Figurations of Peripheries Through Arts and Visual Studies: Peripheries in Parallax (Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies) [1 ed.] 9781032390642, 9781032390659, 9781003348269, 1032390646

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Figurations of Peripheries Through Arts and Visual Studies

This edited volume breaks new ground for understanding peripheries and peripherality by providing a multidisciplinary cross-exposure through a collection of chapters and visual essays by researchers and artists. The book is a collection of approaches from several disciplines where the spatial, conceptual, and theoretical hierarchies and biased assumptions of ‘peripheries’ are challenged. Chapters provide a diverse collection of viewpoints, analyses, and provocations on ‘peripherality’ through bringing together international specialists to discuss the socio-political, aesthetic, artistic, ethical, and legal implications of a ‘peripheral approach.’ The aim is to illuminate the existing, hidden, often incommensurable, and controversial margins in society at large from equal, ethical, and empathic perspectives. The book is designed to assist established researchers, academics, and students across disciplines who wish to incorporate novel, arts, and practice-based research and critical approaches in their research projects, artwork, and academic writing. Providing both a consolidated understanding of the peripheries, visual studies, and artistic research as they are and setting expansive and new research insights and practices, this book is essential reading for scholars of arts and humanities, visual culture, art history, design, philosophy, and cultural studies. Maiju Loukola is an artist-researcher and university lecturer at the Doctoral Programme in Fine Arts at the University of the Arts, Helsinki. Mari Mäkiranta is a visual artist and associate professor at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Art and Design, and a docent at the University of Jyväskylä, Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies. Jonna Tolonen is an artist and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Lapland, Faculty of Art and Design.

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research. Cultural Approaches to Disgust and the Visceral Edited by Max Ryynänen, Heidi S. Kosonen and Susanne C. Ylönen Art Agency and the Continued Assault on Authorship Simon Blond Artistic Cartography and Design Explorations Towards the Pluriverse Edited by Satu Miettinen, Enni Mikkonen, Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos, and Melanie Sarantou Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art Edited by Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art Edited by Sarah Scott, Helen McDonald, and Caroline Jordan Arts-Based Interventions and Social Change in Europe Edited by Andrea Kárpáti The Aesthetics of Image and Cultural Form The Formal Method Yi Chen Figurations of Peripheries Through Arts and Visual Studies Peripheries in Parallax Edited by Maiju Loukola, Mari Mäkiranta and Jonna Tolonen For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeAdvances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS

Figurations of Peripheries Through Arts and Visual Studies Peripheries in Parallax

Edited by Maiju Loukola, Mari Mäkiranta, and Jonna Tolonen

Designed cover image: Photo by Jonna Tolonen First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Maiju Loukola, Mari Mäkiranta and Jonna Tolonen; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Maiju Loukola, Mari Mäkiranta and Jonna Tolonen to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Loukola, Maiju, editor. | Mä kiranta, Mari, 1975- editor. | Tolonen, Jonna, editor. Title: Figurations of peripheries through arts and visual studies : peripheries in parallax / edited by Maiju Loukola, Mari Mä kiranta and Jonna Tolonen. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023034102 (print) | LCCN 2023034103 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032390642 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032390659 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003348269 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art. | Separation (Philosophy) Classification: LCC N7443.2 .F54 2023 (print) | LCC N7443.2 (ebook) | DDC 700‐‐dc23/eng/20230825 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034102 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034103 ISBN: 978-1-032-39064-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-39065-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-34826-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003348269 Typeset in Sabon by MPS Limited, Dehradun

Contents

List of Contributors Introduction

vii 1

MAIJU LOUKOLA AND MARI MÄKIRANTA

PART I

Sites and sentients 1 Performing with trees as shifting attention

13 15

ANNETTE ARLANDER

2 Nomadic scenography and fictional space-body

30

LIISA IKONEN

3 Urban spaces between norms and dreams

47

MAIJU LOUKOLA

4 Spatial references of home – Moving on the periphery of public space

60

DENISE ZIEGLER

PART II

Aesthetics and practices 5 Photographic parafictions (an aside)

79 81

HARRI LAAKSO

6 Formation of artistic identity – Applying themes of narrative identity development in two artists’ life stories

96

MARI MYLLYLÄ AND JONNA TOLONEN

7 Temporal perspectives on Arctic peripheries EIMEAR TYNAN

110

vi

Contents

8 We, a peripheral time-space-body: Notes on encounterinvestigation, corpo-reality, and the gentleness of stones

125

CHRISTOPH SOLSTREIF-PIRKER

PART III

Visual culture rearticulations 9 Something is happening in and to the margins: Black and Brown cultural interventions changing a multiple Northern periphery

141

143

LEENA-MAIJA ROSSI

10 Touching gestures – An affective reading of a photograph of asylum seekers

156

MARI MÄKIRANTA AND EIJA TIMONEN

11 Can artists and lawyers see the same goal? Understanding the law of ecocide through art, articulations, and creativity

169

RAILA KNUUTTILA

In memoriam Ari Hirvonen—Balcony: a peripheral space between intimate and political

181

ARI HIRVONEN

Index

184

Contributors

Annette Arlander (DA) is an artist, researcher, and pedagogue. She is one of the pioneers of Finnish performance art and a trailblazer of artistic research. She was a professor at the University of the Arts Helsinki and, between 2018 and 2019, a professor in performance, art, and theory at Stockholm University of the Arts. At present, she is a visiting researcher at Academy of Fine Arts University of the Arts Helsinki. Her research interests include artistic research, performance-as-research, and the environment. Her artwork moves between the traditions of performance art, video art, and environmental art. Liisa Ikonen (DA) is a scenographer and a professor of design for the Performing Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland. Her research focuses on alternative scenographic work methods and applied forms of scenography. Her professional background is in both experimental and institutional fields of theatre and performing arts. Maiju Loukola is an artist-researcher (DA) and a university lecturer at the doctoral program at the Academy of Fine Arts, UNIARTS Helsinki. Her artistic practice focuses on site- and situation-sensitive urban space installations. Her research interests include the aesthetics, politics, and speculative practices of urban environment examined in relation to democratisation of space, peripherality, and senses. She is the head of the City as Space of Rules and Dreaming research project in which she studies spaces of coexistence in the polemical and in-disciplinary crossings of normative and imaginary site formation. Denise Ziegler is a visual artist, teacher, and researcher of public space. Currently, she is working as a university lecturer in sculpture and 3D studies at Trans Disciplinary Art Studies at Aalto University, Finland. Her artworks and research explore questions related to the public infrastructure, to walls, fences, buildings, and pedestrian routes. In a post-Beuysian vein, the artist’s workshop extends into public space to work with its mechanisms and possibilities. Through experimental and experiential artistic interventions, her works point to traces of gestures, of human activity, and of something that has occurred. Her artistic work and research is practice-based, and it includes three-dimensional combinations of objects and sculptures, drawings, paintings, lectures, writings, video works, and literary-visual works. Harri Laakso studied photography, visual arts, and art theory in New York, Helsinki, and Chicago and obtained his doctor of arts degree in 2003. Currently, he is an associate professor of photography research and the head of the Department of Art and Media at Aalto University, Finland. He is an artist, researcher, and curator

viii

Contributors

interested in photographic images and theory, in artistic research, and in images’ relations to words and performative actions. He has led and participated in many artistic and research projects (e.g., Figures of Touch 2009–2012) and curated and cocurated exhibitions (e.g., Backlight Photography Triennials 2002–2008; Grey Matters in Finnish Museum of Photography 2007; Falling Trees in Finnish and Nordic pavilions at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013). He has published many texts related to photography and contemporary art in academic contexts as well as in artists’ books. He is presently chair of the Editorial Board of RUUKKU Journal of Artistic Research. Mari Myllylä (PhD, cognitive science) works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She partakes in research projects that aim to develop a governance framework for the ethical application of artificial intelligence and intelligent systems in sustainable operations. She has also been a visiting researcher at the University of Granada, Spain. In her PhD dissertation (2022), she studied the representational information contents of the embodied mind in the experience of graffiti art. Now, her research focuses on what and how people think about climate change, erroneous and risky thinking, and the information contents of thought models. Jonna Tolonen is an artist-researcher who combines aesthetic, ethnographical, and action research practices through an inquiry into embodiments and environments. She studied graphic design and photography in Canberra, education and fine arts in Oulu, and received a PhD in art and design at the University of Lapland. She has been a visiting researcher at different universities and educational centres such as the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the Finnish Institute of Athens and has participated in long-term artistic research projects such as Floating Peripheries and Artivism on Edges. Eimear Tynan is an associate professor of landscape architecture at the Academy of Arts at The Arctic University of Norway. She completed a doctorate at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design in 2022. In addition, she holds a master’s in landscape architecture from both University College Dublin and The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. She has previously practiced as a landscape architect in Ireland and Norway over a ten-year period, which has helped to shape, inform, and develop her research interests. Christoph Solstreif-Pirker is a professor of aesthetic education at the University College of Teacher Education Styria, Graz, Austria, and a practicing artist working on performative research, encounter investigations, painting, drawing, sound, and text. He received his PhD in architecture and contemporary art from Graz University of Technology and an MA in philosophy and psychoanalysis from the Global Center for Advanced Studies. As an artist-theorist, he engages with the traumatised planetary layers in an affirmative, compassionate, and specifically feminine form of practice. He has lectured, exhibited, and performed worldwide, with his work appearing in various publications.Currently, he focuses on psychotherapeutic training and is preparing his monograph on Matrixial Breath and Ettingerian Environmental Ethics. Leena-Maija Rossi (PhD) is a feminist researcher based in Helsinki and Rovaniemi, Finland. Currently, she works as a professor of gender studies at the University of Lapland. Her research interests include politics of intersectionality, queer theory and

Contributors

ix

activism, post-coloniality, decolonization, and critical studies of whiteness, as well as different forms of visual culture from advertising, film, and television to contemporary art. She has been teaching gender studies since the early 1990s. In addition to her academic work, she has also served as the executive director of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and curated numerous art exhibitions, which have been presented in Europe, the United States, and South America. Mari Mäkiranta is a researcher-artist is a researcher-artist and visual culture scholar with a background in feminist studies, socially engaged art, and art activism. She is a docent at the University of Jyväskylä and an associate professor at the University of Lapland. Her work explores visual culture, gender, and peoples’ living environments, and it involves collaboration with communities, scientists, and activists. She has received several research grants, including organisations such as the Academy of Finland and Finnish Cultural Foundation. Currently, she is a Principal Investigator in Artivism on Edges – Art, Activism and gendered violence project granted by the Kone Foundation (2022–2026). She is an editorial board member of Ruukku – Studies in Artistic Research and an advisory board member of Northern Photography Center. Eija Timonen is an emeritus professor of media studies at the University of Lapland and an adjunct professor at Aalto University in the Department of Film, TV, and Scenography. She has led several national and international research projects, among others the screenwriting research project The Aristotle in Change, funded by the Research Academy of Finland. For the last ten years, she has photographed the complex structures of ice, and the outcomes of this activity have been seen in different exhibitions and articles. Raila Knuuttila (MA) is a doctoral researcher in Arctic in a Changing World – doctoral program at Lapland University, Finland. The topic for the research Knuuttila is conducting is the Law of Ecocide Law and creatives and the art world contributing to the campaign during the years 2021–2025. Ecocide Law is an initiative for criminalizing ecocide in the International Criminal Court to create an international legal framework for protecting ecosystems. Many creative projects are taking place to support and innovate for environmental work, and the timely aspect of these years now motivates constructive effort and creative solutions that bring together different sectors of societies. Ari Hirvonen was an adjunct professor in legal philosophy and theory and a university lecturer in the Faculty of Law at the University of Helsinki (13/11/1960–28/6/2021). He (LLD) led several cross-disciplinary projects, including City as Space of Rules and Dreaming and The Law and Evil. His burning research interests included radical democracy, social justice, refugees’ rights, and the ethics of tragedy. He was a founding member of Helsinki Lacan Circle that began as a study circle in the 1990s and became over 30 years of love, friendship, and intellectual collegiality over the excuse of Lacan’s Seminars. He was also dedicated to activist work and giving concrete legal advice to refugees and asylum seekers. He has published extensively on philosophy, psychoanalysis, art, abolitionism, legal and political philosophy, and Greek tragedy.

Introduction Maiju Loukola and Mari Mäkiranta

The Figurations of Peripheries Through Arts and Visual Studies: Peripheries in Parallax examines peripheries as both concrete and immaterial phenomena, and as practices and epistemologies that are in different ways framed in the discursive, epistemic, or spatial margins. In an age where different peripheral societal, political, and cultural phenomena tend to be overwhelmed by centralized systems and mediated global assumptions, various ‘marginal’ and ‘extreme’ phenomena have become pressing subjects of political and social debate, as well as in everyday human and more-than-human interaction. The book offers new ground for understanding peripheries and peripherality by proposing a multidisciplinary cross-exposure through a collection of texts by researchers in artistic research, aesthetic theory, and visual studies. The collection challenges the hierarchies and biased assumptions of ‘peripheries’ within the respective disciplinary fields. The main objective of the book is to recalibrate the multidimensionality and hidden potential of the notion of peripherality appearing in different artistic, social, and cultural contexts. Parallax (παράλλαξις parallaxis, ‘alternation’) is here understood as a displacement of a conception viewed from two or more different positions or disciplines. The book suggests a parallax viewing where different social, ecological, political, and philosophical issues are an integral part of the process – not as given, but as transformative, produced, and articulated as essential parts of research. By offering a crossexamination through a variety of material, discursive, and aesthetic practices, the book experiments with and elaborates further ideas related to identities, agencies, authorships, subjectivities, and ethics within and beyond the Anthropocene, thus dissolving the distinction between the material and the textual-discursive spheres. Our hypothesis is that ‘periphery’ and ‘peripheral phenomena’ are characterized by an in-betweenness that needs to be negotiated in each specific case over again. This way the book calls to question the borders of peripheries themselves. Focusing on the socio-political, aesthetic, artistic, and ethical implications of the peripheral approach makes visible some of the existing, hidden, often incommensurable, and controversial margins in society at the micro and macro levels from equal, ethical, and empathic perspectives. Materialities are understood in the book as part and parcel of a materially oriented research approach, where materials such as cultural images, representations, urban space, legislation, embodiment, and gender are seen as mobile and flexible. In this sense, our thinking runs parallel to that of materialist thinking and is congruent with the ontological turn away from dualism and towards change, movement, and non-essentializing ways of apprehending the world. In the era of ecological crisis, the book is anchored to the geological epoch of the Anthropocene, understood as an aesthetic event that has implications beyond merely being reduced to a scientific fact – but that are DOI: 10.4324/9781003348269-1

2 Maiju Loukola and Mari Mäkiranta rather affective, imaginative, and productive in ways intrinsically interlinked with morethan-humans, plants, climate, ethics, equality, and justice. The book asks how the visual, practical, and artistic cases can reframe and reposition agendas and actions to address crucial questions of marginalities, politics, and aesthetics, and the understanding of centres and peripheries in global, geographical, material, and practical contexts. Through situation-specific cases that tackle specific questions and challenges via artistic research and artistic practice, visual analysis, and political action, the book offers a mapping of diverse methodological and theoretical analysis for better understanding today’s complex phenomena through a peripheral lens. Part I: Sites and Sentients tackles peripheries and peripheral approaches through four contributions attached to situated approaches tied to material-practical and discursiveconceptual sensitivities that relate to more-than-human sensitivities, site-sensitive artistic and nomadic practices, and urban environment. The chapters address questions that shape our understanding through aesthetic experience and spatial practice and explicate how our coexistence is interdependent with sites and those ‘others’ occupying them. Site in this sense can refer to anything from a personal location to actual geographical site to a universal perspective. Peripheral sites are discussed in terms of conditions, contextual framings, and institutional/non-institutional settings. Part I of the book contributes to the epistemic discussion by suggesting experimental approaches, methods, and practices framed as artistic research, often characteristically performative, transformative, and material-discursive.1 The texts resonate with some of the key theoretical discussions activated in past decades in the fields of performing and visual arts and their study. The ethos of ‘staying with the trouble’ introduced in Donna Haraway’s classic text echoes in Arlander’s ‘Performing with Trees’ study, as it does in Ikonen’s subtle activism in the frame of nomadic practice, where the body of the artist-researcher shares the performative agency with the more-than-human co-performers, the vegetation, and the environment.2 The post-humanist and new materialist approaches can be seen as having been embedded in artistic and art-based research approaches from day one, as artistic practice is materialbased, tactile, and hands-on by essence. In recent debates, these approaches have found new and more nuanced articulations that have advanced the understanding of discursivity and reasoning in arts-based research processes and in respect to their methodological relevance. Experimental and interdisciplinary ways of connecting and staging seemingly different discursive fields are not atypical for art-based research in an academic context. Such is the case in Loukola’s chapter, where art and law are brought into encountering with shared object of study: city as both artistically and legally practiced space. Artistic practice is characteristically a reflexive practice that makes the boundaries between arts and other discursive fields make way for the emergence of unconventional methods and non-propositional forms of reasoning.3 In Ziegler’s case, art is the ground practice and frame for methodical experiments with a variety of everyday events, objects, and movement, and the object of study also keeps moving as the process of varying the experiments proceeds. Annette Arlander’s chapter ‘Performing with Trees as Shifting Attention’ opens the first part of the book by staging vegetation – plants and trees – at the centre of attention. Arlander comments that even though performing with plants might seem peripheral to the core concerns in arts, the climate crisis and the urgently related post-humanistic and more-than-human discourses demand intense and acute attention. We no longer have the choice to ignore the existing conditions. A recalibration of the means and ethics of

Introduction

3

human and non-human coexistence is in need, at the least. Arlander contributes, with her artistic research project ‘Performing with Plants’ (2017–2019) to ‘art’s return to vegetal life’ and in more broad terms to the current debate around ‘plant turn’ in science, philosophy, and environmental humanities. She respectfully performs with the seemingly sessile, yet sentient beings and discusses the ethical considerations involved with the help of an example of hanging in pine. ‘Performing with Plants’ can be discussed in the contexts of performance art, environmental art, media art, and areas between them, as well as artistic research. In terms of cultural studies, Arlander names as relevant fields performance-as-research and performance studies, critical plant studies, environmental post-humanities, and media studies, and sees the project in many ways positioned in the discursive and artistic margins. They likewise problematize the position of working at the periphery of a discipline of performance art, making visible the oxymoronic characteristic of peripherality itself – as what is peripheral in one field, can be basic and common in another. In their chapter, Harri Laakso articulates this impossible possibility embedded in peripherality in terms of ‘asideness’ in his article in the second part of the book in the context of dislocatedness in the practice and theory of photography. Working with plants has called attention to further areas specifically focusing on the vegetal such as plant rights, plant philosophy, studies on the language of plants, queer plants, and more. Arlander’s constellation forms at the same time as a manual of ‘things to consider when collaborating with the vegatal’ and as a mapping of related performative artistic research practice in detailed dialogue with a tree, with this certain tree. What unfolds are fundamental considerations of identities, agencies, ownerships, and subjectivities, and perhaps with the most intensity and emphasis, the possibility of forming an ethically sustainable collaboration relationship with the more-than-human entities – one that acknowledges the very otherness in an-other sentient being such as a plant, a tree, or another representative of an alien entity. Liisa Ikonen’s ‘Nomadic Scenography and Fictional Space-Body’ joins the discussion addressing the agential efficacies of more-than-human actants in the interplay between us with the other others. Ikonen’s study is located at the intersection of performing arts and their spatial-scenographic practices and a related posthuman and (other) ontophilosophical debate. The more-than-human discourse has radically changed the ways of perceiving the notion of body, materiality, and agency in the context of performing arts. Drawing from these debates and the ontological shift they, according to the author, have suggested, Ikonen addresses an ‘inter-beingness’ between different actors and entities, where both human and other actants play key roles in creating spaces, places, and situations. Through their own artistic and scholarly practice as a scenographer in the performing arts, Ikonen seeks to turn upside down the conception of scenography understood as a redemption of a given representational goal by means of visual and spatial metaphors. This Ikonen calls a ‘default setting’ of scenography, understood as design desk work that is fully authored by the scenographer-designer and realized in a physical appearance in advance before the actual performance is nowhere near being performed. Ikonen looks at scenography not as a practice of manufacturing, imitation, or representation, but rather as an event of becoming, as a process-led act of wandering and formation, where situated situations and materialities have their essential say. Ikonen links their expanded practices of scenography to questions of place and placelessness, and to the very dislocatedness (and in that sense: peripherality) of the re-thought working processes themselves. The discursive links are found to the post-dramatic and

4 Maiju Loukola and Mari Mäkiranta post-studio tendencies in the performing and visual arts studies during recent decades, as well as to those regarding the conceptions of presentational-representational schemes and distributed agencies. In their artistic research project ‘Nomadic Scenography’ project, Ikonen explores the parameters of distance and wandering by way of hiking in a natural environment. Methodically, their study joins a broader discourse related to the walking practices in arts, as well as land art, and likewise has roots in ideas praised by the wandering souls in early Romanticism philosophy, such as Henry David Thoreau and JeanJacques Rousseau. Maiju Loukola’s ‘Urban Spaces Between Norms and Dreams’ tackles the city as a polyphonic space-time that forms and becomes constantly re-structured in a polemical relationship between different actors, interests, and goals. Loukola approaches the city first and foremost as its inhabitants’ space and as an object of utopian thinking, memories, and dreams. The author highlights the hidden, multisensory, bodily, imaginary, and affective aspects that remain overlooked in the regulation-driven urban processes and looks at the city as a ‘practiced space’ – specifically through the interrelated operations by practices of art (the aesthetic-sensuous-affective-imaginary) and law (the regulatory-administrativelegal-normative). Both art and (urban) law manifest themselves in material-spatial dimensions – in architecture, walls, squares, and thoroughfares. The chapter also tackles the discipline-specificity of language and singular concepts, such as ‘normativity’ or ‘intervention.’ These concepts are loaded quite differently in the practices of art and in the practices of law. Loukola argues that addressing two seemingly dissenting discourses offers a staging of an effective tension, where it is possible to acknowledge both registers’ own inner logic while respecting their differences in an ethical way. Loukola proposes means for practicing city space in ways where the throughoutadministrative urban space is encountered with the affective, emotional, and temporal traces through mental and physical experiences and experiments. They present two cases where, by means of artistic intervention and spatial practice, urban space can be liberated from its normative, regulatory purposes and alternative views for seeing, using, being, enjoying, and dreaming the city may emerge. The author points out a necessity to understand that the law not only restricts or prohibits but can be part of the urban processes aside from those highlighting the affective potential of the city. Thus, rather than seeking to transcend, erase, deny, or surpass the role of law and regulations in the processes of urban space formation, Loukola aims to make some of the mechanisms and conceptions of both the aesthetic-sensuous and the regulatory-normative visible and contestable through acknowledging some of the confluences within them. Loukola’s chapter joins a wider debate regarding to whom, under what conditions, and further, in relation to which discursive fields of inquiry and practice, does the city – as a shared, lived, loved, ruled, contested public space – belong. The discursive undercurrents of the article touch on recent debates in law and legal theory, where the notion of ‘spatiality of law’ plays a noteworthy role. In the words of legal theorist Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, ‘the city operates a law’s megaphone.’4 When stressing materiality and embodiment as significant parts of urban placemaking, affect theories offer a non-institutionally driven and in this sense peripheral way for understanding how urban space forms through processes both administrative-social and experiential. Contemplated through a parallax view where the tense relationship of artistic space, administrative space, and political space collide, another kind of picture of a city forms, one that allows the city to be understood more concretely as a temporal-spatial entity where differently motivated practices take place.

