Recreation
ongoingRecreation is a series of projects and multimedia installations around the act of sewing, the spaces of confinement and ritual, and time. Through visual, performative and dialogical processes I investigate assumed social roles, ideas of judgement, social and antisocial being, as well as personal and collective boundaries.
This body of work will explore common rituals like keeping holiday homes or tending to a grave. I am interested in the spaces where these rituals happen, and how it affects our identity and how the body needs to adjust to accommodate for these.
Public office, Limerick, Ireland, ca. 2012Тогда мы идем к вам
Then we are coming to you
Live art
2019
In Russia in the 1990’s there was an advertisement on Tv of Tide detergent. The storyline went so that there were two kids sitting on the staircase of an apartment block building. Apparently, they were told to leave the house and their mother is “boiling”- washing clothes in a large pan of boiling water, heated on a kitchen stove. “Boiling” is a well-known practice that bleaches the clothes and returns them their whiteness. I still use this method of doing laundry in my home in Finland regularly. So it goes on - a man appears on the staircase and he is holding a box of Tide. He is there to demonstrate to the mother that it is possible to achieve this pure whiteness by simply washin the garments in the right detergent. The tagline goes as follows: “Are you still boiling? Then we are coming to you”.
Privacy of personal dwelling is a fundamental human right. It is unsettling to imagine that someone can just open the door and come into your home. However, the practice of carrying out searches in people’s homes as a way of threatening and intimidating citizens has been a common practice of police forces. This is often a first step before somebody is arrested or charged. People’s homes are being searched, people are being searched, their belongings and their bodies touched by force. The process of cleaning references the act of destroyin evidence, getting rid of information, something that can be used against you. Time is a currency, luxury, and a curse.
This performance is part of a body of work I am currently developing which has a working title of Slow Room. Slow Room is a series of projects and multimedia sculptures that explore textiles, spaces of confinement, and time. They are focused discipline and judgement and guilt.
Looking seeing and turning away. Loneliness. Boundaries.
I look into collective rituals like keeping holiday homes or tending to a grave, muscle memory which we embody through our actions and thoughts. Boredom and ordinariness, not dreary, not beautiful, but kind of normal things are what interests me. Bluntness and the everyday. Uselessness and the capitalist stat of objects and people being useful, functioning, working.
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This work was presented on November 8th, 2019 at Museum of Impossible Forms in Kontula, Helsinki as part of Performance LAB, which a platform for experimental performances and hosts artists, poets, dancers et al to make live art pieces. This session also included contemporary dance pieces by Kathleen Heil and Yin Cheng-Kekot. The event was joint with Improv Sessions, a platform for experimental sound and improvised music invites two guests Andrew Bentley and Anu Keski-Saari who played solo pieces (approximately 20 minutes each) and then a joint improv set (aproximately 20 minutes), followed by what we called 'Blinddate Improv Jams'. The idea here is that many of the audience, who are recurring members of this monthly event, will ask you and each other to play short 5 to 7-minute improv jam sessions for the remainder of the evening
I am very grateful to be invited and to share space with these wonderful artists.