the international songs of multilingual articulations. The Cottage Country, with its jetties, woods, and no fields at all, tolerates us temporarily. The landscape of leisure and the work of art asks us: Stop, rest. And this landscape, at times as empty as that of Jamie’s opening joke, “a wet dream of a fascist art form, a landscape without people”, now contaminated by “us”, is framed not by the golden frame but by the weeping song. We came only for this cry, for this prayer of dying, of cutting the ground, of becoming soil, of becoming earth. We only visit, carefully gathered around the pit. There are warnings from the organisers: DO NOT COME TOO CLOSE TO THE PIT, lest the performance become too literal. Don’t make it about you, don’t fall into the pit and die, it’s about the Earth, and even if she asks you to become Earth, become me, don’t do it just yet. The cynic in my head begs: not together with the damned motorboat owners. No need, we are just imagining a possibility while postponing the actual event and all the decisions involved until later.
I, Earth. Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa
The spell is broken when the artists emerge from the pit, dressed in fur hats and somewhat anachronistic clothes. The creative force is just too strong at the moment, I am both grateful and laughing at the appearance of the fake shamans. The same props will not look funny at all in the installation of the same piece in Taiteen Talo’s gallery, hanging alongside well-recorded, beautifully audible singing voices. Here, appearing in the empty landscape, rising from the crevice between ruralities, these recycled costumes seem too real and too fake, almost offensive, appropriating something from the fake time they have brought back to life: an ancestral witch awakened one too many times; undead, not living, not resting, not able to cast a spell.
DOING
In the same enjoyable social bubble, I return to the city by bus, to step into almost similar content in almost exactly opposite conditions. In the middle of the city, among the dead branches collected from the compost pile of the botanical garden, Gustav Brom is performing Untitled (world of becomings). The objects of the installation are made of sticks, old pictures, old suitcases, bones, contact microphones, and some partial musical instruments. Gustav is dressed in a peculiar costume, a denim work suit the origin of which I cannot quite identify; he is lying on the floor, his head resting. Black leather shoes are on the pillow. It is a bit cold here too. A body seems to be waiting for burial. This aesthetic posture and a small white model of a house hanging from the ceiling give the installed landscape a puritan thought-root. From now on, the performer keeps reorganising the landscape, dismantling, assembling, reassembling, taping branches together, putting shoes on a pillow, lifting a suit over his head, posing for a moment as a headless body with shoes in each hand. These are not functional doings, but doings nonetheless, approached, performed and left behind without unnecessary manner, without prolonged duration, without additional emphasis.
“[In] the classic understanding of the medium, performance art is the act of doing. It is not representing, not recounting, not re-enacting, but simply doing. It is live and it is real. It is direct action.”– says Marylin Arsem, quoted by Pilvi Porkola in Performance Artist’s Workbook, 2017
I’ve heard that Gustav has asked for four beers, and he has some food for the duration of the forty hours of uninterrupted doing. It’s nice to know that the plate of grey clay on the table won’t be his only meal, and that there’s no fasting ritual in the background. The audience is moving, walking, watching, doing their things at a pace similar to Gustav’s. The looping sound, the objects and the words spoken, provide a rhythm to the bodies in the room. But there is someone else here… Gustav’s body double, passing through the video image. An identical man with a small house instead of his head, the only animated body in an otherwise perfectly still image of nature. This video image is beautifully textured by being projected into the lining of an old suitcase, becoming an uncanny and painting-like representation outside of time, partially mobile and contained. With this double identification comes the ambiguity of “just doing”, the ambiguity of casual, comforting everyday activities. A man, a white man, and his shadow go about their business. The story unfolds in parts.
Untitled (world of becomings). Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa
The next morning, I enter Untitled again, the air feels crisp, time has slowed down, it is heavy here. Gustav’s face is completely covered in clay, as in an undone human doll. He seems smaller. He says hello. I can find one living eye underneath. He speaks casually, and all this is quite thrillingly shocking as an encounter. He says he needs coffee and goes into the tiny provisional kitchen behind the closed door. I leave the man to have a coffee break in carrying the story that is still, feeling like an intruder. I walk through the dead installation and wonder if it is a man who animates the setting of this invented world, or if they are both “playing dead” and life simply continues elsewhere; not here, underneath, in the cupboard, outside. The next time I see Gustav he is right in the middle of the road. Cars are coming towards him as he marches on without changing his rhythm, somewhat unreal, peaceful, steady. It is as if the traffic and Gustav are in different time layers, as if he is peeling off from this reality. I hear an anecdote about the group of students who passed by the installation and were not sure if Gustav was alive. They thought Gustav was an automated set, a robot.