Introduction

5

Denise Ziegler discusses in ‘Spatial References of Home – Moving on the Periphery of Public Space’ the perception of the notion of home in an urban environment today and points out how the notion of home is increasingly connected to moving in and through public space. Instead of focusing on the geo- or socio-political aspects of the theme, Ziegler’s main objective is to explore the actions and feelings in public space that are connected to what she calls a notion-of-home-in-movement. Through her own artistic research practice, Ziegler focuses on the actions and ways of moving in public space that reveal the characteristics of feeling at home. The author presents four experiential artistic operations, each with a specifically developed artistic method of inquiry; first, a lensbased ‘zooming in’ method where the notion of home is disconnected from a permanent, physical location and instead to the human body and its movement. Secondly, Ziegler uses a method of observation where people’s movement in public space is regarded through a performative lens. The third method translates the observations into an aestheticized form by bringing them into the realm of conceptual art. Last, Ziegler reflects collectively, and in dialogue with others, on the feelings that come about between the absence and presence of home in different situations. Ziegler’s study stands in the middle of a situation where the notion of home cannot be taken for granted for an increasingly growing part of the world’s citizens. The undercurrent echoes effectively in between the lines, serving as impressive evidence of art’s distinctive ability to voice out urgent worldly conditions in its own right. As Ziegler points out, the notion of home may change repeatedly during one’s lifetime, and the relationship to our dwelling sites has a complex and multi-layered history. The conceptions of what belongs to the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres and sites are far from simple. Stressing the transformative processes of feeling at home, Ziegler proposes a conception that goes beyond understanding home attached to a physical place and asks: What is home was simply introduced as an experience of moving in an open space, as a relation to the encountering of things and changing situations that took place in this space? Ziegler’s hypothesis is that the notion of home is a phenomenon that emerges from the fringes of our relationship to our surroundings. Ziegler’s artistic research practice entails their own video and conceptual artworks, collaboration with other artists, ‘consulting with’ philosophers, and other scientists – all these components form essential parts of her fieldwork and study. The artworks’ role is not to represent the artist-researcher’s ideas but to act as a parallax as they allow the audience to ‘navigate through and experience the forming of a new understanding’ of their own moving about in public space. Ziegler makes a parallel observation between the abstraction embedded in both the notion of home and conceptual art. They both ‘need new metaphors in order to get new insights into them.’ An artistic viewpoint can act as a channel to recalibrate our relationship to our environment through experiences as if served before us from a specific perspective, distinctively. Home stands here for the attempt of the individual to connect with the surroundings. Part II: Aesthetics and Practices is opened with an experimental essay by Harri Laakso, who brings in ‘Photographic Parafictions (an Aside)’ into a parallax viewing and to the same literary space with both the theory and apparatus of photography. Laakso discusses photography theory as a process similar to focusing with a range-finder camera used in analogue photography, where one has to take into account a ‘parallax error’ between what is seen through the viewfinder and the image that the camera actually records through its lens. The closer one looks, the greater the disparity and the need for parallax correction. Laakso’s experimental essay creates an experimental literary-visual

6 Maiju Loukola and Mari Mäkiranta space where different practices of ‘asideness’ are brought side by side into discussion, to contest, address, and experiment with some of the key notions in artistic-practical and theoretical-philosophical interplays between photography and the world, images, and real things. The essay compiles as a contemplation that reaches beyond being reduced to representational dichotomies between imaginary and real. Aside from the processual nature of photography (and other) theories – i.e., the practice of photography theory – Laakso brings fore, in a similar vein, the notion of periphery ‘as practice.’ Periphery as a practice is fundamentally dislocated and displaced in a parallel vein as is the case in photography in its relationship with time and place. In current photography theory, the relationship between images and real things has proven a relationship far more intricate than what the ‘standard photographic theories’ seem to have been capable of disentangling and articulating. Photographic images are to be understood as fictions or image objects that are rather parallel to the world, than images of it. In their peripheric practice experiment with critical onto-epistemic contact points with both photography theories and philosophy, Laakso goes on questioning some of the key concepts topical in critical visual culture theories broadly, including the notion of ‘fiction.’ The author offers a conceptual de-tour through a notion borrowed from Carrie Lambert-Beatty, that of ‘para-fiction,’ which entails crossings and overlaps of the real and imaginary (things and worlds) – and as such is not reduced to (just another) theoretical exercise but reveals the necessary and ongoing negotiation needed in suggesting the differentiations between our ‘standard understanding’ of photographic images. Mari Myllylä and Jonna Tolonen discuss, in ‘Formation of Artistic Identity – Applying Themes of Narrative Identity Development in Two Artists’ Life Stories,’ the formation and development of artistic identities using the method of narrative identity as a psychological approach. Their investigation is based on interviews with two artists working in Finland, EGS and David Popa. These artists can be understood as pioneers in the field of graffiti, who have elaborated their artistic goals and expressions into new frontiers. Both interviewed artists have been working with less conventional art formats, either regarding their societal acceptability, mix of techniques, ephemeral materials, or even geographic accessibility. The artists have maintained their exploratory and experimental attitude as they are continuously discovering new ways of thinking about, doing, and presenting their art, while balancing between acting on the fringe of the art world and exhibiting art pieces that gloat in mainstream popularity. However, instead of presenting fractured images of the self, important life events where many occurrences, opportunities, and ideas appear to present themselves by chance are integrated into coherent life stories, where some aspects of identity change and others are affirmed. Growth in artistic identity and endeavours is also fuelled by the sense of agency, communion, and generativity. Artist identities and their different versions are constantly evolving, negotiated, and renewed, displaying chance, continuity, and change. Eimear Tynan’s study, titled ‘Temporal Perspectives on Arctic Peripheries,’ locates itself in a frame encompassing the notion of time, periphery, and the Anthropocene. In the chapter, the region is depicted as one that is changing and in motion rather than a static, foundational entity. Taking up Arctic peripheries, the related conceptions, and imaginaries from the premodern to the present, Tynan offers an analysis based on the accounts provided by explorers and the early cartographers of the Arctic. Tynan examines Arctic peripheries, the peripheries of peripheries, even in geological perspective, inspired here in particular by the fossils found on Bjørnøyan Island. Tynan’s reading ends with the present geological age, known as the Anthropocene. Tynan’s research

Introduction

7

shows in sweeping temporal perspective how Western man has ‘learned’ to efficiently use and exploit nature, the environment, and fellow beings. This conception of the human being has reached its peak in the debate on the Anthropocene: The human race is seen as a geological force, one with impacts on the planetary scale.5 The Anthropocene can be located in the mid-1700s and the beginning of industrialization, in the nuclear weapons tests and the greatly intensified exploitation of natural resources.6 And indeed, as we write this book, we find ourselves in an age where the omnipotence and exceptionality of human beings have reached their peak. The carrying capacity of our planet is reaching its limits. This trajectory is reflected in the Arctic more so than elsewhere, as it is geographically, geologically, and culturally distinctive. It has been claimed that the ravages of climate change are being and will be seen most readily in the sensitive environment found in the North. Rapid warming of the climate has disrupted ecosystems and weather patterns, with dramatic consequences for the life and existence of both human beings and non-human organisms. The neoliberal ideology and era of privatization have had an impact on both local communities and individuals in the Arctic, with this resulting in redefinitions in the respective meanings of the state and the economy, the collective and the individual, and public and private.7 In Tynan’s analysis, these redefinitions have extended to centre and periphery as well as nature and culture dichotomies and their deconstruction in different temporal contexts. The Arctic finds itself in the midst of a transformation from being viewed as a remote region to being a global centre as climate change advances and geopolitical interests change. It has been claimed that the neoliberal mindset depoliticizes questions of power and renders the political field static and devoid of options.8 As Tynan examines, the changes that have occurred in climate, geopolitics, and ecology do not reflect a stagnation but rather planetary forces with ongoing impacts. The role of the researcher is similarly dynamic – in the chapter, climate change emerges as one of the critical issues of the historical, geologically fluid era and of contemporary politics. In Tynan’s practice and analysis, politics does not refer exclusively to institutional or public politics but especially to the micro level, in the sense that it encompasses movements, changes, and forces in an individual’s research, environment, and personal life. Christoph Solstreif-Pirker continues the political and personal aspects in a study of different temporal contexts and notions of politics in constructing images of landscapes. In the author’s performative presentations, multiple-exposure photographs and sound installations representing different historical periods present the viewer with a radically different Alpine landscape. The seemingly unmarred and idyllic surface is revealed to be a stage making manifest traumas, historical facts, and the World War and political struggles of the 1940s. Solstreif-Pirker questions the boundaries of states and counties as they are being shaped in the Western, neofascist, geopolitical atmosphere. Going from place to place in the Swiss Alpine landscape and spending time in an artist residence, the idyllic landscape begins to reveal conflicting scenes beneath the surface: One is the image of Polish soldiers who built roads in lower locations in the Alps in the 1940s. These are still known as ‘Poland roads’ [Polenwege], and they form an extensive road network and infrastructure, on which are etched the fate of young soldiers, their displacement, insecurity, war-related traumas, and sense of isolation. What is particularly interesting in Solstreif-Pirker constructing the image of the landscape is the presence of a silenced and invisible history and a laying bare of the traumas and unhealed wounds. What emerged from under the ambivalent layers of the image of the landscape is not unqualified or

8 Maiju Loukola and Mari Mäkiranta ahistorical but, rather, one that is scarred and riddled with gashes. The image of the landscape also entails a potential for doing research and doing art in which the issues of landscape, border, and country are challenged and given a different significance. The landscape is a site offering the researcher-artist an encounter unveiling responsibility for themselves and others, for the planetary, and for the ethical principles of encounters. The approaches adopted by Tynan and Solstreif-Pirker both enable a reconsideration of the relation between human beings and nature. Implementing different art practices such as photograph exhibitions, sound installations, recordings, and performances in landscapes or in a place creates an experiential, corporeal, and spatial-temporal relation with what is being studied. In artistic practices, space, place, landscape, and body readily take on the layers of meaning that artistic research seeks: viewing the phenomenon in surprising contexts that depart from the ordinary. Art practices also develop the ethicalaesthetic thought of the artist-researcher and ways of doing research that convey a responsibility for others and demonstrate the importance of understanding temporal layers of history. It is clear that in committing ourselves to the development narrative and belief in Enlightenment Era’s progress, we have lost our connections to many local cultures, people, and alternative ways of knowing and being in the world.9 Through the insights they put forward, Tynan and Solstreif-Pirker prompt us to ponder what type of spirituality, coexistence with nature, and mental connection with the land we possess. The chapters betoken the alliance between the artist-researchers and nature: nature, people, and ecological systems, working in concert, shape the world we live in. Tynan’s and Solstreif-Pirker’s ideas also proffer alternative co-ordinates for our view of time. Where the Anthropocene entails the image of the human current in the 1700s, an unbounded belief in progress, and the subjugation of nature, these artists embody a commitment to achieving and challenging a profound connection with nature and to the modern development narrative. Part III of the book, Visual Culture Rearticulations, opens with Leena-Maija Rossi’s study ‘Something is Happening in and to the Margins: Black and Brown Cultural Interventions Changing a Multiple Northern Periphery.’ The chapter discusses the music videos of the rap artist Yeboyah and the media platform the Brown Girls. Yeboyah’s videos and the Brown Girls’ journalism are interesting phenomena in the cultural field of Finland and the Nordic countries more broadly. The ‘Nordic countries’ have long been constructed around the myth of homogeneous Whiteness. In visual productions such as mainstream films, journalism, and popular music, the perspective and content have long been those of White people. Rossi’s critical look at race and account of the activism driving Yeboyah’s and the Brown Girls’ antiracism question and challenge configurations sustaining a racially homogeneous and monolithic Whiteness. The chapter references a broader societal and cultural struggle over girls’ and women’s rights, visibility, and representations of racialization and ethnicity. Also, at issue is how important it is to bring out historical understanding and diversity, such as accounts of the Nordic countries as inhabited by minorities such as the Sámi, Tatars, and Romani populations.10 Representations are not merely innocent cultural performances; rather, they produce and construct what we consider reality and what kinds of values, attitudes, and ideals we associate with different groups of people.11 In research in and on intersectional feminism, racism, antiracism, and race relations, it is crucial that we train our attention on visual performances whose power in producing racialized and gendered meanings is best not underestimated. How Black and Brown girls and women are presented affects how they

Introduction

9

are seen and how they see themselves. The salient point here is that the journalism of the Brown Girls is journalism by Brown girls for Brown girls. Rossi’s research brings an important perspective into a debate by reflecting on how racialized presentation of gender may not only damage and injure but may prompt resistance, and serve as forces driving change. Rossi’s dialogic practice challenges the reader to reflect on the researcher’s own position as a White person and to contemplate what kind of knowledge one can produce from such a privileged status. Dialogic practice also requires genuine and constant interaction with Black communities: Members of the Brown Girls have read and commented on Rossi’s text. Rossi’s dialogic practice is an aspect of feminist solidarity, which one can practice not only in one’s private life but publicly as well. Applying the thinking on feminist solidarity as put forward by Tiina Seppälä,12 dialogic practice, like feminist solidarity, refers to the need for knowledge of marginalized women and knowledge production together with them. This may reveal structures that might otherwise have remained obscured. It can, for instance, bring to the fore racist misidentifications, structures contributing to inequality in society, and political power relations. The following contribution, a reading of a photograph showing Congolese women and asylum seekers, continues problematization of how Western Whiteness is produced in relation to racialized, non-White Others. Much as Rossi’s reading is dialogical and disengages itself from the practice, common in humanistic art research, of analyzing its object of study, Mari Mäkiranta and Eija Timonen undertake to engage with the people in the photograph rather than rendering it an object of study. Titled ‘Touching Gestures – An Affective Reading of a Photograph of Asylum Seekers,’ the chapter offers a multisensory and affective reading of the photograph, one that frames in different ways of viewing it and provides a critique of these. The focus of the study is the researchers’ self-reflection, the emotions aroused by the picture, and challenging subject-object positions. Cultural researcher and feminist Sara Ahmed13 describes such self-reflection as ‘one way of becoming good white people,’ with antiracism being performed ‘right,’ starting from and within the White world. Mäkiranta and Timonen do not shy away from the idea that the White researcher’s gaze may, despite its wellmeaning gestures, or precisely because of them, can reproduce racist and othering significations. In fact, the affective and multisensory approach sets out to reveal the tensions that are associated with the figure of a female asylum-seeker with an African background. Ahmed continues that in places where most of the people are White, the difference is both marginalized and foregrounded. Diversity is praised, and, at the same time, gender, race, and a refugee background may entail marginalizing and degrading significations. Today we live in a context where we see the models of art research and research on visual culture – and of the entire Western university institution and culture – being shaken by a spirited debate on decolonization. This makes it essential to have ways of reading that are antiracist and require critical self-reflection on the position of the White researcher. Research and researchers in the pages of this book, like all others, are now forced to reassess their starting points. A dialogic way of reading and affective reading does not represent unassailable approaches in the pursuit of decolonialist aims. In fact, they sooner represent searches for or experiments in the name of alternative research methods. What we see are several ways of producing knowledge that are dialogical and based on engaging with an Other as well as of dismantling the hierarchies embedded in research. As Mäkiranta and Timonen demonstrate, an effective reading is part of the

10

Maiju Loukola and Mari Mäkiranta

researcher’s corporeal emotional reaction. This reaction is shaped in a corporeal experience, in ways of seeing, and in relation to culture – in places repressed and meanings. The researcher’s interpretation thus does not form solely in the individual’s body and experiences but in the conflux of two or more material subjects, lived places, representations, cultural meanings, and communities. In the case of dialogic practice and affective reading, it must be said that elaborating alternative ways to read is in no way a particularly easy task. Many of us have reproduced for decades the doctrines we learned in researcher training and developed methodologies that sooner sustain than dismantle colonialist practices. The narrative of progress and being a rational human being that was created in the 1700s persists stubbornly not only in art research and art history in the humanities14 but also in conceptions of nature. The 1700s saw not only the emergence of Eurocentric ideas of fine art but also nature-related notions of progress and of the endless exploitation of nature. In the chapter Can Artists and Lawyers See the Same Goal? Understanding the Law of Ecocide through Art, Articulations, and Creativity, Raila Knuuttila poses a challenge to the modern narrative of development and conception of nature as nothing more than an economic resource. Knuuttila is a founding member of the Ecocide Law campaign, which works to criminalize environmental crimes and to make the legal process criminalization entails more accessible to the public at large. As a researcher-artist, Knuuttila tries to recognize local cultures, epistemologies, and ways of argumentation. Knuuttila produces an understanding of ecological catastrophe and biodiversity loss drawing on the means of activism, art, and research. In the chapter, the content of art and international criminal law becomes juxtaposed through a tension between them. Despite their different form of expression, art and law seek the same outcome: a more ecological and just world. Mika Elo,15 who has examined the epistemologies of artistic research, writes that alongside art and research one sees questions of the societal links of art research becoming more pronounced. The themes of focal interest are cultural and social sustainability and nature’s carrying capacity. The chapters in Part III of the book bring to the fore aspects of art and research that have remained hidden from view: critical understanding relating to Whiteness, new epistemological and methodological openings, radical challenging of the modern development narrative, and modern concepts of nature. Part III of the book invites us to engage with the urgency of contemplating the role of the artist and researcher in nature conservation of the future and antiracist work and to develop theory and methods that address these challenges better than we have done to date. Rising to this challenge requires, as political science researcher Tiina Seppälä16 writes, that researchers wean themselves from some of their academic privileges and traditional scientific practices. In post- and decolonial literature this has been referred to as ‘epistemic disobedience,’ which makes it possible to challenge Western, White, and masculine ways of producing knowledge. In much the same way, feminist criticism, which is born of a diversity of experiences of subjugation and resistance, can change our conception of science, the subjects of knowledge, ontology, and epistemology. This requires a critical appraisal of different subject positions and mindfulness of the fact that phenomena should be presented as unvarying, complete, or given. The third part of the volume, titled Visual Culture Rearticulations, can be located in a theoretical shift in the field of culture and art research. Hanna Johansson,17 a researcher on contemporary art and art history, has pointed out that the post-structural paradigm of cultural and art research, which hails from the 1960s, has emphasized that reality is utterly a product of discourses and representations. In this book, for instance, Rossi’s

Introduction

11

and Knuuttila’s thinking adheres to this paradigm – their chapters apply theories of representation and argumentation, whose underlying ontological assumptions lean on social constructionism. The paradigm emphasizing discursivity and representation-based thinking has been criticized for its ignoring the dimensions that lie outside the discourses and representations. The area falling outside language and the capacity for language has also been dealt with as part of the criticism of the post-structural concept of the subject. For example, the philosopher Rosi Braidotti,18 feminist researcher Sara Ahmed,19 and cultural researcher Elsbeth Probyn,20 rather than drawing on discursivity have conceptualized a subject as taking form corporeally and materially. One feature of the chapters in Part III is that the researchers dissociate themselves from a rigorous social constructivist framework. They discuss the tensions and conflictual dimensions that emphasize the discursivity, materiality, and sensuality of written language, images, and works of art. Conceptions of nature and cultural meanings, imaginaries, and ways of speaking associated with gender, corporeality, and race construct what we consider reality, but these also have a material foundation. Mäkiranta and Timonen move in their thinking between the approaches of representation research and materiality-oriented research. Material inspired by ideas, such as images, subjectivity, works of art, and stories, are constantly in motion and can sooner be seen as being constantly reshaped than as unchanging and foundational. Mäkiranta and Timonen’s thinking here has links to ‘new’ materialist feminism and the ontological ‘turn’ characterized by an effort to abandon dualism and look towards change, movement, and a non-essentializing way of perceiving the world. It is these qualities relating to the dismantling of race-, gender-, culture-, and nature-related dichotomies that we see in the chapters making up Part III. The book ends with an In Memoriam Ari Hirvonen. Hirvonen’s contribution is a draft text, which he wrote as an extended abstract. The text exposes an opening for considering the balcony as a peripheral space between intimate and political. Maiju dedicates the book to Ari Hirvonen, who passed away way before his time while this book was in its early phases. Mari thanks her daughters, Venny and Helga Tanninen for bringing feminist debates to her everyday lives. We invite our reader to not only read but to experience and sense these words and peripheral, feminist, and multi-layered art and visualities in Peripheries in Parallax. Notes 1 See for example Borgdorff 2013, The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. 2 Haraway 2016. 3 See Latour 2007; Borgdorff, Peters & Pinch 2020. 4 Philippopoulos‐Mihalopoulos 2007. 5 Lummaa & Rojola 2014. 6 Pp. cit. 33. 7 Keskitalo-Foley & Naskali 2013. 8 Sinevaara-Niskanen 2015. 9 Seppä 2021. 10 Keskinen 2018; Keskinen, Skaptadóttir & Toivanen 2019; Puuronen 2011. 11 Hall 1997. 12 Seppälä 2017. 13 Pp. cit. 14 Seppä 2021.

