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20221008

We wrote an appeal Chaim “Poju” Zabludowicz’s membership of Kiasma Support Foundation must be revoked (2022) to the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma with artist Terike Haapoja. I’m thankful for having the opportunity to work with them. The appeal is direct in its confrontation with the institution. For me it represents a step in a series of inevitable actions, which the 2021 article for No-Niin and it’s later 2022 translation for Tiedonantaja call for. I’m particularly proud that we issued a very clear demand and named people who are responsible for the current state of affairs. Our writing is in accordance to how Aruna D’Souza advices art-writers to engage with institutions, for example not to be afraid to “name names”. The text also includes a short pedagogical snippet informing audiences of “artwashing” and “soft power” (in Finnish), which are cute and could work in a textbook.

Kiasma’s Director Leevi Haapala describes Zabludowicz’s role on the board of the support foundation as unproblematic, for instance, appealing to the organization’s safer-space policy. When someone who represents art organizations being boycotted and who funds the covering up of human-rights violations holds a seat at the heart of a state institution, we have to ask: for whom is the organization keeping the space safe?

The safer-space policy cannot mean that the museum is excused from concern for human-rights violations or for apartheid, nor can it in any way support them. […] We challenge Kiasma – the organization arranging [Ars22 Gathering] discussions – to extend its safer-space policy to its own institutional structures, too. The first step in this would be to revoke Chaim “Poju” Zabludowicz’s membership of the Board. Otherwise Kiasma will endanger its credibility as a platform for discussions of social responsibility, and will be complicit in the artwashing of a political activity that endangers human lives.

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20210916

We wrote an investigative article Our efforts to show solidarity for Palestine are tested at Kiasma, with Pietari Kylmälä for No Niin. The text was edited by Elham Rahmati & Vidha Saumya, who did a great job. With help from the kind people of the Boycott Zabludowicz campaign we were able to gain an update to the affairs of Chaim “Poju” Zabludowicz, a business person who funds an influential pro-Israeli lobbying organisation (BICOM), and who has a long record of investments in companies which work for the security and military forces of the State of Israel.

As a senior member of the Kiasma Support Foundation, Zabludowicz is deeply involved with the museum. In our view, their track record as an investor makes their affiliation with the public institution problematic. Kiasma should ensure that museum beneficiaries are not involved in businesses which benefit from military conflicts such as the current apartheid policies implemented by the State of Israel. We asked museum director Leevi Haapala for a response to the troubling details our investigation touched. Their response is available online.

Haapala’s response depicts a disconnection between politics and rhetorics. It’s disheartening to read how they deploy the museum’s newly announced safer space policy as a rhetorical device to slither away from responding to the concerns we’ve brought forth. They even spent a paragraph celebrating an artist whose artwork Zabludowicz’s involvement has secured into their collection.

In Haapala’s portrayal, as the director of the museum they’re also leading the operations of the support foundation. Paradoxically, while asserting that they are in control, Haapala also insists that since the museum is funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture, the organisation cannot take a public stand in humanitarian concerns. This means that in their leadership the programming of the museums is meant to represent political struggles but not to engage with political reality.

The response depicts Kiasma open and willing to receive funds from anyone. It seems there are no standards, no qualifications – as long as you bring in money and love art, the museum’s happy to serve you. This stance is common for private museums. But Kiasma is not a private museum. It is funded by the state; we need it to do better.

The museum expects its visitors to follow their safer space policy but does not expect the same from their financial beneficiaries.

Kiasma is not a “safe space” if it continues to harbour businesspeople who are investing in companies which Amnesty International is investigating for human right violations. I will not participate in events in the museum until they set forth guidelines which ensure that their beneficiaries are not involved in business actions which violate international law and human rights.

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20210810

The Non-Sitting-Stuff-Not-About-Horses-vol0  publication is based on a collective online study-journal which was written during the spring of 2021 by participants of the Horse & Built Environment course for Aalto University (UWAS-C0071). Group members met weekly at the Kaarelan ratsutalli stables, discussed horse & animal matters and observed horses while executing various stable chores. During a six week period the group succeeded in tiling a floor in the main stable, demolishing an old storage, planting grass and performing a plethora of other maintenance tasks. The group’s activity intertwined with the daily routines of the stable and was periodically interrupted with horse handling exercises, lectures and discussions.