AFTER DOING
On my way to the Score’s Party by Ana Matey and Isabel León, I hear someone ask in disbelief: “Onkse siis ilmainen?” meaning “So, is it free?” It is indeed free, as are all the events in the Biennale programme. Isn’t that amazing? Every day, Isabel and Ana invite the public to read and perform the scores. For one hour each day, the two of them will perform the collection of scores themselves. What is a score? A score is a form of generative text that can lead to action yet is already activating in its very form of notation. As a post-Fluxus legacy of performance art, score is also a radical distribution of that art form, doable for anybody, available to everyone. Ana and Isabel take on the roles of creators, performers, archivists, and together as an archive and maintenance agency. The Score’s Party is a form of doing as remembering other writer-performers, carrying on their work through one’s own, an act of remembering as well as rethinking how something is done, how it emerges in time, in context, collectively.
The Score’s Party. Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa
BREAK
I went to visit my mum in hospital last week. It was difficult because we both know she won’t last long. We talk, but eventually everything is said. So you can be and do things, wash face, change socks, massage feet, make a compote, a salad, hold hands, read a book or a newspaper. It is the language that both of us understand.
MORE DOING – DOING MORE
I find a different or perhaps familiar perspective on doing in Dear BioDaddy, by Stefania Ólafsdóttir. The performance is a story told by a TechnoChild born via ART (Assisted Reproductive Technologies), the story of re-constructing and relating to one’s own becoming. The story is told around and with the twelve-metre long Kirkkovene (church boat), a Finnish boat that used to carry relatives and others across the water from the islands to the church. By tracing connections between familial, technological, and social webs of relationships, Stefania cuts through the layers of the biopolitical landscape of Scandinavia. It is a strange mapping performance, informative, imaginative, verbose, yet deeply material as it unfolds the very corporeal matter of a body speaking from the stage, as Stefania. Always coming back to one’s own corporeality, always grounded in a personal yet political question with a twist of hilarious humour, the stories branch out to different places in time and space, only to return to be grounded again in doing, in gestures, metaphorical, symbolic, literal doing into the body on stage, telling one’s own story.
Stefania Ólafsdóttir. Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa
Through Stefania’s biotechnological family history — from technoMommy to technoDaddy, through scientific facts, corporate branding, a racial scientific dream of her predecessors, early sexist practices of fertilisation — we are led through a deconstruction of the ideal of the family in its psychological, social, and religious representations and expectations. These modalities of finding and losing a sense of belonging are laboriously gestured through the performer’s making of connections between flows, fluxes. These are flows of menstrual blood, water, people rowing a church boat through the sea. The church boat, the symbolic wooden vagina, a large prop in the middle of the stage, takes on water. This boat, which needs to move a village, provides the possible space for all the technoKin involved in the story of Becoming, everyBody and anyBody.
CARRYING THROUGH
If only “we” could row this boat down the river to the harbour where the sea opens, pass the Suomen Joutsen, and end up next to the ferry, which crosses an invisible border while travellers sing karaoke. Those who make it on board enjoy, suffer, or sleep through the collective crossing of Baltic waters. This boat departs from a place known as the terminal.
a terminal. Photo: Tero Nauha
Is a body of water a place where life begins, a place where life happens, a place between lives, or a place for a slow end? How can it be all at once?
There are two works in the programme of the Biennale taking place in the terminals of Turku Harbour. The first of them, a performance lecture by Anastasia Khodyreva and Saskia Suominen called “terminal socialities” happens at the Viking Line terminal. The second, “Future past in Linnaniemi” by Suvi Tuominen, takes places in an unused part of the Silja Line harbour, nearby. The first deals with the “non-placeness” of the terminal, with its machine-like disconnective organisational properties, which orders those who pass through and conceal those who service it. The second lecture revolves around the production of temporal narratives related to the plans for “The Museum of History and the Future”, which is to be built and opened in Turku’s harbour area in 2030.
The work “terminal socialities” is a form of narrated tour through a vintage, once festive, now somewhat cold and ghostly site. It is a passage; in and out, in and out of the vessel, in and out of the country. It is a waiting room, to pass time before the departure and to collect oneself on the verge of arrival. The performance is the perspective of an ex-ferry cleaner, now researcher and their friend embarking on the trip. This construction of the author of the piece, “the ex-cleaner, the researcher and their friend” is already a creative conundrum. Climbing the social ladder seems to require leaving past identities behind, as it would be impossible to carry multiple class positions within. Anastasia and Saskia undo this form of social amnesia by insisting on class queerness. A companion might indeed be needed in such an endeavour. A comrade, one who shares the room or a cabin, a friend. “We” the audience are following those two, tuning into a conversation through a swarm of walkie-talkies. We maintain what seems to be a necessary but inexplicable distance, a separation. The conversation between the two seeps in through the distraction of noise. The narrative spills out in a quiet brokenness, almost erotic, intimate, close but not comforting. We fill in the gaps, following a printout of this dialogue, carefully made, reassuring us that all these fleeting words have been said, more moulded with a sense of purpose. The purpose for which “we” must also be here. “We” are here to recognise the urobilin yellow as a shade of the Baltic Sea, the colour of unflushed urine waiting for the cleaner (unseen); to imagine a uniform of the same colour blending into the body of a yellow Turku bus going uptown.
We “co-readers, co-walkers, co-listeners” become a mimicking swarm, not mere passengers.