12 15 16 17 18 19 20

Maiju Loukola and Mari Mäkiranta Elo 2022. Seppälä 2017. Johansson 2010; Grosz 1995. Braidotti 2006. Ahmed 2004. Probyn 2005.

References Ahmed, Sara. Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Borgdorff, Henk. The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2013. Borgdorff, Henk, Peters, Peter & Pinch, Trevor. Dialogues between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies. Routledge, 2020. Braidotti, Rosi. Transpositions. On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Elo, Mika. “Three phases of artistic research.” Ruukku Journal. Studies in Artistic Research, 18, 2022. http://ruukku-journal.fi/en/issues/18/voices/mika-elo Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion. Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage Publications & Open University, 1997. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Johansson, Hanna. ‘Liikkuvan kuvan materiaalisuus ja haptinen representaatio’, in: Tarja; Lehtinen & Aki-Petteri Nuuttinen (eds.) Representaatio: Tiedon kivijalasta tieteiden työkaluksi, Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 196–213, 2010. Keskinen, Suvi. “The ‘crisis’ of white hegemony, neonationalist femininities and antiracist feminism.” Women’s Studies International Forum 68, 157–163, 2018. 10.1016/j.wsif.2017.11.001 Keskinen, Suvi, Skaptadóttir, Unnur Dís & Toivanen, Mari (eds.). Undoing Homogeneity in the Nordic Region. Migration, Difference, and the Politics of Solidarity. London: Routledge, 2019. Keskitalo-Foley, Seija & Naskali, Päivi. “Tracing Places and Deconstructing Knowledge.” In Seija Keskitalo-Foley, Päivi Naskali & Pälvi Rantala (eds.) Northern Insights. Feminist Inquires into Politics of Place, Knowledge and Agency. Rovaniemi: LUP, 7–15, 2013. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Lummaa, Karoliina & Rojola, Lea. Johdanto: Mitä posthumanismi on? InKaroliina Lummaa & Lea Rojola (eds.) Posthumanismi. Helsinki: Eetos, 13–32, 2014. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. Law and the City. Abingdon/Oxon and New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007. Probyn, Elspeth. Blush. Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Puuronen, Vesa. Rasistinen Suomi. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2011. Seppä, Anita. “Miten kertoa uudelleen ihminen ja edistys? Pohdintoja eurooppalaisen korkeakulttuurin afrikkalaisesta alkuperästä.” In Hanna Johansson & Anita Seppä (eds.) Taiteen kanssa maailman äärellä. Kirjoituksia ihmiskeskeisestä ajattelusta ja ilmastonmuutoksesta. Helsinki, PARVS & Taideyliopisto, Kuvataideakatemia, 48–99, 2021. Seppälä, Tiina. “Naiset, aktivismi ja feministinen solidaarisuus.” Politiikasta.fi, 2017. http:// politiikasta.fi/naiset-aktivismi-ja-feministinen-solidaarisuus/ Sinevaara-Niskanen, Heidi. “Vocabularies for human development: Arctic politics and the power of knowledge.” The Polar Record 51(2), 19, 2015.

Part I

Sites and sentients Maiju Loukola, Mari Mäkiranta, and Jonna Tolonen

1

Performing with trees as shifting attention Annette Arlander

Working at the periphery of a discipline, or at the intersection of several fields, in an inbetween position, can be both central and marginal at the same time. As with inter­ disciplinary and cross-disciplinary endeavours in general, such an in-between position can be problematic. What is marginal, exceptional, and therefore interesting in one field can be basic and commonly known in another. Moreover, moving from one area to another is more difficult than one would imagine. For the project to be discussed here, such areas or fields would be performance art, environmental art, and media art and the border zone between them, as well as artistic research more broadly. In terms of cultural studies, some relevant disciplines could be performance-as-research and performance studies, critical plant studies, and environmental post-humanities or even media studies. Performance art as a medium or as an area of interest is peripheral in the contexts of both performing arts and visual arts or fine art and placed in the intersection between them. Performance art practices that involve performing for camera are marginal, because most performance art has traditionally been concerned with the embodied and ephemeral encounter between the artist and the audience, or the viewers. Due to the recent pandemic, however, and the increasing need to explore digital forms of communication, the situation has changed, and performing for camera in one way or another, often in live streaming, is more and more common. Performing with plants might seem utterly peripheral to the core concerns of visual, performance, or media art, although historically there is no lack of artists engaging with plants, from vegetally inspired music or ornamentation on textiles, pottery, and archi­ tecture, to paintings, poems, and science fiction stories of plants. Living plants are used as material in practices as divergent as garden design, sonification, floral arrangements, and contemporary bio art. Today plants and vegetation are receiving increased attention in the context of the current climate crises and the rapid extinction of species. The growing interest in plant studies, to some extent as a further development of the burgeoning of animal studies, is influencing artistic research as well. The emerging field of critical plant studies has been linked to ‘art’s return to vegetal life’ and to looking at plants in art.1 Ethical discussions have focused on plant rights,2 plant philosophy or plant thinking,3 plant theory,4 the language of plants,5 queer plants,6 and more.7 There is an abundance of popular accounts of scientific research on plant sentience, intelligence, memory, and communication.8 With recent developments in plant science, artists, too, are looking at plants in new ways. Due to the debates concerning biopolitics and post-humanities, this marginal interest is suddenly placed close to the heart of current concerns in many fields. How to perform with plants is a question of utmost interest, and not only, or even mainly in terms of art. DOI: 10.4324/9781003348269-3

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Annette Arlander

Practicing in a park While preparing the artistic research project called Performing with Plants,9 I was not fully aware of the extent of such interests. The most important inquiries I wanted to explore were: 1) How can I collaborate with nonhuman entities like plants? 2) How can I further develop experiences from previous attempts at performing landscape? 3) How can I create actions with plants, in which humans can be invited to participate? The overarching research topic was: How can I perform landscape today by collaborating with trees and other plants, with an awareness of the insights generated by posthumanist and new materialist debates? Thus, I asked questions such as what can I do together with trees, how can I perform together with trees for the camera on a tripod, and how can I appear in the same image space with trees? I sought to combine my previous practice of creating rough time-lapse videos to document changes in the landscape with a focus on trees. As part of this three-year project,10 I made time-lapse videos with specific trees, first both in Helsinki and Stockholm, then in Stockholm only.11 In this text I present one part of the project, performances with trees made in Stockholm during the year 2018 (Figure 1.1), and I focus on some of the ethical dilemmas involved. By post-humanist debates, I refer to the critique of the legacy of European humanism as summarized by Rosi Braidotti12 and others. They see that legacy as a tradition that separates the so-called civilized Western ‘man’ from other forms of life and denies such others, including plants, all agency and consciousness. Within the broad spectrum of new materialist thought, I have been particularly interested in the agential realism of physicist and queer theorist Karen Barad, who continues the work of Niels Bohr, and critically develops the ideas of thinkers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler. In Barad’s account, the differential boundaries between humans and nonhumans, culture and nature, science and the social, are constituted through causal intra-actions. Intra-action is her term for ‘the mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ which, unlike the common term of

Figure 1.1 Hanging in a pine (video still). Photo by the author.

Performing with trees as shifting attention

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interaction, stresses the fact that ‘distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action.’13 Different intra-actions produce different phenomena, and who or what is excluded through them matters.14 I have explored the idea of intra-action in the context of artistic research elsewhere.15 Due to the current climate crisis, however, it has become ever more important to acknowledge our co-constitution with other life forms, including plants. Working with urban nature or nature-culture16 often means dealing with the peripheral also in a literal sense, strolling on the outskirts of a city, in parks, wastelands, or recreational forests. Here, however, I will describe repeated visits to a small wood in the centre of Stockholm, where I was performing for a camera on a tripod with trees. The small wood called Lill-Jansskogen, ‘Little Jan’s Wood,’ is placed right in the centre of Stockholm, between the campuses of the Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University. The area looks like a small forest, but is in fact part of a park, northern Djurgården, and is in itself an example of the peripheral in the centre. The hilly woods are maintained in a seemingly unkempt condition, with lots of dead trees left lying to serve a variety of species, at the same time as the path is lined with streetlights to help runners and walkers keep up with their training all year. I chose this area for my practice mainly because it is right next to DOCH – the Dance and Circus School of the University of the Arts Stockholm, where I was based in 2018. In this small wood, I made a round where I stopped at four sites repeatedly, visiting two spruce stumps and two pine trees, sometimes three times a week (100 times in all). The performances were recorded by a video camera on a tripod and later edited into rough time-lapse videos. Removing the entering and the exiting from the image creates an impression of a continuous action or pose. Each visit was documented with still images from the videos on the project website.17 In all performances I wore a pale pink woollen scarf, and in three of them, I posed immobile with my back towards the camera to make the human figure more impersonal. At the first site, I sat on an old spruce stump with the felled trunk still attached to it, relatively close to the camera. At the second site, I sat on a small spruce stump on the ground among tall spruce trees, this time further away from the camera. At the third site, I first swung and then just hung from the branch of an old pine tree, with the aim of exploring continuous movement, which I had previously explored by sitting in a swing. At the fourth site, I sat in a small pine tree on the slope next to a path, almost hidden between its branches. Although my principal aim was to perform for the camera to produce time-lapse videos, I was inevitably performing for passers-by as well. Especially the dogs were interested in my unusual behaviour. Repeated visits and respect for the site The purpose of these repeated attempts at performing, posing, or appearing with trees was to explore how one might perform with plants while respecting their sense of time, by visiting them in their own place, and how to collaborate with plants. Whether such posing or appearing together can be called collaboration is questionable, though, because the trees or stumps had no option but to collaborate. Collaboration would probably need some more substantial acts to benefit the trees, as in practices of gar­ dening.18 Through the act of repetition, however, a specific type of bonding occurred, which hints at the possibility of developing another kind of relationship with trees and with vegetation more generally.

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Within performance studies, such performances could be considered marginal at best.19 These repeated visits could nevertheless be analysed as performances on several levels: in terms of repetition as a mode of performing, in terms of site-specific per­ formances for occasional passers-by in urban space, in terms of posing for the camera as a silent witness and placeholder for future viewers, or in terms of appearing with plants in a more general sense. While singular poses create surprise performances for passersby, repeated visits form a recurring and therefore recognizable performance for the frequent users of the area. Moreover, they have performative power while functioning as a habit-forming activity for the performer. The video recording serves as a selective documentation of the live event or as a mode of gathering and preparing material for the video works as performance. The activity of editing is a performance as well, albeit not publicly displayed as one. Presenting the edited video in various contexts and circum­ stances as well as online form performances in their own right. The weekly documen­ tation of the process with still images and blogposts on the project website could be called an artistic research performance. And finally, writing an account of the process and the videos here forms an academic performance as well. The most important performance was probably the exchange of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other chemicals that I performed with the surrounding vegetation, the transcorporeal exchanges taking place during each visit, to use the notion proposed by Stacy Alaimo.20 She understands ‘human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world,’ and ‘underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from “the environment.”’21 Her notion trans-corporeality emphasizes ‘movement across bodies’ and ‘reveals the in­ terchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures.’22 She notes that it also aids in cultivating ‘a tangible sense of connection to the material world in order to encourage an environmentalist ethos’ and in counterbalancing the tendency to treat ‘“environmental issues” as containable, eccentric, dismissible topics.’23 Within critical plant studies or environmental post-humanities such a project, which explores the possibility of performing or posing repeatedly for camera together with trees, could be linked to ‘art’s return to vegetal life,’ to use the subtitle of Prudence Gibson’s book The Plant Contract.24 Many recent studies are looking at plants and art, with the journal Antennae devoting several issues to plants.25 Despite scientific research into plant sentience, however, and the popular attention on the topic, there are not many studies on plants and performance, with a few exceptions.26 Due to the veritable ex­ plosion of performances with plants recently, more studies are to be expected to follow the recent issue of Performance Philosophy27 focusing on plants. Elsewhere I have tried to distinguish various ways of performing with plants, such as plants performing for humans, humans performing for plants, humans performing as plants, and plants per­ forming as humans, as well as think of whether the performances take place in human spaces of display, in places where plants grow, or entangled in the same organism.28 Trees are harder to move around, but plants and vegetal growth are often used as material for various types of artworks in galleries or museums. In the examples discussed here, however, I have chosen to perform with plants, or rather trees, on the sites where they grow. As sessile beings, plants are sensitive to place; their life is literally site-specific. We could say that trees are experts of site-specificity in their manner of adapting to cir­ cumstances. A plant is ‘an organism that has formed itself by informing itself with the environment that supports it.’29 And, as philosopher Michael Marder points out: ‘All

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radically contextual thought is an inheritor of vegetal life.’30 One way to perform with sessile beings like trees, respecting their specific sense of time and space, is to visit them repeatedly, as I have done in several projects over the years. Therefore, two character­ istics are important for this practice, namely the idea of repeated visits and the idea of visiting the plants in the place where they grow. The practice has evolved over time, informed by specific contexts. Sitting on the spruce stump was partly inspired by my experience of sitting on an alder stump in Helsinki the previous year, as a sculptural gesture of sorts. In working with pine trees, I drew on my experiences in Nida Art Colony in September 2017, where I performed with various pine trees that cover the dunes.31 In hanging from a pine tree repeatedly for a year, I continued the work I did twelve years before during the previous year of the dog, in 2006 and 2007 on Harakka Island and in Kalvola. In Year of the Dog – Sitting in a Tree (2007)32 I sat in a pine tree on Harakka Island once a week from 7 January 2006 to 11 February 2007. And in Year of the Dog in Kalvola – Calendar33 I was hanging from and leaning against an old pine tree in Kalvola once a month during the year 2006. The idea of swinging from the branch of the pine was also a continuation of my swinging experiments in previous years, starting with Year of the Snake – In the Swing34 2014, albeit without a swing; I wanted to try to create the movement only with my body. Swinging can relatively easily be edited into a continuous movement, which supports the flow from one image to the next. Despite variations and several attempts over the years, the problem remains unresolved: How to perform with plants in a reasonably ethical manner? Think of the choice to sit on a spruce stump; if I really would respect trees as living beings, sitting on a corpse would be rather weird. Regardless of this disrespect, there is no way for me to know what a tree wants on anything but a very general level; I assume it wants to live, grow, and spread; enjoys sunlight; prefers a specific range of temperature and humidity, and probably also the company of fungi and microbes; and so on. Another ethicalaesthetical dilemma is the balance between the human performer and the tree in the image space. The human easily dominates in the framing. Moreover, movement tends to draw attention. One could ask, in what way am I really performing ‘with’ the tree? Or am I rather using the pine tree as my structural support, as the backdrop for my per­ formance, as my ‘site’? Am I utilizing or exploiting the situatedness of the pine tree to situate myself? Or could my use of the pine tree be understood as simply seeking the help of the pine tree in experiencing the site? Usually, I think of my work as a practice that moves in the periphery of and the border zone between performance art, video art, and environmental art. After writing about my work for camera in the context of dance and somatic practices and expanded chore­ ography,35 I noticed there are other possible contexts or border zones such as screen dance. One might suggest that even a simple movement like hanging from a tree is an instance of dance. Or that recording an action like repeatedly hanging in a tree on video and constructing an illusion of continuous movement with the help of editing is an example of work made specifically for the screen. Since the durational movement takes place only in the edited video, this could be understood as an example of screen dance in a very basic and minimal sense. Another aspect, however, might be more provocative, namely the question of who the performer is. Could the pine tree I am hanging in and repeatedly recording be considered a performer, or a co-performer? The question ex­ pands the proposal by Silvia Vitaglione36 to consider natural elements as materials rather than as a backdrop, in her discussion of site-specificity and screen dance. What if natural

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elements like trees or plants are not only materials to be highlighted in contact with the body, but actually co-performers to work with? As in the case of performance in general, one can of course ask how far it is meaningful to expand a notion, artform, discourse, or discipline; how much energy is it worthwhile to spend in the margins, on issues peripheral to the field? Is there a point where one risks losing the specificity of the form by casting the net too wide? In the current era of climate crises and debates concerning post-humanism, new materialism, and decoloniality, re­ garding plants as our co-performers, our allies in maintaining the planet in a livable condition for humans as well as for other animals, is a relevant topic. Expanding our sense of who and what can perform, whether screen dance or performance art, and to consider vegetal beings such as trees in that context is not as far-fetched as it first might seem. Next, I will present one experiment, a video based on the material created during the third stop on my round in the woods in Lill-Jansskogen, Hanging in a Pine (2019), and a lecture performance turned video essay based on that material as the starting point to discuss the possibility of addressing the pine as a co-performer. ‘Hanging in a Pine Tree or Appearing with Plants’ was a video essay (19 min 31 sec) created for the performance philosophy conference in 2019,37 where the organizers invited a broad range of artistic and activist experimentations and interventions. I tried to address the question of how to perform with plants focusing on the ethical dilemmas involved, which I deemed might be interesting in a philosophical context.38 Hanging in a pine tree The video essay ‘Hanging in a Pine Tree or Appearing with Plants’39 demonstrates and discusses how to perform with trees, as an intervention into dominant notions of who and what can perform. Within our ongoing performance of trans-corporeal exchanges40 with vegetation in the world, deliberate artistic performances can be developed to intervene in the continuous disregard of plants. In a blog post on 17 March 2018,41 I wrote: [A] … surprise … , almost a shock, awaited me on the top of the hill by the pine tree. Somebody had broken my swinging branch! Well, the pine’s branch, that is, the branch I normally swing on and hang on was broken … and the remains lay scattered on the ground … My first reaction was a rather paranoid one, that somebody had deliberately broken the branch to prevent me from continuing swinging on it, or even worse, to put a blame on me for hurting or damaging the tree. I immediately realized this was a rather far-fetched idea and examined the broken branch. I could still hang on it as usual; what exactly had happened? Pieces of the branch were lying on the ground as if after a battle. Could it be that somebody had looked at the images online and then wanted to try swinging themselves, but had grabbed the branch too far away near the tip, rather than close to the trunk? Not very likely, but somebody might have seen my repeated footsteps by the tree and therefore decided to try it out, but was much heavier than me, or was careless with the branch. That is perhaps the most likely explanation, but in each case, I have some ethical responsibility for what happened. Although the broken branch would not influence my practice in any catastrophic way, I felt deeply sad for the accident and somehow responsible for it. Despite the flourishing scientific research into plant sentience,42 and the popular attention on the topic,43 there is no way for me as a performer to know what a tree