The publication is co-authored. It is inspired by early 1990’s horse hobbyists zines (see Ihahaa mag. in useful links). Group members have used the online document for collecting observations and to discuss different inputs & articles. Texts could be written anonymously and authors were tasked to create guidelines for managing the document. The text is wild: It was presented as a Pasture where group members could wander seeking nourishment and as a Compost which shows how different inputs and shared moments have been processed and digested. The publication is a snapshot to the thinking which the groups activities and engagement stirred up. It is raw –in the best sense of the word– including creative writing, diary entries, article reviews and links to inspiring media.

We hope you will enjoy this decay.

Dormalen, Gaudé, Harouny, Jalasaho, Keil, Kiviaho, Kolehmainen, Pietari Kylmälä (lecturer, editor), Lecerf, Moberg, Nimetön Nyan Cat, Nurmi, Polkinghorne, Rosina, Visuri, Eero Yli-Vakkuri (lecturer, editor) & Zhao

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20210416

Q: Why Blog? A: Blogs Are Great. (2021) Marc Weidenbaum. A simple and joyful list for building up courage to write publicly. I don’t agree with the “4. Write for yourself first and foremost” argument. I get it and I do exactly that, but I want to emphasize that… What’s great about developing as a writer trough blogging is that it is a semi-public performance and you never know whose going to read it. When I write I feel a seeping awareness that someone will hold me accountable for what I say, so I’m challenged to find better ways to describe old ideas and made more aware of the text. I think blogs are especially great for the accountability they provide. Old (hidden but activist archived) blog-posts by neo-nazi-politicians are a good example. (Also… I don’t have a “Have a topic focus”)

Kritiikki on osa journalismia – Nummi ja Löytty sotasilla [Art Critiques are Journalism…] (2021) Pietari Kylmälä. A appendix to a recent interview of Olli Löytty. Kylmälä confronts the Helsingin Sanomat editors and questions their ethics. He ask why the art critiques the newspaper produces do not meet the same editorial scrutiny as the news. Kylmälä spots the deterioration of journalistic ethic and calls for additional resources. He also elegantly crushes Jyrki Nummi’s critique of Löytty’s recent book.

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Trans-Horse: Horse & Performance for TeaK 2020

We were fortunate to organize the fourth Horse & Performance course for the Theater Academy in the fall of 2020. Together with Pietari, we experienced challenges teaching art during a pandemic face but in the end things sorted out well. At the time COVID spread in Finland was at a decline and the University of Arts Helsinki deemed the course possible. The horse-hobby and equestrian industry here seems well equipped for dealing with the pandemic. Riding group sizes seldom exceed 10 members (and horses) and activities are organized in sparsely spaced sites, which deems it a safe activity. In fact horseback riding is a booming hobby, it offers a much needed outdoor experience and companionship. We were kindly welcomed to Malminkartano by Kaarelan ratsutalli Oy. Kaarela was a well suited site for organizing the course, it is easy to access with public transport and the area has an interesting history.

Horse & Performance had seven participants: Antonia Atarah, Anna Lehtonen, Daniela Pascual, Martta Jylhä, Gaspare Fransson, Mikael Karkkonen and Jouni Tapio. On previous courses most of the participants have been from the acting department but this time around attendees formed a balanced mixture of dramaturgist, actors, live-artists, pedagogist and sound/light designers. In 2017 we started to collect course notes to collective study journals which participants can access online. The journals present open ended questions which the course stirs up, links to texts people refer to and discussions on the exercise we partake in. This time around the document is semi-public and can be accessed  as a .pdf document. We didn’t offer the same volume of practical horse handling exercises as before. Instead we focused on working with the animals at their pasture and got to engage in an array of stable chores. Participants build a hay-shelter, erected fences and collect a lot of droppings from the pasture. I think the course was ultimately about maintenance art and laced with a crafty approach to non-human knowledge.

Taru Svahn who had established the stables twenty years ago gave a thorough introduction to the site. We learned that there has been horse related activity in the area at least since the 18th century and that the site had been a farm until the 60ties. She presented us documents from -62 which detailed farming experiments Helsinki University conducted on site and provided a history of the Malminkartano mansion from 1579 onward. Svahn told us that her motivation for establishing the riding school was set in motion by a dream which presented her a galloping horse. The dream led her to equestrian studies in Ypäjä and eventually to start a business in Malminkartano. Quite recently they have managed to expand the stable by building a manège which enables them to organize courses comfortably during the winter. When we started with horseback riding with Pietari in 2014 the manège was yet to be build and the outdoor classes in Malminkartano were really cold.