We “co-readers, co-walkers, co-listeners” become a mimicking swarm, not mere passengers, some of whom are already here, waiting to leave for Stockholm; but like passengers, “we” are also passing by. We are not guards, but we are watching. We are not staff and we are not outsourced services, but we are figuring out the flows of tasks, invisibility, and surveillance. What is allowed is easily normalised here. What is not, simply does not exist. You can feel the rules, they are thick, much stricter than even those on the street that Gustav has crossed in an odd way. Doing is not self-evident here, and this fact is not amusing. Weirdly, art finds its place easily here, in the terminal.
terminal socialities. Photo: Jesper Dolgov
The next day I hear that the boat didn’t leave that evening, the people who were waiting never left. Technical problems. The terminal only served an artificial purpose that evening.
Another day, I am back at the harbour. This time I enter a corridor built in the 1980s, no longer in use, that used to lead passengers directly to the deck of a boat. The performance takes place in this bygone utility, transparent, narrow and long, accentuated by a bright blue carpet that ends abruptly and leads nowhere. Paradoxically, it feels even more detached from its surroundings because of its perfect transparency and the possibility of observing everything, everywhere at once. We are here to think about the Future past in Linnaniemi, about the plans for the Museum of History and the Future that will be here in 2030. I find it somewhat impossible to understand the concept of this future exposition of the history of the future. Maybe because the performance seems to play on that difficulty, bending the logic of temporal dependencies. It seems to question whether we can imagine the future based on the past and understand the past based on the present. In the transparent tunnel, the performance makes time move back and forth as the performer moves back and forth in repetition in a slightly different version of now. In this way the future is stopped, postponed, too easily present, already over, and the past is too contemporary, too much bound to the future. All is speculative here, the tools to understand time seem to melt down in this hot metal and glass tube. I think about many outdated science fictions, not turning out anywhere near what was imagined, and suddenly get excited about this coming institution (for Speculative Fabulation of Some Facts of Seldom Future).
In short Tik Tok videos, on the backdrop of the visualisation of the future Turku harbour, where the castle always takes the main spot and looks very, very clean and tidy and exactly the same as right now, future Suvi asks visitors of the museum, which is their favourite toilet around here.
There is one more work dealing with passing the body of the sea. It is Mark Pozlep’s Live Load, made in collaboration with the Time for Live Art programme, a residency that supports the artist’s slow travels. Mark’s conceptual piece is a metal container with traces of his 59-hour practice of staying locked inside it, and his story of that practice told. Slow travel, right? OK then, I will ship myself to Finland like a log of wood — starts Mark with something like this as his initial idea. No shipping company will agree to ship him, so he settles for a shorter journey on the Finnlady ferry and more than two and a half days lock-up in the lended container stationed at Varvintori square. In the same location, sometime later, Mark tells the story of being hot in the sun, cold at night, warming himself with a gas bottle, staying in the dark, seeing everything in grey, listening, trying to make sense of sounds. Sounds of machines — workers at work? Laughter — maybe from the bar? Then banging and screaming in the middle of the night: Who is in there? Mark conceptualises the container: it is the empty space, of a standardised size, that runs the entire project of globalisation. There are 15,000 of them on the ship, stacked in thick piles with many layers: left, right, bottom, top. Each container travels with all and only the information contained in an A4 piece of paper called a House of Bills, which is placed on the door. Mark explains that he doesn’t want to appropriate the stories of the immigrants who take refuge in such containers, but tells us about cases of people being shipped illegally, the stories of not getting out. I wonder if they’d care what he or the rest of us think or feel? It is only “we”, the bubble, who are touched or offended by an imagined relationship with the migrant bodies in the container.
Live Load. Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa
Saturday night ends with Moe Mustafa’s Turbulence, the sound installation and live performance that turns the metal oil barrels into a resonant body between which we can lie down and absorb the low vibrations of a continuous drone-like sound, unsettling rest, a somewhat hospitable and pleasurable form of overwhelming waves to which one gives in. No story: barrels and waves thicken into a layer of movement, virtual and material touch, multiple presence and absence.
Turbulence. Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa
Following the Aura river, the urobilin yellow of the Baltic Sea becomes thicker and thicker. The body of the water takes two iterations in Sajan Mani’s Stilt Roots to Postpone the End of the World. In the gallery of the Art House, the earlier iteration of the work can be seen: a video of people moving in the water along a labyrinth of mangrove plants in Kerala, India, in a form of remembrance of the work of environmental activist Kallen Pokudan. The local version we encounter is performed by Sajan in collaboration with Turku divers near Tuomiokirkkosilta bridge.
Stilt Roots to Postpone the End of The World. Photos: Jussi Virkkumaa
After Sajan’s act of painting a picture on the riverbank with fruit and mud, they dive together to look for objects that have fallen into the riverbed. Dressed in deep-sea diving suits and equipped with oxygen bottles, the visiting performer and Turku city workers disappear under the surface of the muddy water to emerge from time to time, with or without a find. After the performance, a long line of muddy scouters is fished out.