Performing with trees as shifting attention

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wants, on anything but a very general level. How then to perform together in a reasonably ethical manner? How can we act or perform with creatures, with whom we cannot communicate directly, or even ask for their consent for posing for a camera with them? Ironically, in Performing with Plants I have tried to follow some basic rules of thumb, like 1 Try not to hurt the plant – choose plants that are bigger than you, stronger than you, plants that can share some of their energy with you – like trees. 2 Visit the plant where it grows; respect its particular relationship to place. 3 Spend time with the plant. Visit it repeatedly. Although you cannot share the temporality of the plant, respect its relationship to time. In this case, the plant and co-performer was an old pine tree that I visited repeatedly for one year, from 16 February 2018 to 4 February 2019, that is, the Chinese year of the dog, performing for a camera on a tripod with it. The pine grows on a hill in Lill-Jansskogen or Little Jan’s Wood, in the centre of Stockholm, in an area popular with runners, walkers, and dogs. Unlike my usual manner of sitting in, or on, or with a tree, as an immobile, faceless figure, in these performances with the pine I tried to first swing and then hang from a branch to explore movement – and that immediately brings attention to the human performer. While editing I combined all swinging images and all hanging images to create two versions of the video. The hanging version is perhaps more in tune with the time of the pine than the swinging version, which really is an intervention44 or interruption in tree time, if we can use such a term. Our collaboration is rather one-sided, however. The pine tree does not need me or anybody else to hang from its branch, but I do need the pine tree – in more ways than one – to be able to perform. On 16 June 2018,45 I wrote: Sitting on a spruce stub or swinging on the branch of a pine tree are probably not the first activities that come to mind hearing the term ordeal performance. Funny enough, they too can turn into an ordeal, especially the sitting-on-the-stub part. /--/ I realized I had to endure the fact that mosquitoes were climbing around on my face, searching for the best spot to inject their nose and suck out some blood. I tried to breathe slowly, resist my reflexes, and think that the nuisance would be over soon. /--/ but while I was … trying to relax as they were sucking my blood it really felt like an ordeal, albeit in miniature. /--/ In … Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire, I read his summary of available stories of the human “relationship” with nature … : “There’s the old heroic story, where Man is at war with Nature; the romantic version, where Man merges spiritually with Nature (usually with some help from the pathetic fallacy); and, more recently, the environmental morality tale, in which Nature pays Man back for his transgressions, usually in the coin of disaster – three different narratives (at least), yet all of them share a premise we know to be false but can’t seem to shake: that we somehow stand outside, or apart from, nature.” (Pollan 2002, xxv) /--/ A fourth kind of story, what could that be? No story at all, only images? A story of hanging in a pine tree for a year? That would be an ordeal performance, for sure, but this continuous hanging is created by editing. It is a fake, a joke, not even an illusion, but a story. A story of dependence? Or perhaps an intervention in time? These performances with a pine tree form one part of Performing with Plants, an artistic research project, which started with the question of how to perform in a landscape today, focusing on plants and especially trees. It soon evolved into exploring what it means to be

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‘performing with’ entities unlike us. For philosopher Michael Marder, in his book Plant – Thinking. A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, ‘the dispersed life of plants is a mode of being in relation to all the others, being qua being-with’ and thus ‘we have a lot to learn from plants that have mastered this way of being … ’46 Or, to put it in the words of Donna Haraway: ‘We become-with each other or not at all.’47 And we, here, does not refer to humans only. A new materialist and post-humanist perspective prompts us to consider how the world consists of creatures, life forms, and material phenomena with varying degrees of volition, needs, and agency. Performing ‘with’ plants is an example of the problem of living with life forms unlike us that we nevertheless are completely dependent on. To understand per­ forming as appearing together, in the same city as well as in the same image space, is perhaps a way to begin to practice acknowledging this dependence. Using the word performing, we assume an intentional act, a subject-forming activity, where the performer is produced in the performance. Appearing need not be intentional in a similar manner. Probably not everybody would agree that plants perform, but there is no doubt that they appear. The interesting question is, can humans appear with them? In Swedish performing or appearing on stage, ‘uppträda,’ literally means ‘stepping up,’ or ‘treading up.’ Appearing can also be translated as ‘framträda,’ ‘treading into the front,’ or to come out. Perhaps we can ‘tread up’ or ‘tread into the front’ in the image together, the pine tree and I, without assuming more wilful acts than setting up the camera as witness. The possibility of performing as appearing, without an intention to perform something or as something, is even clearer in Finnish, where two words are used for performing. The transitive form ‘esittää’ is used when you perform something or as someone, and the intransitive ‘esiintyä,’ when you are performing yourself in the sense of appearing, being on display. In Finnish the word does not necessarily have the philosophical connotation of appearance as opposed to truth or reality, but is concerned with being visible, fore­ grounded (‘esillä’). Perhaps this distinction between the two modes of performing, ‘the showing doing’ and the ‘showing oneself’ or ‘being shown,’ appearing, can help us see how the pine tree performs. We are on display together, the pine tree and I. We perform intransitively; we are being shown, although movement tends to take over the viewers’ attention in this case. Am I thus forcing the pine tree to join in the current selfie-culture, a continuous selfpresentation, self-representation, self-entrepreneurship, and self-development in the hope of future gains? That seems like the opposite of the dispersed life of plants. The idea of occurring or appearing with plants actually resonates with Marder’s suggestion that ‘plants articulate in their language devoid of words … [f]irst of all, themselves … they reaffirm vegetal being, which, through them, becomes more spatially pervasive.’48 He notes how ‘plants articulate themselves with themselves,’ but they also ‘articulate the burgeoning emergence, or self-generated appearance,’ thus ‘demonstrating how a being can come into the light, appear, and signify itself.’49 If this is the case for plants, why not for human beings as well. Could I not try to appear and signify myself together with the pine? Marder combines artistry with plants. ‘To assert that plants are the artists of sensuous appearances, … is to claim in the same breath that they are the artists of being,’ he notes. ‘In effect, plants create and recreate themselves all the time … They are performative creatures par excellence, the artists of themselves.’50 And more than that, they are the true experts in site-specificity, because ‘[v]egetal self-creation and self-recreation takes its cues from the conditions outside … without a rigidly predetermined organismic plan,’ he adds. ‘The artistry of plants that make themselves is, therefore, of one piece with the world.’51 On 3 December, 52 I wrote:

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Reading “The Wretched Earth – Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions,” an introduction to a special issue of Third Text53 by Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh is eye-opening and also inspiring, because it gathers together so many artistic projects dealing with plants, soil, agriculture, resistance to corporate colonialism and environmental degradation. Sitting on a spruce stump [or hanging in a pine], without explicitly taking a stand regarding current practices of monocultural forestry, feels utterly naive and pseudo-innocent. And that is nevertheless the only thing that seems somehow within my reach now … . /--/ What else can you do at this time of year, except to hope for the midwinter darkness to come (and go) as soon as possible – hopefully with some snow! Does this make sense to you, pine? When looking at the images I realized that I hardly know you despite seeing you regularly, often three times a week for a whole year. I have been placing my tripod on the rock nearby, framing the image according to the lines formed by some of your neighbours, trying to keep it constant from one session to the next, not always as exactly as I would have wished. And then swinging from your broken branch, moving my knees as much as possible to exaggerate the movement, then hanging for a few breaths, looking up through your crown. As an ending, I always touched your trunk, as if to say ‘thank you’ or ‘forgive me my intrusion’ or something like that. But you never answered in any manner that I would understand. Not that I expected you to. And then I returned to the camera and stood there recording an image of you on your own for a while. The idea was to perform together, to pose for the camera together, to appear together in the image space. But I never really asked for your consent, or perhaps I asked, but did not wait for your reply. In the images, you remain in the background, as a supporting structure, only partly visible. Most of you and all of your crown is actually cropped out of sight. My movement is catching the attention, actually on purpose; the vigorous or soft swinging of the human body carries the continuity from one meeting to the next, across shifts in framing, changes in light, and the passing seasons. It is nevertheless strange that I know so little about you. Sometimes I wondered about the red mark on your trunk. Was it something accidentally painted there, or to mark the path, or was it a sign that marked you for felling, like the ones they used in timber marking? Nowadays they mark the ones to be saved, I hear. You look very healthy and stand on the hill away from the main path. Why would they cut you down? And you survived the Alfrida storm at the beginning of January, unlike many of the spruces further down the slope. On 11 January,54 after the storm, I wrote: The first working week in Stockholm in the year 2019 and the first visits to LillJansskogen provided quite a shock – the storm Alfrida really had left its marks; plenty of trees lying around uprooted, and many trees also cut into pieces because they had fallen across the path or on electric lines. /--/ Up on the hill, with the pine trees, the storm had not left that many marks. After my last visit to Lill-Jansskogen, on 3 February,55 I encountered another kind of surprise: … when I wanted to add the images recorded in January, I realized the session recorded on 25th January, the one with heavy snowfall, was missing. The still-images

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Figure 1.2 Hanging in a pine (video still). Photo by the author.

captured from the videos were there in the folder where they should be, but the video clips were nowhere to be found. I looked in all likely and unlikely folders, … the other external hard drives, no! I must have destroyed them by mistake, how irritatingly stupid of me! I tried to insert the still-images in the video, and of course that could be done … (see Figure 1.2). Was that how you felt when losing your branch? Or did it hurt more, like breaking a nail? Or even worse, like breaking a bone? In any case, you probably sensed it somehow … and the truly pathetic, bizarre fallacy is imagining that you would not mind. After writing this I returned to the woods to fetch a part of the branch that I assumed would still be lying on the ground after almost a year, to keep it as a token, a piece of evidence, a souvenir … Addressing the pine Although I did not mention it in the text, I planned to carry the broken branch with me to perform together with it, as a substitute of sorts, and even packed it in plastic for the transport. When recording the text and adding it to the video, I abandoned the idea of performing with the branch, using it as a prop, as it were, which would have been a rather strange gesture, anyway. After the presentation at the conference, there were indeed some interesting discus­ sions about ethics, continuing, for example, Laura Cull’s56 discussion of interspecies performances with animals, as well as some conversations about the problem of repre­ sentation. Representation is often in focus when talking about theatre (and politics), with the assumption that the ones represented are not present on stage themselves. When presenting the video essay to the audience, the pine tree was, of course, represented by video images. Despite creating representations in the form of video works, one of my

Performing with trees as shifting attention

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main aims is to focus on the performative dimension and move beyond representations, to attend to the tree, not a representation of it, and to the tree as that specific tree, not a representative of trees or plants in general. The most important moment in this experiment of creating a video essay by com­ bining the video work, notes written during the process, and some reflections afterwards into one whole was the moment of addressing the tree. There is a moment in the text where I turn my (and the viewers’ or readers’) attention to the pine and ask: ‘Does this make sense to you pine?’ Although completely fictional and written afterwards, this shift to direct address became almost like a turning point in my practice, the beginning of another way of performing with plants, which considers trees as subjects to be addressed rather than ‘subjected objects’ to be represented. This shift in attention, this subtle gesture, led me to experiment with writing letters to trees and to begin a completely new project called ‘Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees.’57 But that is already another story … . Links to documentation of the project Performing with Plants / Att uppträda med växter, project website https://www. researchcatalogue.net/view/316550/316551 [accessed 30/9/2022] Artistic Research in Stockholm / Konstnärlig forskning i Stockholm, blog https:// artisticresearchinstockholm.wordpress.com [accessed 30/9/2022] Documentation of performances in Lill-Jansskogen https://www.researchcatalogue. net/view/316550/410491 [accessed 30/9/2022] Published project outcomes (a selection) https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/ 316550/709778 [accessed 30/9/2022] Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

Gibson & Brits 2018; Gibson 2018; Aloi 2018. Hall 2011. Marder 2013; Irigaray & Marder 2016; Coccia 2019. Nealon 2016; Myers 2017. Vieira, Gagliano & Ryan 2015; Kranz, Schwan & Wittrock 2016; Gagliano, Ryan & Vieira 2017. Sandilands 2017. Two recent issues of Antennae (52/2020 and 53/2021) are devoted to vegetation and art, and an issue of Performance Philosophy Journal (2021) is focused on plants. Pollan 2002; Mancuso & Viola 2015; Wohlleben 2016; Chamovitz 2017; Gagliano 2018; Simard 2021. The project was funded by the Committee for Artistic Research at the Swedish Research Council and hosted by the Stockholm University of the Arts. A preparatory year in 2017 was funded by Kone Foundation and hosted by the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at Helsinki University. My visits to some Elms and an alder stump in Helsinki in 2017 have been discussed in Arlander 2019b, while visits to a beech (or rather a hornbeam) and a sycamore in Stockholm in 2017 are discussed in Arlander 2020b. The visits to a Tatarian maple in Stockholm in 2019 are discussed in Arlander 2021. Braidotti 2013, 13–25. Barad 2007, 33. Barad 2007, 58. Arlander 2014. Or natural cultural assemblages, Haraway 2016, 38.

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17 Documentation of performances for camera in Stockholm 2018, video stills ( Arlander 2016) https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/316550/410491 ( Arlander 2016). 18 See for example Natasha Myers (2017) ideas of the planthropocene. 19 There have been some attempts at discussing plants and performance within performance studies, see for example Nikolić and Radulovic (2018), Brisini (2019), and Arlander (2020a). 20 Alaimo 2010, 3. 21 Alaimo 2010, 2. 22 Ibid. 23 Alaimo 2010, 16. 24 Gibson 2018. 25 See Aloi 2011a, b, 2020 and 2018. 26 For example, Nikolić & Radulovic 2018; Brisini 2019. 27 Performance Philosophy, Plant Performance Vol 6, no 2, 2021. 28 Arlander 2020a, 124–126. 29 Holdrege 2013, 115. 30 Marder 2013, 169. 31 Arlander 2019a. 32 Year of the Dog – Sitting in a Tree (2007) http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/year-of-the-dogsitting-in-a-tree/ 33 Year of the Dog in Kalvola – Calendar (2007) http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/year-of-thedog-in-kalvola-calendar/ 34 Year of the Snake – In the Swing (2014) https://www.av-arkki.fi/works/year-of-the-snake-inthe-swing/ 35 Arlander 2018a; 2018b. 36 Vitaglione 2016, 106–107. 37 “Between Institution and Intoxication: How does Performance Philosophy Intervene?” at University of Amsterdam 14–17.3.2019. 38 The making of and the differences between the videos Hanging in a Pine and Swinging in a Pine and their combinations are discussed in Arlander 2019c and Arlander 2020c. 39 The following text is a slightly rewritten version of the voice-over text for the video essay, Hanging in a Pine – with text https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-work?work= 592026 40 Alaimo 2010, 3. 41 Shock or surprise? https://artisticresearchinstockholm.wordpress.com/2018/03/17/shock-orsurprise/ 42 Myers 2015. 43 Wohlleben 2016. 44 Becky Hilton pointed this out at the Stockholm Uniarts research week in January 2019. 45 An ordeal performance in miniature https://artisticresearchinstockholm.wordpress.com/2018/ 06/16/an-ordeal-performance-in-miniature/ 46 Marder 2013, 51. 47 Haraway 2016, 4. 48 Marder 2017, 120. 49 Marder 2017, 122. 50 Marder 2018, n.p.n. 51 Marder 2018, n.p.n. 52 Return of the rainy days https://artisticresearchinstockholm.wordpress.com/2018/12/03/ return-of-the-rainy-days/ 53 Gray & Sheikh 2018. 54 After Alfrida https://artisticresearchinstockholm.wordpress.com/2019/01/11/after-alfrida/ 55 Last Visits to Lill-Jansskogen https://artisticresearchinstockholm.wordpress.com/2019/02/03/ last-visits-to-lill-jansskogen/ 56 Cull 2019. 57 Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees https://meetingswithtrees.com

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References Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures. Science, Environment and the Material Self. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010. Aloi, Giovanni. Beyond Morphology. Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. 2011.18 (Autumn), 2011a. http://www.antennae.org.uk [accessed 30/9/2022] Aloi, Giovanni. Vegetal Entanglements. Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. 2020.51 (Summer), 2020. http://www.antennae.org.uk [accessed 30/9/2022] Aloi, Giovanni. Why Look at Plants? Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. 2011.17 (Summer), 2011b. http://www.antennae.org.uk [accessed 30/9/2022] Aloi, Giovanni. (written and ed.). Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art. Critical Plant Studies 5. Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2018. Antennae. The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. http://www.antennae.org.uk [accessed 30/9/ 2022] Arlander, Annette. “Behind the Back of Linnaeus – Bakom ryggen på Linné,” RUUKKU Studies in Artistic Research, vol 14 (2020b). 10.22501/ruu.470496 https://www.researchcatalogue.net/ view/470496/470497 [accessed 30/9/2022] Arlander, Annette. “Beyond the Saturation Point – Repetition and Difference in Performing with Trees,” VIS Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, 2021. https://www.en.visjournal.nu/beyondthe-saturation-point/ [accessed 30/9/2022] Arlander, Annette. “Breathing and Growth – Performing with Plants,” Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, vol 10, no 2 (2018a), 175–187. Arlander, Annette. From Interaction to Intra-action in Performing Landscape. Artnodes. no 14, (2014), 26–34. https://www.raco.cat/index.php/Artnodes/issue/view/23182 [accessed 30/9/2022] Arlander, Annette. “Performing with a Pine Tree,” In I Experience as I Experiment – I Experiment as I Experience. Experience and Experimentality in Artistic Work and Research, edited by Denise Ziegler, 15–26. Helsinki: The Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, 2019c. Arlander, Annette. “Performing with Plants – Appearing with Elms and Alder,” In Etappeja – Kuvataideakatemian tohtoriohjelma 20 vuotta Waypoints – The Doctoral Programme at Academy of Fine Arts 20 Years, edited by Mika Elo, Lea Kantonen, & Petri Kaverma, 33–56. Helsinki: Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, 2019b. Arlander, Annette. “Performing with Plants in the Ob-scene Anthropocene,” Nordic Theatre Studies, vol 32 (2020a), 121–142. https://tidsskrift.dk/nts/issue/view/8763 [accessed 30/9/2022] Arlander, Annette. Performing with Plants project archive (2016). https://www.researchcatalogue. net/view/316550/316551 [accessed 30/9/2022] Arlander, Annette. “Process as Performance or Variations of Swinging,” In Performing Process: Sharing Dance and Choreographic Practice, edited by Hetty Blades & Emma Meehan, 99–118. London: Intellect Books, 2018b. Arlander, Annette. “Resting with Pines in Nida – Attempts at Performing with Plants,” Performance Philosophy, vol 4, no 2 (2019a), 452–475. 10.21476/PP.2019.42232 https://www. performancephilosophy.org/journal/article/view/232 [accessed 30/9/2022] Arlander, Annette. “Visiting a Tree,” In Voices: Floating Peripheries Conference 2019 – Site and Situation, Maiju Loukola, Mari Mäkiranta, ‘VOICES_ruukku_peripheries/katveet issue: FLO­ ATING PERIPHERIES Conference 2019 – Sites and Situations,’ Research Catalogue (2020c). https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/757632/757633/0/0 [accessed 30/9/2022] Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2013. Brisini, Travis. “Phytomorphizing Performance: Plant Performance in an Expanded Field,” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol 39, no 1 (2019), 3–21.

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Chamovitz, Daniel. What a Plant Knows. A Field Guide to the Senses. Updated and expanded edition. New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Coccia, Emanuele. The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture. Translated by Dylan J. Montanari. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. Cull, Laura. “The Ethics of Interspecies Performance: Empathy beyond Analogy in Fevered Sleep’s Sheep Pig Goat,” Theatre Journal, vol 71, no 3, (September 2019). https://www.jhuptheatre.org/ theatre-journal/online-content/issue/volume-71-number-3-september-2019/ethics-interspecies [accessed 30/9/2022] Gagliano, Monica, Ryan, John.C., & Vieira, Patricia. (eds.). The Language of Plants – Science, Philosophy, Literature. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Gagliano, Monica. Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2018. Gibson, Prudence. The Plant Contract: Art’s Return to Vegetal Life. Critical Plant Studies 3. Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2018. Gibson, Prudence & Brits, Baylee. (eds.). Covert Plants. Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World. Santa Barbara: Brainstorm Books, 2018. Gray, Ros & Sheikh, Shela. “The Wretched Earth,” Third Text, vol 32, no 2–3 (2018), 163–175. 10.1080/09528822.2018.1483881 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09528822. 2018.1483881 [accessed 30/9/2022] Hall, Matthew. Plants as Persons. A Philosophical Botany. New York: Suny Press, 2011. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Holdrege, Craig. Thinking Like a Plant. A Living Science for Life. Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Book, 2013. Irigaray, Luce, & Marder, Michael. Through Vegetal Being. Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Kranz, Isabel, Schwan, Alexander, & Wittrock, Eike (eds.). Floriographie. Die Sprachen der Blumen. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2016. Mancuso, Stefano, & Viola, Alessandra. Brilliant Green. The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Washington: Island Press, 2015. Marder, Michael. “A Portrait of Plants as Artists,” Blog post in The Philosopher’s Plant, 2018. https://philosoplant.lareviewofbooks.org/?p=243 [accessed 28/10/2020] Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Marder, Michael. “To Hear Plants Speak,” In The Language of Plants – Science, Philosophy, Literature, edited by Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, & Patricia Vieira, 103–125. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Myers, Natasha. “Conversations on Plant Sensing: Notes from the Field,” NatureCulture, vol 03 (2015), 35–66. https://www.natcult.net/journal/issue-3/ [accessed 30/9/2022] Myers, Natasha. “From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing Gardens for Plant/ People Involution,” History and Anthropology, vol 28, no 3, (2017). 10.1080/02757206.2017. 1289934 [accessed 30/9/2022] Nealon, Jeffrey T. Plant Theory. Bio Power and Vegetable Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. Nikolić, Mirko & Radulovic, Nada. “Aesthetics of Inhuman Touch: Notes for ‘Vegetalised’ Performance,” RUUKKU Studies in Artistic Research, vol 9 (2018). 10.22501/ruu.372629 [accessed 30/9/2022] Performance philosophy journal. https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/index [accessed 30/9/ 2022] Pollan, Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-eye View of the World. London: Bloomsbury, 2002.