As expected working with city officials for permits to build a horse stable to a suburb was an enormous effort. Rights were eventually granted based on the site’s historical value and history with horses. In short: The horses of the past, paved way for the horses of the future. There are archaeological sites (röykkiöhauta) close by and the nearby forest is protected from development (Malminkartano was an island until 3000BCE). Svahn explained that ultimately the permission process was paved by personal relations she formed with individual city officials and a lucky coincidence where the right mix of city committee representatives happened to be in the same room at the same time. It is revealing that charisma and luck are central for city development. Svahn’s motivation for establishing the site was to grant access to horses to the youth of the district. The suburb was troubled in the 90ties. Still is.

Each day started with a morning meeting at a forest opening. Pietari heated water with a portable stove, we all sat on a branch and chatted while having coffee. The morning sessions worked well for establishing a casual relationship to the texts and theory which we structured the teaching on. There were lectures in the forest too. I fondly remember Pietari’s introduction to speciesism, with yellow rays of sunlight reflecting from the moss. When preparing for the course we were inspired by the Gustafsson&Haapoja: Museum of Becoming HAM exhibition and picked up texts by Cary Wolfe and Terike Haapoja from it. The main culprit for the theory of human-horse-relations was yet again Haraway and we turned to Soppelsa for developing insights to the role horses have had for the development of modern Europe.

At the end of the two week long course participants were invited to develop group exercise or artistic outputs, which reflected their evolving relationship to horses. This lead us to organized a miniature horse-art festival of sorts. It offered dance pieces (witnessing a horse-human dance led me to understand the relationship as a highly choreographed communication), audio-based-works (which presented arbitrary horse movements as dance), meditation and body awareness sessions (we could imagine ourselves as plants and experience ourselves as a self organizing assembly). Summaries and group reflections on the exercises are documented in the collective study journal. One of the most memorable experiences I had was a session titled “Horse’s Birthday” (Jylhä & Karkkonen). The session started with us setting a picnic table in the middle of the pasture. As we started to eat cake and to perform a birthday ceremony, our gathering and the sweet smells lured the horses in and soon our assembly was rearranged by a herd of animals. They revealed their ultimate power-move: Breaking crowds with their hulls and caused disarray in organization. Our picnic was efficiently disbanded and we were caught between rivaling horses.

Previously, in teaching art I’ve emphasized the act of “stopping” and we often practice it as a part of physical exercises: I encourage students to be rude, to halt the charismatic flow for making notes, formulate opinions and set new plans in motion. During the pasture-birthday session I noticed that I have not developed artistic exit strategies which would afford sensible and secure retrievals from difficult situations. Most horse-human exercises I’ve participated in have been focused on becoming with the animal and after the exercises have peaked we look for an opening where we can depart peacefully. This works great for establishing a sense of security but requires that the horse-human session is carefully planned: I’ve witnessed numerously how facilitators work towards soft departures. Working in the pasture –which is the horse’s domain– requires that people would also be equipped with skills in distancing themselves from the horse at haste. I think I should develop artistic skills to escape a bad situation (like a rodeo clown). I was petrified during the performance. We got stuck between five horses, a table and the cake we brought with us. I didn’t know how to safely distance our group from the dominant maneuvers of the horse herd.

On the last day of the course we got a tour of the Ruskeasuo Police horse facilities. Senior Constable Jukka Aarnisalo took us in and offered a glimpse to the offices of the 130 year old police unit. We were invited to their very compact kitchen and debriefing room, which is located in a corner of the Ruskeasuo horse stables. Inside we were presented with old Russian era swords (brought from their old headquarters in Kasarminkatu), WWII memorabilia and trophies from past competitions. Their current stables were built for the Helsinki Olympics and manifest the functionalist architecture movement in its prime. Modernist traits can be identified in the facilities waste disposal arrangements and the usage of natural light, which early modernist architects associated with hygiene (as defined by Kirsi Saarikangas).

Our visit to the stables ended the course to a very conflicted setting. Participants had just spent two weeks (re)sensitizing themselves to the nuances of horse-human communication, after which we were confronted by a professional with over 30 years of experience in working with animals in urban settings and effectively teaching multiple generations of horses skills for desensitizing themselves. To add to the confusion the skills in question were taught in a respectful working relationship, in institutionally monitored and publicly scrutinized setting. All done just so that the police-horse and the police-human could enforce the law effectively. It safe to argue that mounted officers (and their horses) are the most visible public servants and most criticized law enforcers. I personally enjoyed the conflict because the sensitive and emotional sessions we shared with  horses in Malminkartano, were balanced by the reality and lived experience of people working with animals and animals working with people.

Horse-pedagogical efforts will continue in the spring as well organize a course called Horse & Build Environment for Aalto University. On this course we will explore horse stable designs and the relations they afford us.