What can artwork do? Erika Fischer-Lichte, in her introduction to The Transformative Power of Performance, gives an example of performance art as “created situation wherein the audience [is] suspended between the norms and rules of art and everyday life, between aesthetic and ethical imperatives.” Where the audience finds itself in a “crisis that could not be overcome by referring to conventional behaviour patterns” (Fischer-Lichte. 2004, 12).[2] Such a crisis can present itself in the paradox of both the necessity of doing something and the impossibility of not being able to find a way. If the political possibility of the artwork is its impact, why would it proceed by the producing immobility, arrest, and a sense of failure in one’s own reasoning, sending the viewer into a more individual rather than collective mode of reflection? Is the transformation to take place on another occasion, postponed? Perhaps only a form of probing, rehearsing for a future “event” can rely on an aesthetic paradigm. Can such performative “doing” accommodate what Chantal Mouffe calls for in her essay on Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces, that is,”a total break with the existing state of affairs […] subverting the dominant hegemony and by contributing to the construction of new subjectivities” (Mouffe. 2007, 5).[3]
Cynic: Oh my days! This is just exhausting. Nothing here is just simple doing; everything can be done in many ways and leads to other doings. In performance art ”doing” mutates, it is explored, multiplied and exploited to its physical and conceptual limits, open-ended. What about the relief of getting things done, you know… use of skills that lead to a result. Who has time to wonder, to be amused by doing inconclusive actions, learning, practising shape-shifting meanings, bla bla bla… A wider perspective of complexity in progress?
Believer: I think that by asking “Who has time for this?” you are asking a so-called false question. I’d say: Who can afford to do ‘business as usual’ without entertaining the possibility of doing otherwise, confident that once learned, the skill of getting things done will not lead to a dead end, especially when pressed for time? What about the relief of arriving at the point where you are done with your own ways, you know?
The risk of performance art suddenly presents itself as a considerable one, controlled, limited, and yet at the same time real. It is the risk of losing oneself in the failure of reasoning, in becoming… in learning… or in breaking with…
The risk of performance art suddenly presents itself as a considerable one, controlled, limited, and yet at the same time real.
LEARNING, LEARNING…
Another day, another bus ride. This time to a windmill farm. May-Britt Öhman & Eva Charlotta Helsdotter, two highly accomplished researchers in the history of technology (May-Britt) and water security (Eva Charlotta): No Magic Wands/ Ungreen Windpower — Sámi and Scientific Perspectives on Fossil Dependent and Environmentally Destructive Designs. It is a Sámi take on wind farms from the position of reindeer herding, water rights, and environmental sustainability. It presents a wider than usual scope of calculation of the energy balance of wind power, including the pre- and post-phases of the process of establishing the facilities, such as: the mining activities, the building of a transport infrastructure needed for construction, maintenance, dismantling, as well as micro and nano plastic pollution. We learn that wind power is indeed “not a magic wand”, but also “environmentally destructive, aggressively colonial” and more dependent on fossil fuels than it is branded as. Good to know. After all, we are allowed to stare at the giant windmill, step on the ground beneath it and imagine the sense of danger when the blades shoot out ice in winter. This performance-lecture informs me and makes me aware of an urgent matter. I was uninformed, so I’m grateful. I hear some of the other audience members are disappointed by the informative rather than performative quality of this one. I am enjoying my break from the aesthetic-semiotic crisis. I am relieved that we do not have to pretend that this event is anything other than an informative excursion. I appreciate the curatorial courage to frame this action as performance, activating but not necessarily doing more than it can.
No Magic Wands. Photo: Jesper Dolgov
Another similar event is The Streets of Turku, A Queer Perspective by cultural history researcher Jean Lukkarinen. It is a walking tour through queer historical sites of Turku city centre. It both treats the history of marginalisation of LGBTQ+ people in public space and memorises the places that stood up against it or offered a place of refuge. We visit the places where the activist association gathered, places where one could socialise without fear for being outed, like bar Saukko, and ex-Motel Haarukka. We hear about the top floor of the Valencia restaurant, where one could make a reservation “for the artists”, to end the tour at the main town square. After the series of protests which happened here in late 90s, the law against public incitement to homosexual acts was finally taken down (1999). The form of the tour, almost identical to any tourist tour, suddenly holds meaning. After all, the history in question is held by people and in people, in their experiences, memories, and doings. Now we get to hold some of it too. It makes sense.