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Sandilands, Catriona. “Fear of a Queer Plant?,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol 23, no 3 (2017), 419–429. Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree. Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021. Vieira, Patricia, Gagliano, Monica, & Ryan, John (eds.). The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015. Vitaglione, Silvia. “New Materials: Natural Elements and the Body in Screendance,” The International Journal of Screendance, vol 6 (2016), 94–111. http://screendancejournal.org/ article/view/4939/4271#.XWv7u5MzYn0 [accessed 30/9/2022] Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees – What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2016.

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Nomadic scenography and fictional space-body Liisa Ikonen

Spatial relations, directions, and distances have always been among the most important basic units of my scenographic expression. Lines are endlessly interesting: they twist, turn, roll, and lead. They avoid permanence by generating movement and orientation towards something, but they also arouse curiosity by referring to something that is not yet here. The distances between the spaces, on the other hand, are full of tension and attraction, which activates action. While the physical scenographic composition always consists of directions and distances, I will now examine them as a source or foundation of artistic expression that precedes all design and decision making. I will open a view to the artistic experiment, in which I strive to experience distances and directions sensorywise and find such an approach to the spatial composition that would both be bodily and resonate with an environment. I bring to light the creative work phase that usually remains hidden from the end result, the goal of which was not to do spatial planning itself. It was a pure attempt, inspired by the phenomenon of distance, to find an alter­ native approach to my scenographic practice. By connecting my physical experiment to the wider philosophical discourse, I learned to understand how the mentioned spatial attributes are not only narrative, action-producing, and movement-directing, but also innovative and world-revealing (Figure 2.1). A journey to the periphery of design I wanted to explore distance through my own physical involvement by focusing on its ability to make scenographic suggestions in the creative process. In summer 2020, I carried out the one-person Nomadic Scenography research project, which focused on distance as a starting point for scenographic expression and on wandering as a place for creating sce­ nography. Through physical hikes, I tried to deconstruct the permanence of space and time in my scenographic work and to give scenography the opportunity to emerge in the con­ stant variation of the space-time relationship. The digitalization of scenography has been doing the same on stage for a long time, while designers’ working methods have developed to be largely technology-driven. In addition to the changes produced by the demater­ ialization1 of stage, my experiment raises a more ontological question of the space, place, or placelessness of the working process itself. I am asking how far scenographic work, conventionally understood as a proactive design work or a creative collaborative process, can break away from its own accustomed operating models. Is it possible for the sceno­ graphic work to distance itself from its typical event spaces – both the designer’s desk and the artist collective – and literally wander into a changeable and unpredictable space-time that has no evident connection to performance context or a space of performance? At the DOI: 10.4324/9781003348269-4

Nomadic scenography and fictional space-body 31

Figure 2.1 The rippling pulse of the water surface in the first hike in Varpusenlinna Island, Lake Päijänne. Photo by the author.

same time, my experiment also combines a wider philosophical question of the meaning of the environment and abandons the scenographer-subject. To what extent could scenog­ raphy emerge, as if peripherally, by being located away from the conventional design practices and taking place as an author-independent event? Scenography as bringing-forth My artistic research experiment was about rethinking the creative work process and questioning the position of desk work as the default for a scenographic process and sce­ nographer’s work. By the 2000s, I had already examined the formation of performance scenography when working with process-based methods. In the spirit of Martin Heidegger’s late-period thinking, I pondered what kind of foundation would hierarchically free and equal scenographic work require in relation to collective creative work. I wanted to find an alternative way of working, where the scenography was not conceived for a preplanned performance but could take shape or reveal itself more on its own terms. In this frame of reference, creative work appeared, above all, as a listening and receptive world relationship, along with the artist’s involvement in the emerging work. I equated scenog­ raphy with the concept of tekhne, that does not refer to making in the sense of manu­ facturing, but rather something that guides the physis, the all-encompassing being, to manifest as art in the event of bringing-forth.2 My aim was to consider scenography in terms of a disclosure, rather than imitation or representation. It was also a way of thinking about art and truth together, and a commitment to the notion of truth, where truth is not the correspondence of knowledge and object but an event of disclosure. Connection to the art of walking With nomadic experiments, I continue to examine scenographic bringing-forth, but in another way: as an event preceding the design, without an artistic collective, and more in the context of expanded scenography than the realm of performing arts.3 I approach scenography freely as a process of wandering and formation. In choosing hiking as a scenographic method, I join the broader discourse of art-travelling. Hiking and walking

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have long been part of the contexts of not only art but also cultural-historical obser­ vation. The art of walking can be considered to have been inherited from the Grand Tours of early Romanticism and the thinking of the philosophers of that period like Henry David Thoreau and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who praised freedom of movement. However, it has also been influenced by numerous other forms of observing nature and the landscape.4 The art of walking has developed into its current form, especially in the works of the early land artists of the 1960s, such as Richard Long’s long-distance walk, which can also be called embodied sculpture. Long’s artwork was formed from the totality of his own bodily experience, walked distances, and later gallery works con­ ceptualizing them. The author Paul Moorhouse, who is extensively familiar with Long’s career, states that Long’s works imply that walking is essentially practical, but it is also a way of engaging and interacting with the world.5 The connection of my experiment with the wider art-travel discourse can be found in the comprehensive world relationship and corporeality of wandering, but also in the artmotivated gaze, and the fact that what happened to an individual may later return to the art community through scenographic deeds. Whereas Long made sculpture by walking instead of working with materials and forms, I think that scenography can also be not only space and place but also placelessness, and it can also deny the permanence of place. In my hikes, it was essential not only to surrender to nature but also to replace the artist collective with a non-human environment. Wandering room and speculative middle I carried out the Nomadic Scenography project in Finland, Päijät-Häme, in the area of Päijänne National Park, in the ridge landscapes formed by the Ice Age, and in the archipelago surrounded by a large body of water, where the boundaries formed by nature caused resistance and friction to movement and thinking. I worked within the framework of artistic research, which enabled methodical freedom and artistic knowl­ edge to emerge from my own experience. According to Henk Borgdorff, artistic research essentially involves something he calls material thinking, the articulation of nonpropositional knowledge and experience embodied in artworks and creative processes. He has described the thinking related to artistic research as thinking about not-knowing and the not-yet-known, that ‘creates room for that which is unthought, that which is unexpected – the idea that all things could be different.’6 Like the philosopher Juha Varto, I think that the emergence of such unpredictable artistic knowledge requires special recognition, which must take place in the context of art itself.7 Such knowledge is either the artist’s personal bodily, sensory, or material knowledge, which precedes all contextual­ ization and conceptual divisibility. Artistic research can therefore only become commu­ nicable through reaching and identifying this knowledge. Varto speaks of this kind of individual knowledge as a singular. According to him, being singular in the world is never being alone in one’s own world but being in the same world with others.8 Nomadic Scenography was guided by the principles of artistic research, and my own artistic process formed the path through which new knowledge emerged. I was also inspired by the methods of (post)qualitative research, particularly from Stephanie Springgay and Sarah Truman. In their book Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World: WalkingLab (2018), they suggest walking and moving as a method for conceptualization and creative problem solving. The authors raise questions about thinking in motion and the intertwining of thinking and doing. They emphasize the suggestive nature of the method and

Nomadic scenography and fictional space-body 33 state that it is the proposals that act as hybrids between the real and the possible.9 Central to the thinking of Springgay and Truman is also queering and examining familiar expressions from unusual perspectives and in unusual contexts through walking.10 Then conventional human perspective is often challenged by the non-human influence as well. Both the investigated phenomenon and the route have appeared in a new way and in relation to each other. The authors emphasize the nature of research as a speculative event and locate speculative ‘what if’ thinking instead of a proactive plan based on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, leaning on the speculative middle in a situation where research is already underway and the researcher is inside the event with their thinking and doing.11 Springgay and Truman’s methodology approaches artistic research or creative process in that it maintains openness to the gradually revealing phenomenon, rather than shackling it with pre-defined or restrictive questions. As artistic research, nomadic scenography differs from that. The hiking method does not focus on anything outside itself, but the new creative scenographic thinking emerging during the research is in itself both the object of the research and the objective. The building of the method was therefore based on methodological pluralism. According to Borgdorff, different approaches that emerge from the other sciences can be part of artistic research, but they should only complement it. The research itself must take place in and through the creation of art.12 My hikes commenced without a specific design goal, and my experience was that the creative thinking inevitably centred itself in the middle of the process. It happened, not in anticipation, but as the walk progressed and the route took shape, as events in the en­ vironment and its various temporal layers were juxtaposed in my perception. I began my research by transforming scenography in the spirit of Springgay and Truman and combining it not only with hiking but also with fiction. The phenomena of presence and absence, which are central to the distance, wandered with me in the form of a fictional room. The room was a pocket-sized piece of folded cardboard or a scale model, the essence of which was defined by the unfinished. As a physical object, the room was on the one hand present, real, and material, but at the same time also incomplete in its unfinishedness, something that exists as a possibility yet is not yet existent. The un­ finishedness of the fictional room, as well as its ability to wander and change its location, drew the thinking to a speculative middle (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 The starting points for the fictional room: Field tools and cardboard materials found in the nearby environment. Photo by the author.

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Liisa Ikonen

Antihumanism and distributed agency I look at scenographic formation primarily as an artistic question related to distance and placelessness, but also as a philosophical issue about the manifestation of art and its relationship to distributed agencies. With the hikes I made, my own spatial-temporal being intertwined with diverse nature, and there were also non-human perspectives involved. The idea that scenography can be formed by wandering and in an ever-changing relationship to all kinds of materialities brought alongside the Heideggerian backgroundhorizon the vital materiality theory by the social philosopher and theorist Jane Bennett. My reflections on distributed agency also received conceptual support from American professor Stacy Alaimo’s theory of trans-corporeality, in which any human or nonhuman entity is seen as a body that participates and influences other bodies.13 I also thought of a room from the basis of trans-corporeality as a body, and more as a thing than an object that would settle in relation to other bodies on a journey. In Alaimo’s theory, bodies are porous and permeable; the theory emphasizes non-human perspectives as well as interactions between different bodies and a fundamental interdependence that humanism, for example, does not recognize.14 When I thought about the agency of scenography, I thought of both the scenographer-subject and all the environments shaped by nature or culture that I encounter on hikes, and the different materialities they contain as permeable bodies in the spirit of Bennett and Alaimo’s theories. However, I was also still committed to Heidegger’s late-period thoughts, which have also become detached from man’s intentional world relationship and more attached to an antihumanist way of listening to the world. I am thinking of bodies as Heideggerian things that need to be listened to and that must be confronted according to their own essence, unlike objects, which are always determined by a goal set from outside.15 Bennett also emphasises the human-independent power of bodies, which he speaks of as thingpower.16 For me, Bennett’s theory continued, refined, and took forward the discussion opened by Heidegger and his late thinking that was inclined to a poetic or even mystical manner of speaking. A key shift in perspective, supported by both theoretical approaches, lies in the fact that the scenographer-body is no longer more active than other bodies in its environment or as an actor at a hierarchically higher level. Artistic formation does not require either the artist’s intention or proactive decision making, but rather reception and interaction with other bodies. Background theories challenged scenography as intentional design work and provided concepts with which to speak of it as movement, change, and for­ mation. The hikes were aimed at a new way of working and, only after that, on knowledge building and practice. Place of emptiness and state of lack I approached distance as a physical, conceptual, and experiential phenomenon, but I thought of it above all as an intermediate space, and a state that always includes dif­ ference and thus also lack. As I began my wanderings, I thought of the lack as a sce­ nographic potential and approached distance as a separating – but at the same time, porous – dimension. My goal was to bring these two different spatial relationships, presence and absence, into encountering in this porous zone. I presumed that the con­ stant change in the spatial-temporal relationship caused by the hike would place me, as a hiker, in a kind of non-place that would be neither pure presence nor pure absence. The

Nomadic scenography and fictional space-body 35 non-place, or place of emptiness, paralleled my understanding of Heideggerian release­ ment, a space where a person is neither active nor passive, but open and sensitized to different encounters. The defining feature of releasement is a waiting and listening attitude, an attitude that does not focus on anything that is known in advance.17 Now I wanted to find out how the physical strain caused by the hikes, the heightened sensory awareness, and the directions guiding the walk would affect this and what kind of spatial experience it would produce. I sought experiential information about how the shapes of the terrain, or the tensions created by the distances would tune my experience. Philosopher Timo Klemola parallels releasement to the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida’s way of thinking about the breakdown of the dualistic subject-object world relationship, where ego-awareness fades and body-awareness increases. The self then moves to a kind of place of emptiness, where subject and object are no longer separate, and the world expresses itself through our body. This is accompanied by a dampening of active activity and a strengthening of intuition. However, the dimming of activity is not passivity, but rather a kind of allowing.18 This is essential in the creation of experiential artistic knowledge and is related to what Varto writes about the ontology of singular. He argues that something revealed by void can only be singular.19 In his analysis, Klemola still refers to the Chilean philosopher and neuroscientist Fransesco Varela, who also talks about the corporeality of the mind and the intertwining of the body and the world. Varela sees human consciousness as a complex interaction process between the world and the mind, instead of consciousness being a representation of a pre-given world. The key thing is that the mind, or consciousness, is not located in the head, but is created through action in the world. Varela describes the mutual relationship between different actors with the concept interbeing, which is stronger than interaction, and emphasizes the equal and simultaneous manifestation of different entities.20 Wandering towards assemblage Getting to know Heideggerian releasement had already taught me the importance of relinquishing active will as part of the creative process. Bennett’s theory of vibrating matter also brought alongside it a view of the environment and the non-human as a distributed agency. In Bennett, non-human agency is always associated with the impulse or driving force of action, which he speaks of as the concept of actant, originated from Bruno Latour. An actant is a source of action that either acts independently or is given activity by others.21 According to Bennett, alongside individual human actors, there are also multidisciplinary actants that can have partial, overlapping, and contradictory efficacy and power.22 At the start of my wanderings, the lack of defining the distance was for me the primary and clearest source of scenographic activity – an actant. I assumed it would settle the room that wan­ dered with me into various changing power relations with other impulses and ongoing processes produced by the advancing hike. Bennett describes the actor giving up the subject as a distributive event, in which the most diverse human and non-human things and phe­ nomena can act as a source of actions that create an assemblage. With the concept of assemblage deriving from Deleuze and Guattari, Bennett describes a network, or meshwork, that emerges as a kind of part-whole relation to a volatile but still functional whole.23 I quote the concept of assemblage to use it to describe the formation of nomadic sce­ nography. By assemblage, I mean both the temporal and the spatial relationships that arose when wandering – that is, in spatial instability that is not attached to a particular place. Distributive agency is realized through the interaction of numerous spatial and temporal

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bodies on a different scale. Thus, the assemblage is a kind of ever-changing event space. According to Bennett, what is central to the assemblage is that it consists of a collaborative action in which each component has its own pulse that differs from the common rhythm of the assemblage. Thus, the assemblage takes shape and eventually ceases to exist, as deter­ mined by the sum of vital forces and effectivities that each component considers.24 In nomadic scenography, distance and hiking regulated how different spatially and temporally varying materials and pulses affected the observations of the assemblage. The terms actant, distributive agency, and assemblage describe the involvement in relation to unfolding scenography that takes place during my wanderings, as well as Heideggerian releasement. What they have in common is thinking of the whole of being as a dimension beyond the control of the subject. Creative scenographic thinking arises from the combined effect of several events that start and take place at different times. Hiking is determined not only by my own progress and the change it produces, but also by the changes that take place in the time-space of the surrounding nature. My involvement arises as a bodily, somatic experience, joining an event that is wider than me, even though my experience or perception does not extend to the source that caused them. The time per­ spective of thousands of years prevented me from reaching the start of the processes shaping the landscape and climate, but I was still a part of their events through interbeing, and so was also my fictional room. I positioned myself as part of an assemblage of various animate and inanimate bodies, which materialized in my bodily and sensory presence, shaping my creative activity at the same time. Even though I wandered in national parks, I still encountered numerous signs left in nature by the industrial world. Some of the signs were random; some were intentional, such as the route markers painted on the bark of trees that were hundreds of years old (Figure 2.3). The question was therefore not

Figure 2.3 The pulses of authentic and performed nature meet in a blue route mark on a pine tree trunk. Päijätsalo, Päijänne National Park. Photo by the author.

Nomadic scenography and fictional space-body 37 only about the authentic but also about the presented nature, whose pulse was formed depending on the routes, initiated by very different actants. Varpusenlinna I had my first hike in the middle of the most beautiful Scandinavian summer on 25 July 2020 in Varpusenlinna, a small island on the border of Päijät-Häme and Central Finland, and Kellosalmi and Kuhmoinen. The island was so small that it could have been circled in ten minutes if the steep terrain to the west had not made movement challenging. My day of hiking was dry, but cloudy and calm. The temperature was 17 degrees Celsius. As I approached, my first view was of a high, vertical cliff. I took a boat ride behind the island and landed on the west side, moving through a rocky shoal. My arrival was surrounded by silence. The calm of the lake, with its immobility, intensified the experience of silence and tuned my being to listening to the environment. The island had a strong character. The shady west slope was occupied by huge boulders that seemed to stop on the slope as if they had been stopped in time while rolling down. I ascended from the middle of the pinedominated forest to the highest point of the island. I was the only representative of the human species, but numerous birds, whose song I did not recognize, registered my arrival. From the clifftop, the view of the lake stretched to the horizon, and I felt I was at the centre of the universe. The experience of distance was strong and empowering. The intermittent rupture of the water surface revealed a momentary intensification of the wind, or alter­ natively, drew visible the routes of passing boats. Although I stood at the highest point of the landscape, I could not see the shape of the rock beneath me. I was emphatically aware of the limitations of my observation, as well as the simultaneity of presence and absence. I tried to locate areas I knew far away on the winding strip-like coast. A desperate attempt to see made the distance a bodily experi­ ence. I realized the limits of my senses: On the one hand, the opportunity offered by a high and open place, but on the other hand, also the inability to see far. The body, the senses, and the environment formed a whole, and the boundary between them became porous in my experience. At the same time, the relationship of my own presence to the absent also became porous. As the distance closed the details of the landscape, the event evoked instinct, intuition, and imagination. Although the absent was invisible and hidden, the spatial experience was strongly determined by the awareness, or instinct, of being surrounded, included, and in relation to the absent as well. The wandering room did not get any clear form in this environment. It was still raw material, cardboard, and paper, waiting to be sized, shaped, and assembled. When I consciously took the lack inherent in the distance as the source of action, it began to emerge from the corporeality that I realized in a new way. I filled the gap for the absent not only by trying to see, but also by moving and advancing. The experience of the moving body from the surrounding space was constant reaction, sweating, shortness of breath, increased heart rate, and heartbeats. The distance travelled felt like strain and lactic acid in my muscles, and my body gradually began to anticipate repeated ups and downs. I tired, slipped, and fell. The moisture on the ground rose through the clothes onto the skin, and the low-growing lichen pressed its image into my palms as I took support from the ground. Immediately, the sensuous confronted the temporality of matter. The rock formed by the Ice Age was steep and resisted my passage. The shape of the island guided my course into a circular motion, even though there were no ready-made paths there. The surrounding body of water opened in a different view at each point of the

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compass, always in relation to the observation site, either open or framed in different ways. When I tried to place the spatiality of the island in the room that roamed with me, it simply fell apart. The space took the form of holes, incisions, and openings that were constantly organized in different ways. The room was not created by building or adding, but by receiving and bringing-forth. It came to be a reflection of assemblage (Figure 2.4). The central body of the landscape, Lake Päijänne, began to form as the continental glacier consumed rock fractures during the last Ice Age.25 Freezing, thawing, and flowing have changed its pulse in a millennial perspective, and humans have had to settle into this environment on non-human terms. I got to know later, after my hikes, that Varpusenlinna presumably housed a later Iron Age fortress associated with tribal wars. According to the local village history, Kellosalmen historiaa, forts were built between 1000 and 1300 on difficult-to-navigate islands and cliffs that were easy to defend.26 Varpusenlinna seems to be well suited for this, thanks to both good visibility and a sheltered slope. I had encountered remnants of the rock formations of the fort on the island, and my experience of the space resonated strongly with the history of the place. The shape of the island responded to the spatial needs of attack, defence, or protection. It was literally a kind of state of being caught or encountered. The island continued to form a continuous event space for numerous vital bodies and their assemblages. The pulses of the assemblages were long-lasting, continuing to materialize in the rolling and corrosion of the rocks or in the growth and twisting of the stunted trees. It was not possible for the distributed agency to open to my observation as a whole, but I was still part of the same event and the same swarm of vitalities. The pulse set off from the continental glacier extended to me, my life, even to the coffee water I carried in a thermos. The shared pulse was both a poetic idea and a concrete fact. According to YLE, Finnish Broadgasting Comppany`s online article Päijännetunneli, the drinking and domestic water of one million inhabitants of the Helsinki metropolitan area is diverted from Päijänne via a 120-kilometre water tunnel.27 Some of the pulses in the assemblages were related, time-wise, to considerably shorter natural processes – nesting, wilting, withering, and decay – but at the same time, also to momentary situations and various technological corporealities and materialities. Such were the passing motorboats and

Figure 2.4 The opening of distance in a fictional space-body. Varpusenlinna Island, Lake Päijänne. Photo by the author.

