Visited Susanna at the Etelä-Espoon ratsastuskoulu and she took me for a ride around the pond. Worked with the horse Emma and got my muscles sore. We did some stable work and discussed the technicalities of introducing horses on stage. Had a nice moment with the Awaited Son too. For the evening I went to the Helsinki International Horse Show with Hanna. It was a boring sports event merged with a cheap horse gear and accessory sales event. Food was bad and beer was expensive. Shot video of the event and I’ll make a post about the event for the Trans-Horse blog.
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Videos of Antti Salminen investigating how art is going to change as we run out of oil, Eeva Anttila presenting dance as the ultimate post-fossil artform (she’s arguing in a modern fashion) and Jesse Sipola living the dream.
Learning “The Theory of Affordances” by James J. Gibson (The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 1979) in an effort to understand how animals change the way we perceive our surroundings. As we learn to work with the animal we are granted new “affordances” to the environment and collaboration between horses and humans build habits which benefit both species. Jussi Parikka cites J.J Gibson in his “Mutating Media Ecologies” (2015) article. The controversial concept of Niche Construction also offers interesting routes for investigation!
When investigating affordances I found a funny fitness project by Anne-Marie Skriver Hansen “Bringing Performance Art into Everyday Life Situations“.
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Grey Cube Gallery documentations are completed! Fixed the Italian-to-Finnish translations with Viivi yesterday and send my final invoice to the Union for Rural Culture and Education. My favorite artist presentations was by Päivi Allonen and I also enjoyed taking with the Helsinki Zoo staff. During the summer Honkasalo-Niemi-Virtanen collectives residency documentations were cancelled but I’m overall satisfied with the project.
A lot of interesting ideas concerning the relations of animals and public institutions came up during the Zoo staff interviews but these complex talks didn’t make the final cut. I’ve written some down under the tag “Animals in the City“. The idea that the sites primarily goal is to build awareness of animals as individuals was build up through director Sanna Hellström interview. The Bear Castles that hosted the art exhibitions and events are now left unused and if someone is interested in presenting stuff there they should contact Katri Houtbeckers from the Zoo.
Artist presentations:
- Päivi Allonen
- Eeva-Liisa Puhakka & Katrin Caspar (English)
- Gaia Carboni (Italian, Finnish subtitles)
Helsinki Zoo staff and festival documentations:
I’ll meet up with the Union for Rural Culture and Education on the 26th for the “Paikan tuntu” book launch at the movie theater Orion. I was interviewed for the book by Antti Möller.
Visited “Suburbia – Lähiöperformansseja” exhibition by Antti Ahonen and Katri Kainulainen over the weekend. Came too late for Siiri Nevalaises after party piece but got to hear KOELSE drone noises. Many of the exhibition pieces were faux performance documentations and there was a tad too much repetition (Some photos from the exhibition available online). The photos mimicked street fashion looks and presented a hardcore-nostalgic view to the suburbs. Katri and her friend posed semi-nude in rough concrete surroundings. Unfortunately the contemporary fashion industry produces heaps of similar (and even more disturbing) imagery and styles present in the exhibition came off as rip-off’s of Vice magazine covers.
The fashion industry has appropriated the visual cues of performance art! The disturbing documentations such as Carolee Schneemann’s “Interior Scroll” (1975) has been normalized trough Vice magazines commercial interests in the niche and the perv’s. The best way to rebel against these processes is to produce documentations which look boring!
Had an interesting chat concerning photography workflow with Antti. His archive on flickr is packed with performance art, street art etc. event documentations and artworks. The huge cultural heritage collection he has build has been made intuitively. He does not “waste time” with color correction (he’s colorblind) and he trusts the camera’s/computers automatic sensory. This approach alleviates stress and enables him to take on performance documentation gigs rapidly.
Sometimes the winning move is to renouce the fight. #ॐ
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Visited “The Museum of Nonhumanity” by Terike Haapoja & Laura Gustafsson and crew. The exhibition was translated in Finnish as “Epäinhimillisuuden museo”. The naming of their work was confusing as the piece was not concerned about non-human agencies. The stylish (meta-ironic) installation displayed technologies and cultural practices which are used divide, categorized and control human populations, sites and other organisms. “The Museum of Nonhumanity” showed a carefully selected series of historical events during which people have dehumanized and treated as animals in order to justify their control and slaughter. Texts and documents which were presented in the installation focused on statements and quotes made by warmongers and capitalist which presented the groups of people they wanted to control (or kill) as animals. These snippets of information were presented as evidence that our relations to animals are aligned with our relations to Others.
A gruesome part of the museum revealed that wild wolves and female soldiers of the Red Guards were discussed as pests. Apparently a lot of female soldiers of the Red Guards were killed during our Civil War in 1918. Their systematic slaughter was organized by the White Guard officials and they justified these monstrosities trough eugenics and saw it as a form of pest control!
Guests were handed catalogues which featured a nifty text by Giovanna Esposito Yussif which bashed museums as sites which use collections to justify the status quo of the regimes that fund them (The text didn’t discuss the fact that the same dynamics are evident in the majority of art that is made. Also museums are no longer dependent on their collections. They have converted in “event sites” which serve the public in a very similar fashion as the “The Museum of Nonhumanity”). The second text in the catalogue was by Salla Tuomivaara. She pleaded for empathy in human-human and animal-human relations. Unfortunately the artwork and the texts didn’t discuss the agencies of the animals or the human victims. There was no trace of their resistance and constant efforts to re-negotiate their treatment. Unfortunate animals and humans were presented as mere resources for colonial ambitions. The intent of the show was not to build awareness about the agency of animals – It presented a collection of methods and tools humans have used to instrumentalize their fellow beings.
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Currently editing the Grey Cube festival documentations and zoo staff interviews. The process is dull and I’ve kept myself in high spirits by playing music. Song about the Przewalski’s horse (Human is always to blame). Melody is based on the Finnish original (on soundcloud) where the singing worked better but I’m reasonably happy with the new version too.
When I get stuck with editing, I continue with singing, when the falsettos fail I turn to blogging and from there back to editing. Swapping projects on the fly is more efficient than trying to fight through obstacles. Small successes in side-dish-project keep me moving and motivated to work. Side-dish-project enable me to take distance from problems and eventually work myself around them. As a result of multitasking aspects of my profession feel more like serious hobbies then labor. This is useful as I can engage with work tasks playfully and experimentally. I guess this is key for maintaining artistic productivity: To maintain creative productivity, you have to increase creative productivity (or some “less-is-more” shit like that).