The Streets of Turku, A Queer Perspective. Photo: Jesper Dolgov
Danger Danger by Wilhelm Blomberg and Milka Luhtaniemi is a class on doing. It promises to be a nuanced mix of humour, pedagogy, and intervention on how to confront the ecocrisis; how to act, rage, and grieve. We meet in the Turku Art Museum lobby. Both the performance and the museum ordeal start here: locker room, right place to stand and wait… Everything is tight here. We have organised opening drinks, a quick discussion on forms of climate activism: are “Just Stop Oil” museum actions good or bad? Too polarizing maybe? We get to training in the protest techniques: slow walk, somewhat very proper here in the museum; pulling out by the leg, somewhat relaxing and so satisfying here on the perfectly smooth shiny floors among the contemporary artworks on nature. We hear a letter from young eco-activists, imagining their lack of future and asking: “why the fuck do I have to tell you this?” The artworks are looming back at as from the walls, somewhat more elusive in their questions. We practice our emotional response abilities; we exercise the use of our voices. They sound good here, but a little weak and apathetic. Towards the end of Danger Danger, the demonstration banderoles are placed “as works of art” in one of the museum’s rooms: “Oispa metsää”, “Elokapina”, “Annihilate coal”. I suspect they will be taken down shortly. As a final gesture, the confetti explodes in a green burst. I am all for it and I feel like a complete idiot for having to be educated in this laborious way.
Danger Danger. Photo: Karolina Kucia
Later I visit an empty space in front of the museum where the bust of V.I. Lenin used to stand. There is a square stain from the pedestal and four holes from the mounting bolts. Is this what remains of the dream of a classless society? For a moment I feel sad and somewhat hopeless about the “Inter Species International”. Then I think that the square and four holes are a much better formal attempt than a facial representation of someone who didn’t want to become a symbol. I feel alive here, with this reminder of revolutionary art and with the hopelessness. The black square smudge seems alive.
Lenin was here. Photo: Tero Nauha
“There is no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory.”
from What is to Be Done by Lenin.
I find myself longing for such combination of theory, art, and social organisation.
…and UNLEARNING
Diego Bianchi’s work Rewinding is a nine-person performance located in various spots of the Hansakortteli shopping mall. At the door of a flower shop I encounter an end and a remnant of an action. A tiny device that rotates around its centre and pulls a fallen leaf on a thread around and around. I see another part of this at the Stockmann department store, in the Artek design corner. Everyone is sitting in the beautiful and expensive chairs. We simply try to inhabit an impossible place, everyone is staring at their own phone, some watching, some dancing, moving, most natural gestures here and yet awkward. Just on the edge. There is a slowness to it, a boredom, it doesn’t make sense. Two kinds of music coming from different directions are in perfect dissonance. One comes from the mall’s loudspeakers, the other from the performance. The rhythms are out of sync, disturbing each other. It is like a cloud of noise. If you move closer to one of the sources, the noise turns into a readable message. Closer, further or just on the edge of the disturbance of the transmission. It reminds me of the idea of an irritatement.[4] Not a musical entertainment but a glitched touching tune that pokes you in the eye, that makes you alert. I enjoy it. But what do we do here? Are we avant-garde? I think not. The excess of the Artek furniture and other super-expensive “Nordic” or “Scandinavian” design objects, mixed with the scarcity of content and the abundance of passivity and bare presence, catalyses for me this moment of shared estrangement.
Rewinding. Photo: Jesper Dolgov
Dash Che performs M*Otherland: Stack Of Rules and a Big Collective Feeling in one of Kupittaa’s playgrounds. Dash’s performance uses the playground to comment on the formation of nationalism and patriotism. The performer appears with a bear costume, into they will gradually slide. We obediently follow the performer around the area, but they do not stick to the agreement of accommodating us around the set stage in any way, moving with the speed of an active child. We become unsettled, like other frustrated parents in the park, hoping to sit down and grab a coffee; but no, it is not an easy task to keep Dash in sight. The disobedient performer runs away, jumps on the bouncy horse/worm/caterpillar, up and down, up and down, and … falls asleep. Mmmm… Another moment of dissociation.
Käärijä’s song Cha-Cha-Cha is playing from the loudspeaker. To me as a non-Finn, but still someone fairly well trained, the vileness reads odd.
I just begin to chat with a fellow member of the audience, and what? The performer runs again, this time with a dog. The dog is baffled by this large animal of the same colour, confusing the daily routine of the park walk. Barking ensues. The estrangement thickens, it is more than human. In a nearby traffic learning park, Dash/Bear, is driving a miniature police car weirdly smugly, with the attitude and speed of Miami Vice. Käärijä’s song Cha-Cha-Cha is playing from the loudspeaker. To me as a non-Finn, but still someone fairly well trained, the vileness reads odd. One is seduced to interpret the cause of these actions as either minor immaturity (children’s toys, playful environment) or Russian stereotypes (the bear costume and the Soviet upbringing advertised in the program). We are being trapped in the imagination of the national rule, civility, citizenship; all phenomena of regulation and yet ungraspable, sneaky, challenging to disidentify with.
M*Otherland: Stack Of Rules And A Big Collective Feeling. Photo: Jesper Dolgov
I manage to book a spot for the one-to-one performance You see…by Jamal Gerald. We sit in the Titanic Gallery office. One by one I turn the card, revealing the next of six talking points: class, sexual orientation, race, nationality, ability, and religion.