Nomadic scenography and fictional space-body 39

Figure 2.5 The rock formed by the Ice Age was steep and resisted wandering. Varpusenlinna, Päijänne National Park. Photo by the author.

their petrol-powered engines with their emissions, which have both immediate and longlasting effects. The lure pulled behind the boat had its own space and pulse, as floats floating on the surface had theirs (Figure 2.5). Päijätsalo, Pulkkilanharju and Kelvenne I completed the rest of the project’s hikes on Päijätsalo on 1 August 2020, on Pulkkilanharju on 6 August 2020, and on Kelvenne on 7 August 2020. The fictional room had become an instrument through which I was connected to my surroundings. I likened the pocket-sized apparatus in my mind to Claude glasses, the black mirrors used by the 18th-century English upper class on walks for nature observation. However, my room did not function as a means of capturing or representing the picturesque views, but rather as a different pulse matter – a Heideggerian thing. The experience of distance was by no means limited to the route I took, but it expanded radially around me. The present and the absent began to merge more and more conceptually and experientially. What was absent was not just things behind or in front of me, but a kind of network of locations that my own body and the fictional room constantly related to differently. An image of a network was strengthened when I became aware of the interrelationships of my routes and the temporal connections going back to the Ice Age, as well as the map formed from them. The environment began to materialize as relationships, networks, and directions. Arrivals and departures by speedboat contrasted with the physicality of the hikes along rocky coasts and ridges, as well as the quiet agency of the meltwater that shaped the landscape. According to Juotavan puhdas Päijänne webpage, Päijätsalo located on the eastern shore of Lake Päijänne, is a rugged island whose rocky peak is a remnant of the corrugated mountains that formed almost two billion years ago. The bare-rock top of the island rises 85 metres above the surface of Päijänne.28 The altitude differences seemed considerable, and my progress was again challenged by the terrain’s response to body movements. The island was dominated by spruce forests, where the forest had long been allowed to develop in its natural state. Where the trees in Varpusenlinna were shallow and stunted, the trees in

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Päijätsalo were correspondingly rugged evergreen forests. Thus, the pulses of ecological processes also differed from each other. The different processes of growth and decay manifested themselves in a variety of encounters, strata, and co-formations. The pulses were constructed from variability in decay and growth, but also from interrelationships of species, resistances, and adaptations, but they were also intertwined with vibrations from new technological and material processes brought by people and the assemblage was guided by many different sources of power – actants. However, the recreational use of Päijänne had a long-lasting pulse, and the signs of 19th-century villa life were still visible. According to Päijänteen kansallispuisto, Päijätsalo webpage, at that time, people from Pyydysniemi had climbed to the mountaintop, Päijätsalonvuori, to admire the lake landscapes of Päijänne and the waters of Tehinselkä. At an early stage, an observation tower had been built on the highest point of the island, which later also functioned as an air surveillance tower during the war.29 Through their height and good visibility, Varpusenlinna and Päijätsalo had an interesting common feature in relation to dis­ tance and ambush. According to stories, Päijänne is said to have been named after an ambush, which is described by the word päijäys. Gaze, gazing, or päijäys appeared as one historical measure of distance, and earlier ways of looking at the landscape en­ countered my own way of looking at, or rather experiencing, the environment through, or with, my fictional room. Modelling or wandering with the fictional room meant an attempt to participate in an environmental event and move towards the scenography revealed by the hike. Thinking of a vague cardboard form as a fictitious and reactive room-body or as a Heideggerian thing was at the same time an attempt to liberate creative thinking and also to achieve something hidden from perception. Place of emptiness and scenographic assemblage The state of lack I identified as an actant was a pure starting point, a vacuum, not a place, between the counterforces formed by presence and absence. I recognized several moments in the middle of my hikes at which action and intuition intertwined and where active action changed to allowing the environment to unfold in my bodily experience. The fictive space that I had thought of as a room disintegrated time after time and followed the directions formed in the landscape. The distributed agency, which Bennett speaks of as swarm of vitalities, was realized as tensions between different bodies and space-times. My own agency was the involvement of hikes in these events. The hikes themselves were physically tough, and while enhancing bodily consciousness, they also produced experiences of the disappearance of the boundaries between the body and the environment, or between the self and the world. Involvement in changing the space-time-matter assemblage further enabled the emergence of scenographic assemblage. By scenographic assemblage, I am referring to a space that can only arise from experiential inclusion and distributed agency. The hike can be seen as a method for revealing or bringing-forth that implements the Heideggerian non-intentional, waiting, and listening attitude: releasement. Philosopher Miika Luoto interpretes this as a creative event. People open up to the unknown that reigns through them, and creativity arises when they learn to face what governs them.30 On the hikes, this was involvement in an event where different bodies interacted and influenced each other. Hiking then takes place as tekhne, a method that allows for the disclosure of the physis and furthers the formation of scenography. Nomadic scenography emerges from physical exertion and excitement on the journey, a kind of thinking in motion, more of an inclusion and a process

Nomadic scenography and fictional space-body 41

Figure 2.6 The wandering room closes the horizon. Photo by the author.

of free formation, rather than active doing. This was also reflected in the formation of the fictional room. The room remained unfinished to the end, shapeless, and disintegrated in different ways with each hike. However, the disintegration was not insignificant, but rather an opening towards the spatial rhizome (Figure 2.6). By nomadism towards the rhizome My experience of progression was not as linear as a hiking trail itself but was surrounded by numerous simultaneous and disparate events. Getting lost cut off the experience of intervals and distances and drew attention to directions and instincts, into a spatial state of knowing without knowing. Successive hikes began to intertwine and open an event space that was more of a network than anything that could be set in clear boundaries. The recognition of distributed agency as a space-producing, or rather space-revealing, factor changed my attitude towards presence and absence. I no longer thought of them as locations, distances between things or phenomena, or anything that would be relative to immediate sensory experience. Presence and absence appeared as temporals operating in different pulses and vibrating through each other. They showed up at the same time in all the wear, recesses, traces, and vegetation I encountered while hiking. They were con­ tinuous events of intrusion and permeation of disparate bodies of different ages. Spatial networking or spatial diversity can be described not only as an assemblage but also by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizome.31 The rhizome is seen as a kind of irreversible structure. Finnish TV production designer and researcher Kimmo Turunen has described the rhizome in a media space as an event in which ideas, thoughts, or forms move and manifest in endlessly changing contexts with no direct and clear cause-and-effect connection between them. Instead, there is, as it were, an invisible thread in their inter­ relationships for all temporal and spatial locations and events. The rhizome can open or close from any point in time or space and still connect different levels to each other. From this moment and situation, I can touch the past or the future, located there or here.32 This also describes my hiking well. Hiking constantly changed the relationship to both space and time. At the same time, bodily and sensory events network into non-human processes

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in the environment. The hikes revealed the distance as a rhizome of various permeable and stratified bodies as well as temporal influences. In the Alaimo theory of trans-corporeality, the prefix ‘trans’ refers specifically to movement between bodies and emphasizes transitions between different human and nonhuman actors and ecological and chemical processes. Central to the theory is that bodies participate in each other and change each other.33 Bennett’s thing-power also contains an aspect that emphasizes the sociality and unification of objects. Based on the theories of Bennett and Alaimo, as well as my hiking experiments, I think that the porosity, perme­ ability, and alliance of bodies are events that produce or reveal a space defined by plurality, simultaneity, and unpredictability. My fictional room also reflected this as it constantly evaded one permanent form. Thus, the spatial composition revealed by the hikes appears just as a rhizome, which consists of several intersecting space-times and the intersecting effects of various human and non-human processes. This becomes visible in Päijänne lake itself. The surface formation of the large lake-body varies drastically. The different vari­ ations, from calm to storm, all have their own pulse, which still have their own actants. Still, the condition of the surface is always created by distributed agency. The surface mainly follows the direction and strength of the wind – in other words, temperature and air pressure differences – but also the friction caused by the surrounding nature, such as ridges shaped by the ice age or manmade structures. All of this still has its impact on life below the surface and, for example, on the movements of fish-bodies in the water, the movements of boat-bodies on the surface, and the human bodies travelling in boats. It is a question of a kind of part-whole relation to a volatile but still functional whole. A rhizomical scenography formed on the basis of distributed agency could never arise from a single predetermined need, for instance, from aesthetics or functionality, but it should be able to emerge simultaneously from several different sources. Nomadic sce­ nography is just this. I named my experiment nomadic, because I wanted to connect scenography with events related not only to hiking but also to the interbeing and dis­ tributed agency. The idea of collecting coincides with distributed agency. The individual vital bodies, each with their own pulse, come together in an assemblage. However, the compilation is not performed by the subject but is part of the events of the more-thanhuman world. So, it is a question of becoming a collection rather than actively gathering. Return from the periphery to the centre Distributed agency, thought in motion, made tangible in the fictional room, also grad­ ually transformed into a proposal for a new approach to the scenographic assemblage. The hikes revealed the distance as non-linear, but also as non-vertical and nonhorizontal, as if untraceable dimension, in which no deficiency other than that caused by the difference, was permanent. The lack steered towards something all the time. The particular effectiveness of the assemblage arose from the fact that, although my hikes always had a direction, the distributed agency of the bodies I encountered was revealed at the same time as temporal, differently stratified, and permeable processes. Distance no longer meant a measurable hike, an interval, but rather a place where spatial relation­ ships are renegotiated each time. Constantly advancing, shaping, and disintegrating, nomadic scenography forbade a solution that would stop at just one permanent option. I am now returning from the periphery to the conventional centre of the design and sitting at the desk I rejected. I am clearing space for a possible new practice. I am now sketching a space-body concept in which a neutral space opens to the agencies revealed

Nomadic scenography and fictional space-body 43 by my hikes and implements the scenographic assemblage based on that, ripple, fracture, stratification, corrosion, and leaching. This takes place as space-compliant, rising and falling lights, colours, and graphic patterns, as well as changes in their intensity. The scenographic assemblage revealed by the hikes is not a formation of separate bodies, but an event based on distributed agency and a porous network opening in different directions. I am sketching the shape that the fictional space-body that wandered with me has gained, or rather lost. I will continue to sketch and con­ sider both human and non-human actants. The fictional space-body of my sketch responds to impulses, touch, movement, and sound generated by presence. It responds to speech, shouts, and whispers, but also to breathing, body temperature, and heart­ beat. It responds to the materials present and their movements, each of which has its own independent pulse. The effectiveness of an assemblage varies with how it is in space and how its human or non-human bodies move and function in relation to each other. I will now leave my sketch on the table, at a stage that requires both a proper design task and further thinking (Figure 2.7). I am still in the middle of the research, in the speculative middle. Yet, physical hikes revealed the phenomenon of distance in a new way, as an experiential inclusion and interbeing, and incorporated the idea of rhizome into my artistic work. At the same time, they produced artistic knowledge about distributed agency, a kind of scenographic bringing-forth that was singular in its nature. The artistic knowledge created from an individual experiment has a personal, but always at the same time, broader meaning than the subject. Artistic knowledge arises from the bodily and sensory experiences of an individual artist, as well as their choices, which also include the unconscious and thus the

Figure 2.7 Transformation of a fictional space-body, a sketch. Photo by the author.

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a-subjective preceding the subjective.34 Thus, artistic knowledge is localized into both the human and the more-than-human world, and its application is its own unique event each time. This means that nomadic scenography also does not allow for generalizations, reproducibility, or direct modelling but always requires the involvement of the individual artists in their world. The scenography that my nomadic experiment has revealed ap­ pears as a network of relationships liberated by porous bodies, providing a basis for new thinking, new interpretations, and a new singular. Notes 1 Performance theorist and historian Arnold Aronson (2012, 86–95) speaks about the change caused by digitalization as the dematerialization of the stage. 2 Heidegger (1998, 60–62) detached tekhne, in his own interpretation, from the craft-ontology and the idea that precedes the manufacturing, and he combined art and thinking. The con­ cealed nature of the physis could appear as meaningful to man only with the help of tekhne. For Heidegger, tekhne meant above all knowing and bringing-forth (her-vor-bringen). Heidegger introduces the concept of bringing-forth in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935/36). 3 Expanded scenography is an open-ended definition that emphasizes the increasingly inde­ pendent role of scenography as a part of performance, but also the various applications of scenography outside the performing arts. See Joslin McKinney and Scott Palmer (2017) Expanded Scenography, an introduction to contemporary performance design. 4 Art pedagogue Anna-Katariina Keskitalo (2006, 37–57) has identified different approaches to travelling discourse and walking or hiking in nature. Her classifications include the eyes of an explorer, a geographer, an artist, a forest romantic, a national romantic, a flaneur, a tourist, and a wilderness hiker. 5 Moorhouse 2002, 33. 6 Borgdorff 2012b, 124. 7 Varto 2017, 55. 8 Varto 2008, 38 and 216. 9 Springgay & Truman 2018. 10 According to Springgay and Truman (2019, 2–3), they have organized several Queer Walking Tours for the big public, where the research topic has been explored during a particular route walked together, through discussion and speculation, pop-up exhibitions, and lectures along the route. Their Queer Walking Tours have always started from a proposal to queer also a place by approaching a phenomenon, under the study, from many frictional and oblique perspectives. 11 Springgay & Truman 2017, 1–2 and 4. 12 Borgdorff 2012a, 147. 13 See Jane Bennett (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things; Stacy Alaimo (2012). Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. 14 Alaimo 2012, 156. 15 Heidegger 1991 (1959) writes in Releasement (Gelassenheit) about meditative thinking that approaches objects also belonging to the technical world with a new attitude, as ʻthings.ʾ Heidegger (1996) had already described the essence of things in his essay The Thing (Das Ding) in 1954. 16 Bennett 2010, 9. 17 For Heidegger (1991) releasement (gelassenheit) meant a waiting and listening world rela­ tionship and meditative thinking – the opposite of goal-oriented calculative thinking. 18 Klemola 2005, 174–178. 19 Varto 2008, 112. 20 Klemola 2005, 156–159. 21 Bennett 2010, 9 and 34. 22 Bennett 2010, 46. 23 Bennett 2010, 48.

Nomadic scenography and fictional space-body 45 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Bennett 2010, 48–49. Rautio 2011, 6–9. Hirvonen, Kinnari, Koski & Ruokolainen 2014, 63. Päijännetunneli. Päijänteen kansallispuisto, Päijätsalo. Päijänteen kansallispuisto, Päijätsalo. Luoto 2002, 97–98, 110 and 114; Ikonen 2006, 206. Deleuze & Guattari 2013 (1987). Turunen 2019, 118–119. Alaimo 2012. When Varto (2009, 39) speaks about artistic research, he emphasizes the solid connection between knowing and world relationship: ‘If I am immersed in everything, wrapped into, changing with it, often at my own different pace, no conceptual entity or similar, no know, can prove what something is. Only something revealed in the event itself, as an event, can prove what something is.’

References Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Aronson, Arnold. “The Dematerialization of the Stage.” In The Disappearing Stage: Reflections on the 2011 Praque Quadrennial, edited by Arnold Aronson, 86–95. Prague: Theatre Institute, 2012. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Borgdorff, Henk. “The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research.” In The Conflict of the Faculties, Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia, edited by Henk Borgdorff, 140–173. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012a. Borgdorff, Henk. “Where Are We Today? The State of the Art in Artistic Research.” In The Conflict of the Faculties, Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia, edited by Henk Borgdorff, 104–126. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012b. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Transl. Brian Massumi. London: Bloomsbury, 2013 (1987). Heidegger, Martin. Olio. Transl. Reijo Kupiainen, 54–60. Tampere: niin & näin, 1996 (1954). Heidegger, Martin. Silleenjättäminen. Transl. Reijo Kupiainen. Tampere: Tampereen yliopisto, 1991 (1959). Heidegger, Martin. Taideteoksen alkuperä. Transl. Hannu Sivenius, 3rd ed. Helsinki: Kyriiri, 1998 (1935/36). Hirvonen, Auli, Kinnari, Ritta, Koski, Katariina, & Ruokolainen, Janne. Löytöretkiä PäijätHämeen kyliin, Kellosalmi, Seitniemi ja Virmaila - kylät Päijänteen sylissä, 2014. [Referred 07.01.2021] https://etela-suomi.proagria.fi/sites/default/files/attachment/padasjoki_2_painos_ selailuversio.pdf Ikonen, Liisa. Dialogista skenografiaa – Vaihtoehtoisen työprosessin fenomenologista tulkintaa. Helsinki: Taideteollinen korkeakoulu, 2006. Keskitalo, Anna-Katariina.Tien päällä ja leirissä: Matkanteon kokemuksesta taideteokseksi. Rovaniemi: Lapin yliopisto, 2006. Klemola, Timo. Taidon filosofia – Filosofian taito. Tampere: Tampereen yliopisto, 2005. Luoto, Miika.Heidegger ja taiteen arvoitus. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto, 2002. Mc Kinney, Joslin & Palmer, Scott (eds.). Scenography Expanded, an Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Moorhouse , Paul . “The Intricacy of The Skein, The Complexity of The Web: Richard Long`s Art.” in Richard Long, Walking the Line, edited byMoorhouse, Paul & Hooker, Denise. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

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Päijännetunneli. [Referred 07.01.2021] https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2008/01/15/paijannetunneli Päijänteen kansallispuisto, Päijätsalo. [Referred 27.08.2023] https://book.visitlahti.fi/fi/tehtava/ 1183658/p%C3%A4ij%C3%A4nteen-kansallispuisto-%7C-p%C3%A4ij%C3%A4tsalo/ showdetails Rautio, Jukka (ed). “Suur-Päijänteen synty.” In Suur-Päijänne, edited by Jukka Rautio, 6–9. Tampere: Emu, 2011. Springgay, Stephanie & Truman, Sarah E. “On the Need for Methods Beyond Proceduralism: Speculative Middles.” In Tensions, and Response-Ability in Research, 2017. [Referred 16.04.2020] https://walkinglab.org/on-the-need-for-methods-beyondproceduralism-speculativemiddles-intensions-and-response-ability-in-research-article/ Springgay, Stephanie & Truman, Sarah. “Queer Walking Tours and the Affective Contour of Place.” 2019. [Referred 15.11.2022] https://walkinglab.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/ Queer-Walking-Tours.pdf Springgay, Stephanie & Truman, Sarah E. WalkingLab, Walking Methodologies in a More-ThanHuman World. London: Routledge, 2018. Turunen, Kimmo. Televisuaalinen välitila ja lavastajuus – käsiteteoreettinen tarkastelu. Espoo: Aalto Univeristy, 2019. Varto, Juha. Basics of Artistic Research. Ontological, Epistemological and Historical Justifications. Helsinki: University of Art and Design, 2009. Varto, Juha.Taiteellinen tutkimus - Mitä se on ja kuka sitä tekee? Helsinki: Aalto-yliopisto, 2017. Varto, Juha. Tanssi maailman kanssa, Yksittäisen ontologiaa. Tampere: niin & näin, 2008

3

Urban spaces between norms and dreams Maiju Loukola

Seizing Henri Lefebvre’s famous notion of the citizen’s right to their city,1 the article aims to enlarge and concretize art’s role in advancing more holistic means in urban development in ways that acknowledge city space as a process where different kinds of not only interests, but also practical practices collide and meet. The underlying premise here is that art can liberate urban space and create alternative scenarios for, of, and in it. The means inherent in arts, such as impertinent dreaming and unbounded imagination, play a key role in this endeavour. City space forming in the crossing of normative and affective practices Urban space is saturated with material means of space-making through several practices, including the regulation-driven, also ‘soft’ legal instruments. Both art and urban law manifest themselves in material and spatial dimensions – in architecture, walls, squares, and thoroughfares. Urban law, like urban intervention and other public space art, manifests itself in material dimensions but in a very different kind of register, one almost unnoticed. In the words of Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, who writes of the ‘spatiality of law’: (–) the city operates as law’s megaphone. In city, law’s presence is magnified to a deafening extent – so much that one no longer feels its presence: planning restrictions, environmental regulations, zoning, social control, borders between private, public, and restricted access areas, pavements, roads, traffic lights, metro barriers, flows of people, (–) power architecture and landscaping … are just a few ‘legal moments’. (–) Law is the regulator of spaces between spaces, connecting and severing urban beings, urban objects, urban desires, and fears … .2 Once recognizing some of the mechanisms of the seemingly dissecting orders – art and law – we can say that as material and discursive dimensions they, in their collision and differences, may also produce informative tangential points worth thinking forward. Ari Hirvonen writes about city space as a ‘normal space for normals’ in which specific areas are allocated for consumerism, production, transportation, passage, work, and free time.3 Thus, it is much an institutionally defined hegemonic space, and, as such, never a neutral one. If we look at the city as a space saturated with norms (for normals), we notice that norms flow in the city not only as meanings on a symbolic level but also as material and real. Urban landscape is there to be seen, experienced, touched, and lived. The lefebvrian right to the city arises and becomes spatialized in and through several DOI: 10.4324/9781003348269-5