You see… (Jamal Gerald and María Villa Largacha). Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa
Time is passing and it feels more like a session in a therapist’s chair, with both of us listening more to what I say. Jamal vehicles a reflection of sorts. I am bored with myself mostly, no reason to be excited really. I rehearsed and negotiated my answers on a number of privilege walks, always feeling like some conversation is still hiding, still uncovered. Maybe here, in this tête-à-tête? In a way, and yet, not really. Not really? This is a personal encounter of 20 minutes, both a short and long time to meet each other. Yet, as in every one-on-one performance, I feel replaceable, and I accept it quickly. Not that I don’t care. Is it the therapeutic setting that makes me somewhat passive — or is it my overwhelming whiteness that cannot reflect itself in my companion’s face, shutting me down? Nothing happens, it is all up to me. That feels much too comfortable and unsettling at the same time. I have always avoided self-reflection; not self-criticism, no, but self-reflection. Insights feels just not enough, not risking much, just a self-image, that is everything I am at that moment. Here we are, seeing each other. Jamal is just there. It also feels like we’re both just waiting to move on. I ask Jamal if there is a ghost with him, someone who accompanies him. Jamal tells about his late aunt Teresa, a bubbly person who passed away. I appreciate the possibility that she is accompanying us for a moment; maybe she sees me, but I do not see her.
SUDDEN APPEARANCE OF A GHOST
Dear all.
First of all, THANK YOU so much for your work. I was in there. Now I have a job to write an article about the festival. I would like to ask you one question. Some of you already answered, some I could not reach. Please, answer or not and as much as you want and if you do answer, please mention if it is ok for me to quote your reply or if you would rather have me just keep your answer in mind when I write about your work.
The question is really one, but I rephrase it three times in case it doesn’t reveal itself to you right away:
Was or is there a ghost who was there, performing with you?
Is there someone or something that haunts you when you work? Anything or anyone you cannot forget, or you work to remember?
Is there anyone you owe, or hate, or love who is there in your work, and is not coming forth?
Warmest regards,
Karolina Kucia
Hi Karolina!
Here is our answer to your question, feel free to quote. “The audience haunts me when I work, they are ghosts. I keep swatting away to try and make the work as I would if there was no one to see it.”
Thanks!!
Miradonna & Sofi
It is an “audience member” that haunts the festival. And even if I am here, I am not it. This ghost of an audience is something else, it is a motherf**ker of a double-edged sword. For the audience member to exist, the performance must happen; and for the performance to happen, some audience must witness it. I imagine that for the festival to happen, a certain number of audiences must happen, and the festival produces its own audience. Luckily in this festival, Tuomas Laitinen’s performance Audience Body can bring the ghost back to its corporeal existence. It emerges together with the emergence of the performance, and the two hold each other in a kind of threshold lock. What if the audience is a charge between being in and out? As this work is also a part of the author’s artistic research, the performance of the Audience Body is formulated as a critical question. The sound of the audience is dispersed, the body of the audience is humming like bees, the audience is dispersed and yet contained within the installation of performing textual objects, letters, books, cards with scores. They activate “us”. The audience presents itself as a mobile and active, interconnected composition of bodies, voices, watching, seeing, reading, sounds of turning paper, quiet walking, sitting, standing. The audience body is somehow of low volume even if silence is not required. The audience body is here is very careful not to break the illusion of its own existence as this is a sacred ritual. Does realising one’s own potential leave one in awe? In awe of simply being, making an appearance, reading the written word about oneself, or in awe of emerging as an event? There is a magic in the reciprocal back and forth of allowing things to happen, turning papers, and reading on about what is occurring. In awe of their own existence, the audience coughs softly, chats softly, watches slightly, moves not too dramatically, smiles politely, and people give each other space. There is a distant kindness in this mutual recognition and care as we are moving in and out, in and out, between the performance and audience modes. The balance seems to be fragile; the performance is strong, yet the author seems even stronger, intimate, close, insisting on “us”, whatever “we” do. Whatever?
Audience Body, fragment. Photo: Karolina Kucia
dear Karolina,
very intriguing questions you bring up.
identities and selves always seem to be very fluid during the work, like who is looking at who?
when the work flows there is no “me” there, the body is in the service of the work and my own biography/memory takes a step back. of course with the longer works there are many different stages of thought patterns circulating,
but I always encourage a state of no-mind, like you become the action.
thanks for bringing this up
Best of luck with your work
gustaf
HAUNTING
Impossible Bodies is a dance for twelve performers, their bodies moving almost simultaneously in an empty room. Artist, dramatist, and choreographer Vasen Vasilev has given them “tasks”.
Impossible Bodies. Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa
This labourous doing is slow. It feels difficult, both to achieve, I assume, and to watch. It is an act of animating by a singular as well as collective body in a semi-synchronised swarm. It seems like a group of the same doings, in which each member is invested in their own solo version. It also never ends… At some point the audience applauds, there is a shift in the atmosphere of the performance. The audience starts their chattering, yet the performers continue in a semi-performing, semi-aftercare mode of staying together; resting, waiting for something that doesn’t come. Then someone says: “Shhhh….” I shut up and keep watching, but my watching starts to feel as though I’m somehow “arresting” the performers, so I decide to leave.
BREAK
I need a break. It feels too much now. The festival… Why did I decide to see it all and then put you through it in turn? Grab a coffee or something, we have about 2,000 words to go.
Here, there, somewhere by Tuuli Vahtola and Iida Hägglund opens to me through disconnection of hearing and seeing. The performance happens in the audio layer and on stage, separately. I am grounded in the sound through headphones, like a carrier of the action that is glued to me, grounded in me, carried out by my ears. The doing of the performance, the action itself becomes a somewhat distant yet intimate dimension, peeled off from the sound I carry, like a layer of skin. Murmurings, the rubbings of my own being are at times non-separable from the sound of the performance. At times it feels as if they are a hallucination of my own mind. “Words times spaces, waiting for someone to come through the ceiling, to enter my bank account, they came to realize they don’t need permission, everyone is liquid.” I remember this being said more than once, like a promise. “Freshly squeezed liquid from the wall” – I hear while watching a self-floating plastic pile being moved by the body separated by the semi-transparency from the whiteness of the space.
Here, there, somewhere. Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa
Hi Karolina!
Here is our answer to your question, feel free to quote. Sometimes I also think about someone who I worked a lot with who is not present. Sometimes if it feels hard to make decisions I think about what they would say.
Thanks!!
Miradonna & Sofi
Further up the Aura river, in a coffee house called Koroinen, a small and rather exclusive group of those who have managed to book their places for this performance gather in front of the old wooden café building for Peeling an Onion by Lotta Petronella and Gabriela Ariana.
Peeling an Onion. Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa
When the time comes, we are let in and seated at the tea tables. The slightly stiff atmosphere of sharing the tables with strangers breaks a little bit through the first phase of the performance: peeling and chopping the onion. As we do this, we listen to the stories Ariana tells, stories of collective disobedience by making soup, of coping with death by singing. We tune into the singing, the lamenting and the smell of “Onion-Union” — the food and the medicine.
I must confess that I am terrified as I enter this event. I carry a lot of grief inside me then and there. I am afraid that it will come out in an uncontrollable way, that if I start to cry it will take me over. Again, no worries, this is not about me. Nothing like that happens, the atmosphere of stiffness never breaks out, we balance between the subtle warmth of touching memories, politeness, hope, despair and the pretentiousness of small gestures that make us believe in collective transformative possibilities, just not yet. The soup happens here, a great soup. At the end, everyone receives a small bottle of liquid, a product of this gathering, an essense, containing a rather weak tincture of onions and the feeling of collectivity. Each bottle makes a somewhat Christian round in the room, from hand to hand. The cynic in me shrugs; the believer doesn’t say a word, but takes the bottle. The believer chooses to imagine that the dishes are now being washed and that, along with the water from the flushed toilet, they will descend from the green land back to another location, to a slightly different but not disconnected place.
Did you know that under the surface of the city there is at least one more body of water? This water, not so pure, was once used and now carries the remains of our becomings and gatherings. In Snägäri by Recover Laboratory, that is Sofi Häkkinen and Miradonna Sirkka, we discover this dark side of the city, its undergrounds, its body double. This undercity also has named streets, lakes, a factory and workers. It’s a sewage treatment plant for the Turku area and the surrounding settlements. We wander in the darkness, in a smelly underworld, dizzily crossing black waters that seem to run unimaginably deep, bringing a sense of danger. We are told that the water is 25 metres deep. As the waterway bubbles with oxygen, the fear of falling in arrives, falling fast, falling right to the bottom through its light consistency.
At the gate of this institution, we are handed a programme in the form of a questionnaire: the places and scenes presented are THE DOOR, THE CORNER, THE EARTH(Y), DON’T TAKE IT AS AN INSULT, TAKE IT AS A SIGN and THE WATERPOOL. The questions are:
1. What do you think about at night?
2. What are you afraid to think about?
3. Is everything all right and is there enough of everything for everyone?
4. What do you cry about?
The questionnaire is also a game and a puzzle. This formal labyrinth insists on complicating my simple answers:
- Things I wish I hadn’t done.
- The future.
- No
- Loss.
As the story unfolds, the metaphors take us on a nostalgic journey with the twist of the new context, the place unfolding in new ways. There is something comforting in the ability to reach out from down here, through the layers of time and concentrated shit and dirt, filtered and not yet pretty water, to life above ground. “This place that you may not even know exists — if all goes well”. The performance serves as a metaphor, a vehicle for a waste of emotional production. The link between the mental and environmental layers is somewhat missing.
I imagine I am also receiving a tincture of this performance. The faint smell of onions has not vanished, my few tears of nostalgic travel are now concentrated and mixed with the layers of muck, dirt, and decomposed toxins. The performances are talking to each other in the contents of the bottle, which holds such power that I am afraid to open it. All this exists only in my tired mind. I wish it didn’t.
Snägäri (fragment: patties served at the end of the trip). Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa
CRITICAL DOING
Hi Karolina!
Here is our answer to your question, feel free to quote.
The inner criticism haunts me while working. I am constantly worried about mistakes and that’s a paradox because our artworks are a lot abou
t mistakes.