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legal and material practices. That is, there are only a few spatializations in the city space that would not be results of these processes and practices. It is fair to say that there is no urban space without a touch of law. Lefebvre argues a city is an ‘oeuvre of its citizens – a work of art that is constantly being made anew.’4 It is noteworthy to point out that Lefebvre’s notion of ‘right to the city’ was brought to urban studies’ table some 50 years ago, and like any grown-up term is to be looked at in relation to the cultural and societal transformation over time. In recent critical readings, the notion has been dissected from multiple angles in multiple contexts, from legalistic conceptions5 to radical-materialistic ones6 to those emphasizing culture-specific cooperational relations and conditions in which the right to the city becomes activated, claimed, and contested. Peter Marcuse suggests a better recognition of the interconnect­ edness of spatial proximity and social diversity in enabling ‘interaction across difference’ that can foster possibilities for more complex forms of cooperation.7 Recognizing the citizens’ needs, wills, dreams, and desires ought to be an essential part of urban decision-making processes. Through acknowledging the inhabitants’ affective relationship with the spatial formation processes might have potential to grow less hierarchic, less top-down, perhaps in ways that release potential for more responsible and caring relation towards one’s hoods. When including materiality and embodiment as significant parts of spatial practices in urban placemaking8 affect theories offer a non-institutionally driven, and in this sense peripheral way for understanding how urban space forms through processes both administrative-social and experiential.9 Following Sara Ahmed, affect recognizes ‘the actual, everyday way in which an individual body moves and negotiates its relationship to space,’10 and thus much defines how we talk about the constitution of spaces as being for bodies. On the same breath, it is crucial to notice that not all bodies are the same, as some are always more ‘sheltered’ than others in terms of visibility, subjectivity, and what is given (for them) as rights. From the perspective of affective urbanism, following Anderson and Holden, cities form as compositions of ‘multiple, differentiated affects, emotions and feelings.’11 Attachment to a site The connection between urban life and emotions was famously outlined by Georg Simmel in his literary work The Metropolis and Mental Life in 1903. He wrote of a special type of human, produced by the city life as a result of an overload of urban­ ization, mass migration from rural areas to cities, and crowds of people and information. The turn to urban life led to a creation of the blasé person who substituted emotional reactions with rational reactions.12 The French word blasé is a past participle form of blaser, which translates as being or becoming ‘apathetic to pleasure or excitement as a result of excessive indulgence or enjoyment’ – of being made tired of too much of everything. Turning to blasé mode of being was as if a shield to bear the overload of metropolis stimulus in contrast to simple country life. Sense of belonging to a place brings along an empathic sense of attachment that makes the connection meaningful in a way that is profoundly tied to the registers of sensory experience, memory, and imagination. We are connected to the world through our spatial-sensory experience, and this connection politicizes the aesthetic experience. While in domestic space, ‘at home,’ and while taking our daily routes and any other everyday routine repetitively and absent-mindedly – those sites and situations become saturated

Urban spaces between norms and dreams 49 with personal relations, sensory data, memories, emotions, and affects that have taken place in those very places. Yet none of these site-tied occurrences form as purely personal and intimate without a slightest touch of the hand of law and regulation. One surely does not need to be at home to feel at home. It is exactly these kinds of ‘feeling at home’ type of spatial occurrences and practices in public space, in the city en­ vironment, where the sensuous and the regulatory meet and collide that I find it interesting to look at through a parallax lens; sites, situations, and practices where the intimate and personal are acknowledged as adjoined in a dynamic tension with the normative and regulatory, instead of trying to force these spheres in utter and complete separation. My hypothesis is that affect implicates an ethical engagement with people and their everyday and particular sites. In them, the intimate, own, personal, shared, collective, and public come to be effective in countless variations. I argue that affective processes, situa­ tional, and relative by nature, have an underused and unidentified capacity to break the normative spatial order in ways that have potential to liberate some of the urban space legal practices beyond their positivist-normative purposes and interpretations. They have a potential to enhance affective cohesion and sense of belonging through citizens’ daily practices, individual and collective, connected to their living environment and their material-architectural processes. Affect implies ways of connecting to others and other situations.13 An affective link is likely to not only empower the citizens’ right to their city but entails potential to bridge socio-spatial gaps and eventually come to challenge practices of exclusion, othering, and alienation. Affective urbanism implies certain calibration towards being attentive to the residents’ sensory connectedness to urban space, and to others sharing those spaces, and adds another kind of measuring technique for the citizens’ experience of their living environment. For example, instead of rooting the citizens’ attachment to the city around their use of infrastructure or services, affective approach makes way for the ‘unconscious and preverbal phenomenon that only emerges when an encounter of bodies of different nature – not only human but also material objects, ideas, anything – occurs.’14 We are constantly involved in the production of affects through the choice of our routes to the grocery store, daily walk with the dog, to work, and leisure. We keep building affective maps, unintentional and unaware, and in so doing come to affect our environment as well.15 It is these kinds of everyday affective cartographies that I wish to pay attention to in the following chapter through introducing certain ‘techniques,’ conceptions, and approaches for experimenting with the formation of sites and situa­ tions that form into something more than just places on a map or distances from one place to another. Situational practices in arts Simmel’s blasé person and Walter Benjamin’s flâneur characterize some of the most noted examples of the shift in a new kind of urban experience through idle exploration in the city. In Benjamin’s studies of the Paris arcades ‘the flâneur’ forms an audience of one who wonders in a city filled with visual and sensory stimulation.16 Translated into today, the flâneur browses in the digital space across a plentitude of media layers of arcades small enough to fit in a smartphone. The Situationist International developed a playful meandering practice, dérive, and a related wandering method psychogeography where the city is experienced without the usual motives for moving. The method highlights the effects of the environment on the

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wanderers’ emotions and behaviour.17 An act of walking in dérive practice is primarily an urban affair in cities that often can be unwelcoming for a pedestrian. This way the act of walking becomes a subversive act, against the spirit of the modern city with fast vehicles and other technological innovation.18 The situationists stressed the interconnectedness of art in everyday life. The tendency is widely present in arts today. Walking practices in today’s arts in public space share many roots with their avant-garde predecessors’ methods and motivations. Ernesto Pujol, one of the forerunners of socially engaged performative walking art practices, has used the method in his site-specific community walking projects and social choreography works to highlight social and political issues related to decolonization, ecological trou­ bles, human and animal rights, to name a few. He names several traits constantly at use via this approach: the socially engaged walking practice entails site-specific embodiment of urgent social issues; considers human gestures such as conscious walking; is ethically made; is a form of diagnostic, collective, poetic portrait; is freely offered for aesthetic appreciation and reflection.19 Socially engaged walking practices and other collective and participatory art practices are realized outside (art) institutions, and in this sense, they come to critique art’s institutional practices. Urban space interventions also take place outside museums and institutions, in public space. All the mentioned can be seen as part of the post-studio practices. Claire Bishop calls these kinds of art’s tactics ‘modes of action in which en­ gagement is part of a politicized method’ often with a focus on the creation of situations that have references to a wider societal and political context.20 Spatial interventions are site and time-specific actions that typically break the tradi­ tional expectations of presenting or performing art. Among other things, an intervention may challenge the notion of spectatorship ‘by injecting something new and surprising into the familiar and existing.’21 Rooted within several moments in the history of arts, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and again the Situationist movement, intervention ques­ tions both the institutionalized and everyday life that shape our lived experience in a capitalist society. Place, as a concept and as a concrete physical space, has a central role in any intervention. Silvia Jestrovic calls this an interperformativity of place, and notes that many public urban spaces can be associated with collective memory.22 Intervention has a potential to enhance, challenge, and alter experiential expectations as well as create new ones. Yet another walking practice shaping the city space are ‘desire paths.’ The term derives from urban planning to describe the slithering shortcuts that people choose to take when the ‘official’ routes do not provide a direct or in other ways preferred route for urban pedestrians. They cause mechanical erosion to the ground through repetitious and intentional bodily movement. These unpredictable free-form passages, with grass worn off, confront the planned set-up for moving into the city.23 They form in the margin of planning dictated by urban policy and can be seen as democratic and unpredicted interruptions through the citizens’ power to affect the fabric of the landscape in an unconscious but purposeful way. To start a desired path is to vote, quite literally, with your feet. Desire paths have inspired artists to manifest the border areas between the regulated and desired uses of public space and to imagine other ways of organizing space. One of the forerunners in land art Richard Long has ‘walked without purpose’ in several works with telling titles such as ‘A Line Made By Walking’ (1976) and ‘Dusty Boots Line’ (in Sahara desert 1988). In a playful way we can think it is ants’ everyday practice shifted

Urban spaces between norms and dreams 51 into human (and beyond) scale. Playful or intentional mis-use, rebel, absurdification, fabulation, or fictionalization with rules, regulations, and ‘normals’ – subtly as a whisper or with screaming intensity – are common tactics in arts. The site-specific, situational, outside-of-museum post-studio practices in public space inevitably form another kind of interconnection with society than were they presented in gallery or museum context. The tensional relation between ‘city law’ and ‘art event’ forms an alternative urban reality quite concretely visible. Art intervening the top-up ruled city space I next look specifically at an urban space intervention positioned in the city centre loaded with regulatory aspects framing its use, which on the other hand is intrinsically an intervention with an own inner logic as artwork. The installation project People’s Architecture Helsinki took place in a popular meeting place in the heart of the city, Three Blacksmiths’ square in autumn 2017. The project was facilitated by a Taiwanese architect Hsieh Ying-Chun with the aim to set up a temporary shelter at the heart of Helsinki city centre.24 An open call for citizens was launched, and a group of some 30 asylum seekers responded and participated in the collective art project. Most of the participating asylum seekers had at that point been involved in the Right to Live standing demonstration, which had stood for the call day and night for over seven months at the railway station square for more just refugee policies than those executed by the Finnish Immigration Services (Migri), at that time operated by the then sitting right-wing government.25 The asylum seekers urged for human rights policies that would better respect the international agreements that Finland is committed to and protested against forced deportations.26 The original demonstration had been asked to move from the railway square in end June 2017 and faced other logistic difficulties in re-settling, and had now a chance to get reactivated in early September in the Three Blacksmiths square as part of the Helsinki Design Week event. The installation was re-titled Right to Live house, and it was on site for two weeks, after which the Right to Live protest as a physical and long-term demonstration ended. The intervention can be seen as a manifestation of socially engaged art practice mo­ tivated in large part by the act of claiming the right for city space by the citizens themselves – in this case, by the asylum seekers who were, at the time, themselves un­ dergoing the process of claiming their own rights to seek asylum and possible later the (permanent status of) citizenship. For some of the audience and passers whose life not necessarily is anywhere near being in need for a roof above your head or any other shelter reminiscent of a ‘home,’ the intervention perhaps served as a bridge for con­ necting even remotely to the problematics of homelessness (local and global) in one step more concrete manner than by reading an article about it. The project can be seen as an artistic intervention that liberated public space from its given normative regulatory purposes, while entailed emancipatory potential in giving voice and subjectivity to those who collaboratively worked it up. The intervention posed a question about to whom the city belong. Similarly, it challenged the prevailing con­ ditions and social structures of the site of its erection, the Three Blacksmiths Square.27 Furthermore, intervention breaks traditional expectations of what is normal and acceptable behaviour in urban space. It ‘injects something new and surprising into the familiar and existing’ and suggests another kind of attachment to the (new and altered) situation.28 Through the intervention one comes to acknowledge the altered materiality

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and new parameters or demands in terms of embodiment that are at stake in it and in its relation to the site. The People’s Architecture was constructed as a polemical space by transforming a designated public square into a shared and inclusive space open for all. It took place within the normative institutional order of the city coinciding with the utopian possi­ bilities related to several practices of ‘othering’ – it constituted an inclusive space for those not granted an official status of citizenship (or even asylum), and it constituted an opening, a stage if you like, for a utopia to be actualized in an unexpected contradiction with the overly commercialized location under city law, regulation, and surveillance. In this way, the intervention formulated a new theoretical gesture inherently a political one, through tactics commonly used in arts. Art pieces, such as urban interventions, can serve as empirical evidence of the re­ sidents’ engagement to their site. In this sense, they create a new cartography of the city, of itself. Ideas and dreams become felt and understood through sensable experience and affective attachment they actualize. Following David Harvey, the asylum seekers – as temporary citizen’s actualizing the temporary work themselves – carried out their ‘freedom to make and remake our cities as one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.’29 The intervention celebrated this by leaving the citizens’ affective footprint onto the site. Putting dreaming techniques into practice In the previous chapter, I mentioned desire paths as one of the practices seizing the citizens’ power to change urban scenery in ways beyond the city planning top-down ideas and ideologies. In psychoanalytic literature and study, desire paths resonate with a wide and multidimensional field way too vast to be touched in this text in more detail, yet I will briefly take up a line of thought in dialogue with Gaston Bachelard. In his endeavour in ‘giving the exterior destiny to the interior being’ – as he formulates in the frame of his psychoanalytic-phenomenological topoanalysis of the intertwined spatiality of body and mind30 – he writes: ‘George Sand, dreaming beside a path of a yellow sand, saw life flowing by.’ ‘What is more beautiful than a path?’, she wrote. ‘It is the symbol and the image in his soul.’31 The passing glimpse into Bachelard’s dreamlike conception serves here as a hinge to elevate another kind of visionary, fictional, and magical thinking as means to challenge the preconditions dictated by the normative rational-technical thinking. Through artbased approach that takes the imaginary equally real as the physical everyday-reality-athands, the prevailing social, cultural, and urban practices become re-evaluated and articulated in terms leaning to another kind of register that connects with embodiment, senses, and affectivity. Sense of belonging and affective attachment to a place become relevant indicators once we take imaginary dimension as a tool for mapping sites and spaces in ways receptive and respective to their experiential qualities. Recognizing closeness to a site makes an affective attachment, a caring relationship, that brings along responsibility and thus an ethical bond. In the earlier pages of this article, I introduced between the lines, with two images (see Figures 3.1–3.2), some examples of assignments by the group called ‘space + practice parasite,’ whose specific interest is in the relationship between spatial practice and urban

Urban spaces between norms and dreams 53

Figure 3.1 Space + practice parasite group session ‘sticks with the city’ (from series of as­ signments), Agroksenmäki, spring 2022. Photo by the author.

Figure 3.2 Space + practice parasite group session ‘sticks with the city’ (from series of as­ signments), Agroksenmäki, spring 2022. Photo by the author.

space. The group began as a course and workshop gathering collectively to do spatial assignments once a month, each time with a specific ‘score’ for an assignment.32 Each score entailed instructions or parameters for each four-hour-long gathering. The ‘score’ for the assignment ‘sticks with the city’ (Figures 3.1–3.2) was as follows, and it was initiated by one of the group facilitator-members Denise Ziegler: We pick up some long wooden things we need and walk together to Agroksenmäki park on a hill. We explore the site together using long wooden objects. Place the sticks

54

Maiju Loukola in the landscape. Connect the stick, a human/humans and the landscape. Take a picture/pictures of the situation(s).

The score defined the material to work with (each participant took with her/him a 3-metre-long wooden stick), the collective mode of practice (walking together to the site carrying the stick, and working together at the site), inviting the participants to ‘place the sticks in the landscape’ so that they in some way connect the sticks with a person/participants and the landscape. Further, the participants were asked to take a photo documentation of their assignment outputs. The gatherings are motivated by a shared will to experiment, test, materialize, and sketch various, all kinds of, spatial practices in relation to the city space without a specifically defined purpose or aim. The spatial practice sessions are like five-finger ex­ ercises with city space and practice (an active act of experimenting) in relation to or born out of whatever the score, the site, and the situation at hand may suggest. Usually at the end of each gathering, we step aside from the site and discuss instant impressions and observations. We have agreed that we try to maintain as objective a tone as possible, make observations, and avoid ‘making meaning’ or ‘evaluation.’ In the observation session after Agroksenmäki ‘stick with the city’ gathering, the participants mentioned among other things the following, in commenting on one of the assignments where one of the participants had asked the other participants to hold the long wooden sticks on a vertical position, exactly lined to be in a 90-degree angle with the ground, and place themselves in a group position with some 5–10 metres distance from each other, with the city skyline with high vertical buildings as the backdrop of the assignment setting: … while making (this) composition with sticks in a vertical position, the city changed as if into an architectural scale model … This observation catalyzed a thought that urban planners should really sketch the architectural (and other) planning with 1-to-1 scale objects at their hands, instead of making tiny scale models by the laptop and drawing tables. Another comment: The group of vertical sticks created a phantom building on the Agroksenmäki, and it was like drawing in the air a kind of sketch of a spatial construction, perhaps a house, that is to be built here … a virtual figure of a house or some other architectonic object … What was noted repeatedly was that whatever material or object was used, they never ‘stayed the same,’ but through the practice their potentiality was made visible in many unexpected ways. The stick was no longer ‘just a wooden stick’ but part of several possible spatial compositions – those that were acted out in Agroksenmäki, and those that became visible in their absence while and after practicing, experimenting, observing, and dis­ cussing. The practice created concrete materializations of what could be possible, but also, immaterial visions of what could be possible but was not realized (by choice of instant action and choice to do this and not that), or could not have been realistically realized but could be realistically envisioned. Many of the potential options of how to use the sticks in a sketch-like composition, as elements of potential architectonics, were possible to imagine as effects of an actually practiced practice. The envisioned possibilities not realized but imagined, represent a ‘utopia’ as it refers to an absent idea, a figure that has a counterpart

Urban spaces between norms and dreams 55 in the sensuous mind as a phantasmatic figure, even though a focal point in reality remains missing. Interestingly in a parallel fashion, in the context of relationship between law and the city, legal theorist Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos formulates utopias as ‘temporal leaps out of the present (–) and into a future vocabulary of possibility, where both law and the city (in their identity) delve into the horizon and construct an ideality in the form of absence.’33 In the ‘sticks’ practice, the utopian components enabled the effects of the spatial practice ‘to extend on a phantasmatic articulation’ in the urban space, which, in turn, became dreamt by the observations resulting from the practice, in the tension catalyzed exactly by that practice.34 In the early pages of the article, I mentioned the notion of ‘law’s invisibility’ by Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. He claims that law and regulations are present in the city space to that (magnified) extent that they become a ‘normal,’ transparent condition in their being-not-noticed. Here, he locates one of the ‘blindspots in lawscape’: When a single law or rule is looked at more closely, it is assumed to be an answer, a reaction to some strictly limited problem, and thus insists on the ‘performativity’ and ‘spatiality’ of law. Instead of being a solution in and of itself, the law needs to respond to the ‘frac­ tured, conflictual, and piecemeal nature’ of city life, city space, and the ever-transforming conditions of and in the city.35 He strongly argues against the conception where law as such responds to a fixed, static, given conditions. What needs to be asked instead, he argues, is how to ‘aquire a sense of spatialized history of the urban manifestations of the law’ – and how could further blindspots be revealed?36 Considering law and regulatory mechanisms as historical and present, always ‘practices practiced’ that are tied to spa­ tiality as well as temporality, brings fore interesting parallelity to art and art’s modes of operation. Artistic practices are elementally spatial and temporal, not to mention his­ torical in their fluid context-specificity. In arts, as in the law, it is a common practice to play with discrepancies and contra­ dictions. In arts, it is a common practice to purposefully equate the ills and inconsistencies in strange and impossible parallels. Art puts exactly those frictions and differences, im­ possibilities, and peculiar settings out in the open to be perceived, experienced, felt, and known for us to encounter. We meet with art via senses and are in these instances bom­ barded with stimulation that lands on both the aesthetic and sensuous, and the conscious and context aware. Yet, in experiencing art we are nowhere near being dispatched from the invisible effects of law and the prevailing normative set-up. One of the most deeply touching examples of depicting a tragic wrong via means of art is based on a tragic real-life photograph of the Nauru island refugees, who, while being forcefully and against all international obligations for human rights in illegal imprison­ ment in a Nauru island refugee camp with their mouths stitched up. The images spread widely in social media and were followed by numerous adaptations, becoming an iconic depiction of the brutality of illegal camps torturing those seeking asylum. A mouth is a vehicle for speaking one’s voice. Without having to see the actual image a set of heated political issues immediately hits us through our aesthetic-sensory perception.37 In the case, there is no way to not consider the legal and incomprehensible depth of absence of rights.38 Horizons The city space can be understood as a nexus of its inhabitants’ freedom, needs, interests, desires, and their estuaries. This viewpoint urges the necessity to inspect closely the forces that partake in the formation of urban space – and of different kinds of urban spaces