Thanks!!
Miradonna & Sofi
Through the interview with the curator, María Villa Largacha, and by experiencing the organisational structure set up by the artistic director, Leena Kela, and the managing director, Anni Sundbacka, I learn not only about the burden of work, the care, the love given to the artist, both materially, organisationally, but also by being there, present in each of the works. I also learn about restraint in the use of power.
I appreciate that the curatorial position in the festival exists only as a framework, not as an excuse to spin one’s own production of meaning and another layer of self-presentation in the cake of the art world. It is a rare position for a curator/artistic director, and one that is so needed in relation to performance art.
As I said, performance art is already doing and undoing, already generating the conversation, its own crisis and cure. Performance art is an excess, a collision of bodies: performers, audiences, organisers, supporters, venues, politics, things. It would be weakened by an additional generosity, a further opening to something unseen, undone. It is already an organised economy of life, it is already a hierarchy of governance, it is already the exploitation of potential, it is already a crisis to recover from. Perhaps it doesn’t need additional poetic treatment, it doesn’t want to travel in a vehicle of metaphor or virtual concept, but it might still need a certain care. The curatorial and organisational structure of this festival manages to be restrained enough to do just that and no more. What more one can wish for? Perhaps an organisational ability of not smoothing down but opening the conflicts that these events carry within them. Perhaps instead of an overall mixture that is pleasing to the audience and the ghost of an audience, we could also choose to be part of what Chantal Mouffe calls an agonistic struggle.
The most important consequence [of an artwork] is that it challenges the widespread conception that, albeit in different ways, informs most visions of the public space conceived as the terrain where consensus can emerge. For the agonistic model, on the contrary, the public space is the battleground where different hegemonic projects are confronted, without any possibility of final reconciliation. (Mouffe. 2007, 3)[5]
The potentiality of the event, which is not self-reflective for the audience, but of its material consequences, carries within itself the emergence of trouble, of a conversation that is not quiet and harmonious. Yes, a struggle. But do “we”, the bubble, want change? The change that almost every piece in the festival’s programme is asking for.
Performance art is an excess, a collision of bodies: performers, audiences, organisers, supporters, venues, politics, things.
I need a new word for “radical” — this sentence from the artist talk by Jamal Gerald (if I remember correctly) haunts me. I hear it again over breakfast in a hotel. There is a disappointment in this sentence with an art world that appropriates this “radical”. I get that. It is strange, though, that in time we shall invent a new word that is not yet tired and not yet disappointing.
Cynic: Isn’t it exactly how the art world works, by creating representations that inflates its meaning? Perhaps the way would be rather to find what the word means. Maybe forget it for a moment, that word, you know, not the affect it signifies; do, join, keep doing, and maybe… one day… who knows? … What was the word? Oh, yes… radical!
Believer: Yes… I am with you. Imagine what it would take for Coming Together, for the whole complex framework of this event, to do that? Perhaps we would have to forget the ghost of the audience, forget to serve. Imagine the supporters and the city enabling the organisers to do it, to risk a little more. Imagine the actual audience in the performance, in the festival, becoming something else, not a consumer, not a body arrested in a crisis, training for future events; not a self-conscious, sacred body, but one or more sides in a conflict, people in a struggle. Imagine the audience taking the risk that they are clever, that they know how to get out of the crisis, that they are ready not to be pleased, amused, or imagined any more, that they are already emancipated.
Cynic: Isn’t a performer’s greatest fear that the audience will be smarter than the performer, and an audience’s greatest fear that they’ll risk being stupid?
Believer: Wouldn’t it be great if instead of avoiding this fear, we were to face it, to embrace it, to mobilise it… To be stupid and unpatronisingly sharp, to do the thinking while being seen, to be a witness to someone’s doings while also doing. “Radical” requires the risk that no one gets anything out of this — not even a little, I mean absolutely nothing… Rather that something is lost, or even that everyone fails.
Cynic: Sure, performance art can do that! So, you are asking me to be … what was the word? Oh yes… radical in my expectations of performance art? To not be pleased? To be generously vocal…? I see… A kind of cynical believer. Because performance art is there for me, sometimes even for free, so I could be there for it and allow it to risk something.
The writer is a performance artist with a background in sculpture, intermedia and performance studies. She is currently completing her doctoral research: Monstrous Agencies – Resisting Precarization; Tools and Models for Collaboration in the Arts; at the Performing Arts Research Centre, Uniarts, Helsinki. She is passionate about developing organisational solutions to problems related to forms of precarious labour in post-neoliberal capitalism and the current form of art institutions.
References:
[1] Quotations from the festival’s printed programme.
[2] Fisher-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A new aesthetics. Abington. Routledge.
[3] Mouffe, Chantal. 2007. Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces. ART&RESEARCH: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods. Volume 1. No. 2. Summer 2007.
[4] Term coined by a musician Vicki Bennett (People Like Us).
[5] Mouffe, Chantal. 2007. Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces. ART&RESEARCH: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods. Volume 1. No. 2. Summer 2007.
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