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in varying temporal and spatial frames. A city is a dynamic topography, in which different kinds of orders are established, ills and inequalities are created, and at the same time opportunities for emancipation and democratization are opened. Understood as a network of subjects, places, events, emergences, and imagination where seemingly dissenting reg­ isters – art (aesthetic-sensuous and affective) and law (regulatory-administrative-legal) – form an effective tension, within which it is possible to acknowledge both registers‘ own inner logic and respect the difference by an ethical logic of being sensitive to the strange and peculiar other(ness). It is noteworthy to understand that the law not only restricts or prohibits but can and needs to be part of the emancipatory processes as well. When contemplated through a parallax view where the tense relationship of artistic space, administrative space, and political space collide, another kind of picture forms of a city, one that allows the city to be understood more concretely as a temporal-spatial entity where differently motivated practices take place. I have elaborated on a few instances where different kinds of material and discursive dimensions in the city can be looked at through the lenses of art and law, and how some of the tangential points between the dissenting orders could be located in order to add more holistic understanding of the citizens’ sense of belonging and attachment to their city.39 I am convinced that a better understanding of the interplay between different conflictual forces and factors contains hidden potential that could strengthen the residents’ attach­ ment to their living neighbourhood in terms of care, responsibility, and affection. I have stressed that through experiential practice of practices via means of arts, without goal-oriented premise for an expected result, can act as manifestations and concretizations of the forces at stake in urban space formation. While the relations and tensions at play are contested in actual sites, with material tools and objects, we come to have access to an imaginary, utopian even, field of possibilities that may actualize right here right now as absent yet have recognizable counterparts and points in the lived space and spatial experience, and inform us of the components at stake, effective and affective. As urban space is through and through material and ‘constitutes an actual site, a place, a ground within which and from which political activity flows’ it is necessary to seek ways to specify and concretize the connections and differences in the forces and components at play, to be able to achieve improved means for mending the claimed blindspots that remain overlooked if we place the sensuous and the regulatory as opposite actors.40 Along with the reach for theoretical understanding, concrete practices – artistic and political – are needed in this work. As I have tried to exemplify, in artistic experiments alternative scenarios are created and concretized. Artistic interventions in the smoothened throughoutadministrative urban space leave affective, emotional, and temporal traces through mental and physical experiences. I have presented a fragmented scenario to explicate an art-based and law-sensitive orientation for partaking in the democratic processes of forming citizens’ attachment and agency in urban space. I have stressed an angle that recognizes the power of affective attachment to site – singular and collective, local, and beyond. As the city space is created in a polemical relationship between different forces and actors, the research methods and practices are necessarily diverse. Through interlinking conflicting dis­ courses and experimental practices, the cross-examination of different kinds of affec­ tive relations to city space has proved to create new perspectives not only to make visible people’s connectedness to the city space, but also to offer tools for urban planning and further residential civic activity via practices attentive to affective attachment, responsibility, and belonging. In political, artistic, legal, and lived

Urban spaces between norms and dreams 57 practices the city keeps re-structuring. It matters how the counterparts come in con­ nection, and it is crucial to safeguard a space for the dissenting orders, conceptions, and practices to have the right to be recognized as particular, yet open. Notes 1 Lefebvre based his concept of the ‘right to the city’ on his investigation of urbanization in 1960s France, as urban areas and planning were marked by the expansion of capital and massive migration from rural areas, which led to the ‘crisis of the city’ and colonization of everyday life. The domination of social housing and mass production in the margins of the cities, while middle-class and working-class suburbs and city centres were valued as different. ‘In these difficult conditions, at the heart of a society which cannot completely oppose them and yet obstruct them, rights which define civilization […] find their way. These rights which are not well recognized, progressively become customary before being inscribed into formal­ ized codes. They would change reality if they entered social practice: right to work, to training and education, to health, housing, leisure, to life. Among these rights in the making features the right to the city, not to the ancient city, but to urban life, to renewed centrality, to places of encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time uses, enabling full and complete usage of these moments and places, etc.’ ( Lefebvre 2000, 178). 2 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2007, 9. 3 Hirvonen 2011, 297. 4 Lefebvre 2000, 117. See also Butler 2007, 214 (in ‘Aspiration, asylum and the denial of the “right to the city”’ in Law and the City, ed. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 205–220). 5 Mayer 2012, 63–85. 6 See for example Harvey 2008. 7 Marcuse 2012, 185–197. 8 The term has been actively used by urban planners and activists in the 1990s, yet the thinking behind placemaking is influenced by trailblazers of urban planning development such as Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte, who advocated the idea of cities for people, not for just cars and consumption. 9 Ahmed 2004; Wetherell 2015. 10 Schmitz and Ahmed 2014. 11 Anderson and Holden 2008, 145. Affects are understood here as impersonal movements that amount to what a body can do, feelings as interpersonal expressions of affects, and emotions as personal qualifications of feelings. (ibid.) 12 For a dictionary definition, see https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blas%C3%A9 13 Massumi 2015, 6. 14 Massumi 2002. 15 Massumi 2015. ‘(–) affect is the power/capacity to affect and be affected’ (2015, ix). ‘These capacities are not two different capacities, they “always go together” because when you affect something you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn.’ (2015, 4). 16 The concept was originally used in poetry by Charles Baudelaire to depict the figure of an artist-poet of modern metropolis and has been requoted and modified further in poetry and literature, urban and feminist studies, and other contexts. 17 Guy Debord (defines psychogeography as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals’ (Internationale Situationniste #1, 1958). 18 See Coverley 2018. 19 See Pujol 2018 [1988]). 20 Bishop 2012, 1–2. 21 Jensen et al. 2018, 11–12. 22 Jestrovic 2013, 40; see also Jensen et al. 2018, 15. 23 Landscape planners sometimes make desire paths ‘official’ by paving them and they become integrated with the official path network. Urban planners are known to visit construction sites immediately after the first snowfall to get a better idea of where people walk, and where thus the paved routes should be.

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24 Hsieh launched an open invitation for citizens to join and share the collective responsibility in building a temporary shelter. Over 30 asylum seekers responded to the call. Over the course of ten days, the temporary shelter was installed on Three Blacksmith’s square, one of the most centrally located sites in the city. Adjacent to the square lies the classiest department stores in the city, surrounded by the most elegant fashion boutiques. The site is a perfect example of a socio-economically coherent, gentrified downtown location designed to be attractive for middle-class taxpayers and tourists ( Galanakis 2008, 243). As such, it is also top-up regulated, exclusionary space to the marginalized urbanites such as the homeless, the paperless, and the asylum seekers. 25 Finland is committed to international agreements and to providing protection to those in need. The basis of this is the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention and other international human rights treaties and EU legislation. See https://intermin.fi/en/areas-of-expertise/migration/refugeesand-asylum-seekers. (Accessed 6 March 2022). 26 The Right to Live protest was the second-longest held in the country and the first one orga­ nized by the asylum seekers themselves. It brought together a large community of supporting citizens, allies, NGOs, and other open-border activists to support the demonstrators’ consti­ tutional right for temporary use of urban space for demonstration. The protest started on 10 February 2017 in front of Kiasma Museum for Contemporary Art and was transferred to the Railway Square a week later by order of the police. (See Näre 2018). 27 Jensen et al. 2018, 127. 28 Jensen et al. 2018, 11–12. 29 Harvey 2008, 23–24. 30 Author’s interpretation of Bachelard’s approach in thinking space and spatiality. 31 Bachelard 1994, 90–91. 32 The framing of the ‘space + practice parasite’ activity is described as follows: ‘We focus on addressing the multiplicity of space and the ecology of spatial practices that they suggest. We develop methods of imparting the ways in which different spaces structure and form the taking place of things, gestures and events. We (–) prepare and experiment with site and situation specific interventions, gestures, and other space-reckoning practices. We develop methods of visualizing, materializing, or presenting thoughts on the role of space as structure for taking place of things, gestures, and events. (–) we learn from the site, its pasts and futures and the possibilities it offers now.’ (See the original course description in full in https://opinto-opas. uniarts.fi/en/course/K-JI-11-K22B/13712). 33 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2007, 11–12. 34 I am here altering a quote from Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos into the use of interpreting the ‘sticks’ situation from an angle where the imagined, utopian effects resulting from the spatial practice come to be seen in parallel with the original citation, which deals with the law and the city. I see considerable concurrency in the sentences where the other is in part translated or replaced with words and conceptions from another discipline. This ‘method’ brings another layer to thinking about law and art through a practice of translation. The original quote is ‘Utopian projects are vociferous lawscapes, enabling the legal body to extend on a phantas­ matic articulation of the urban, which, in turn, is dreamt by the law in a state of justiceinduced excitement.’ ( P-M 2007, 11). 35 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2007, 10. 36 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2007, 8–10. 37 Lip-sewing protests and variations of them have been seen in the context of early AIDS pro­ tests, for example, see Rosa von Praunheim’s documentary ‘Silence = Death’ (1989). More recent lip stitch images have been a tragic evidence of Nauru island refugee camp, where the refugees, while being in forcefully illegal imprisonment in a refugee camp in the island near Greece-Macedonia border, voiced out their protest against the brutality of the camps. The images started circulating in turmoil via social (and other) media, becoming an almost iconic depiction of the brutality of illegal camps for those seeking asylum. 38 It remains a subject of another article and further study to tackle the ‘politics of space’ related to migration and asylum policies with the European Commission’s struggling with stumbling with keeping up its (human rights) appearances in border policies, as refugees and stateless people will form ‘the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics,’ as Hannah Arendt rightly anticipated in her work The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Urban spaces between norms and dreams 59 39 See Lefebvre 2000 and 1968; Harvey 2008. 40 Mitchell 2003, 129–135.

References Ahmed, Sara and Schmitz, Sigrid. “Affext/Emotion: Orientation Matters. A Conversation between Sirid Schmitz and Sara Ahmed.” FZG, (2014), 97–108, 2014. https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/316457951_AffectEmotion_Orientation_Matters_A_Conversation_between_ Sigrid_Schmitz_and_Sara_Ahmed Ahmed, Sara. On Cultural Politics of Emotion, New York: Routledge, 2004. Anderson, Ben and Holden, Adam. “Affective Urbanism and the Event of Hope.” Space and Culture, 11(2), 142–159, 2008. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism, San Diego: Harcourt Inc., 1968. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, 1994. Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London and New York: Verso, 2012. Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography, Harpenden: Oldcastle Books, 2018. Debord, Guy. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. by Tom McDonough, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2000 [1955]. Galanakis, Michail. Space Unjust: Socio-Spatial Discrimination in Urban Spaces: Cases from Helsinki and Athens, University of Art and Design Helsinki A82 Series, Helsinki: University of Art and Design, 2008. Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review, 53, 23–40, Sept./Oct. 2008. Hirvonen, Ari. “Kiistojen kaupunki sääntöjen ja hallinnan tilana.” [City of Disagreement as Space of Regulations, Governance, and Resistance], Oikeus [Justice] Journal, 40(3), 293–312, 2011. Jensen, Anna, Rajanti, Taina, and Ziegler, Denise. Intervention to Urban Space: Experimental Intervention as a Tool for Artistic Research and Education, Helsinki: Aalto ARTS Books, 2018. Jestrovic, Silvia. Performance, Space, Utopia. Cities of War, Cities of Exile, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, Oxford and Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Lefebvre, Henri. Writings on Cities, trans. and ed. by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Leboy, Oxford and Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Marcuse, Peter. Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, eds. Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse, Margit Mayer, Routledge, 2012. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke University Press, 2002. Massumi, Brian. Politics of Affect, Cambridge: Polity, 2015. Mayer, Margit. “The ‘Right to the City’ in Urban Social Movements.” in Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer (eds.) Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, 63–85, New York: Routledge, 2012. Mitchell, Don. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space, New York: Guilford Press, 2003. Näre, Leena. “Olemme täällä näyttämässä, että olemme ihmisiä siinä missä muutkin” – Etnografinen tutkimus turvapaikanhakijoiden protestista Helsingissä [“We Are Here to Show That We Are People Just Like Anyone Else“ – Ethnographic Study of an Asylum Seekers‘ Protest in Helsinki], Sosiologia, (4), 350–365, 2018. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. Law and the City, Abingdon/Oxon and New York: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007. Pujol, Ernesto. Glimpses of Walking Art Practices. Reflections on Socially Engaged Paths, Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2018. Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Wetherell, Margaret. “Trends in the Turn to Affect: A Social Psychological Critique.” Body & Society, 21(2), 139–166, 2015.

4

Spatial references of home Moving on the periphery of public space Denise Ziegler

Introduction ‘To be the living room of the people, to make you feel at home in public space’ is a common slogan to promote art museums, cultural facilities, and shopping malls today. The dichotomy of the private and the public has shifted the question of ‘where are you living?’ to the question of ‘where are you moving about?’ Today, a public space is considered to be more than a place to reminisce about ‘the dead and the done,’ kings, heroes, battles, conquests, and monumental undertakings. The ability for everyone to access the public sphere is considered the key to inclusion.1 But what does it actually mean to be ‘at home’ in public space? This text reflects upon how we perceive the notion of home in an urban environment in 2023 and how the notion of home is connected to moving in and through public space. I have consequently excluded from these investigations the geographical and socio-political aspect of the notion of home as the anchor place where you were born, where you grew up, and where you reside or used to reside. Instead, the main objective of this study is to find, observe, describe, and reflect on the actions and feelings in public space that are connected to what I call a notion-of-homein-movement. By this, I mean actions and ways of moving in public space that show the characteristics of feeling at home. To detect these notions-of-home-in-movement, I have created four experiential artistic operations, which I will describe below. These operations are part of my artistic research practice, and they often lead to the creation of artwork that is part of the artistic research in question. First experiential artistic operation

I adopt the working method of ‘zooming in,’ which was originally applied by artists with a lens-based practice, to detect the notion of home in public space. I am figuratively zooming in on the time frame of the notion of home, considering ever shorter time spans in a human’s lifetime that are connected to the notion of home. This experiential artistic operation disconnects the notion of home from a physical and permanent location and instead connects it to the human body and its movement. Second experiential artistic operation

I observe and describe different situations where people’s moving around in public space can be regarded as performative actions of routines, rehearsal, or oddness and selfexposure. For example, I describe the ridiculous act of walking barefoot through the DOI: 10.4324/9781003348269-6

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outskirts of the city or the ongoing practice of a hockey player in an ice hockey arena. For me as a visual artist, describing these experiential occurrences in public space in a detailed way is a method to gain awareness of what happens in these situations and to better understand how they connect to the immediate surroundings. The literal descriptions serve as a script or a sketch for my artistic practice, where I restage these performative actions in the form of a video collage, for example.2 The encountered movement in the public space is brought into a new context by artistically distancing it from the original context. Third experiential artistic operation

I aestheticize the notion of home in public space by bringing it into the realm of conceptual art. I introduce a conceptual public artwork that manifests the notion-ofhome-in-movement.3 Fourth experiential artistic operation

I reflect on a feeling that arises between the absence and presence of home on the border of the imaginative and the real. This is implemented in dialogue with artists, colleagues, and our respective artwork.4 Even though in this research I exclude the physical location, such as a house, a flat, or a landscape, as the origin of the notion of home, I acknowledge that the experience of being a European resident has still influenced these investigations. Despite of populistic attempts to work towards a homogenized Europe, the notion of home is still associated with an ex­ perience of diversity by many of the inhabitants of the multi-state, fragmented, and borderrich Europe.5 There are multiple languages, nations, borders, and lived cultures. There are different styles and traditions of architecture, handicraft, and agriculture, as well as dif­ ferent traditions of thinking. Migrating a few hundred kilometres may include not only a change of language but also a change of culture and traditions. In this respect, the defi­ nition of ‘feeling at home’ or ‘feeling strange’ may change repeatedly during one’s lifetime. On the other hand, even if one stays all one’s life in the same place, the geographical and social surroundings will undoubtedly have a big influence on the notion of home. This was evident, for example, in a study on elderly people’s notion of home conducted in the Faroe Islands. Elderly people who had lived most of their lives in bigger cities experienced home in a community with its social contacts, whereas the ones who were living on small islands were feeling at home in a certain place, a house, or a farm.6 From a historical point of view, the changes in our relationship to a dwelling might help us better understand the viewpoint suggested here. In the 1800s, the concept of a dwelling included the idea that you left traces of what you are to the visitors of your home.7 The interiors of private homes were considered clues to the individuals’ personalities. Along with the rise of the private individual in the 19th century, the place of dwelling became separated from the office, the place of work.8 Public space was considered a place where you had to avoid getting exposed as a private person by acting and assuming a role. To the philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner (1892–1985), public space was a place of shame, which can only be endured by using a mask or armour, by acting with diplomacy, or by playing a game.9 Public space was opposed to private space, and it was hence the opposite of home. Accordingly, public space and especially public art was directed at commemorating people

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in their public role. In my experience as a visual artist, this notion of public space and the role of public art is changing. Today, public space is at least promoted to us as something that includes diversity and inclusion. The place of dwelling, on the other hand, is nowadays often connected to trends and fashion, with open kitchen concepts and reality TV shows telling you how to style up your home to be part of the latest standards and trends. The controversial term individuality and its connection to the notion of home in the private and public sphere would constitute a fruitful investigation on its own. However, I will not get deeper into this topic here, as it is largely outside my field of expertise. Instead, I ask: What if our notions of home went beyond a ‘home’ as an attachment to a place, a flat, a house, a city, a landscape, a social environment and culture, a shelter, a safe nest where you sprung from and where your return is always welcome. What if home was simply introduced as an experience of moving in an open space, as a relation to the encountering of things and changing situations that happened in this space. In this text, I critically investigate the notion of home in relation to public space. The aim is to find out how and where someone can feel at home in a changing urban environment. The hypothesis is that the notion of home is a phenomenon that emerges from the fringes of our relationship to our surroundings. This includes how we interact with objects, situa­ tions, and encounters in our everyday lives as a whole. The notion of home is seen here as something that follows our actions and movements wherever we are. The notion of home is not attached to something specific (like a physical home) but emerges on the periphery of us being in motion. This investigation is hence conducted mostly in public space and on the move. Because my artistic practice is made in, for, and about public space, it provides the flexibility needed for this research. Spatial References of Home includes the video work Go Hard – Door Closes,10 the conceptual work for public space Child Bike Seat – at Home in Movement,11 and the sculptural installation Window Shutters.12 It also includes a col­ laboration with Glenn D’Cruz’s video work Tape Recorder13 and Alexandra Inkster’s text The Mutable Immutable – A proposition for a future situation,14 as well as a collaboration with an independent research group that implements the Continuous Prototype, a dynamic artistic research tool created by the group that allows you to imagine what kind of further development could be deduced based on the current situation.15 In the implementation of these investigations and in my artistic research practice, I also engage in dialogue with experience research, urban studies research, philosophical anthropology, as well as research on the origin of an artwork and the reason why an artwork has come into existence. In my artistic practice, this means that I develop and resolve material, spatial, or practice-related challenges also by consulting texts of dif­ ferent philosophers and scientists to be able to ‘discuss’ our respective practices and to learn from them. The artworks created in this process and discussed here are therefore not illustrations of my research, nor are they illustrations of other people’s theoretical frameworks; rather, they are essential parts of my fieldwork and research. At the same time, the artwork functions as a parallax and allows the audience to navigate through and experience the forming of a new understanding of their own daily occurrences in public space. The aim of my research is hence also to contribute to a rethinking of public art and to envision what public art might be like in the future. A phenomenon emerges on the fringe of our immediate surroundings In this chapter, I introduce the method of ‘zooming in,’ which was originally applied by artists with a lens-based practice, as an operational tool in search of the notion of home in

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public space. I then introduce a second operation in which I describe occurrences in public space in a verbally detailed way. I describe a walk, a rehearsal exercise, and the act of sitting in public space parallel to an experience of temporarily feeling at home. I do this to better understand how the things I have just encountered connect to their immediate surroundings. To feel at home is usually connected to a durational, extended time period. It takes time to feel somewhere at home. But what would happen if we narrowed down the timeframe concerning the notion of home by asking you where in your home you are this year, this week, or today? When you zoom in on a map, more and increasingly small streets and paths start to appear; similarly, when you adopt a smaller timeframe when thinking about the question of home, our moves, routines, and activities start to matter. The daily commute to work, a walk to the shop, a bar hop, or a doctor’s visit are repeated travels in urban space and they follow familiar patterns of where to go and what to encounter. If I narrow down the timeframe even more and consider where I am at home this hour, this minute, or this instant, the home becomes con­ nected with my human body and the feeling of being in the body of a human. The human skin is now my closest home. ‘Life is man’s best time!’ said Finnish ski-jumper legend Matti Nykänen.16 Especially when riding my bicycle on a familiar route, I feel that I can concentrate on my own thoughts, an idea for an artwork, or plans for the weekend, for example.17 As in ancient Greek rhetoric, I match my thoughts to the changing urban landscape I am travelling in.18 While walking through the streets, I like to eat my lunch or hum a song. I do all these things that I would do in a relaxed and homey environment while being ‘en route.’ I extend the experience of home to include being in motion and connecting my thoughts to the changing surroundings. Home in this sense might be defined as something that follows all human bodies that are in motion rather than being a social arrangement or an institutional programme that depends on the obligations and duties of society and its members. After the operation of zooming in on the question of the notion of home, I introduce the second operation. This second operation consists of describing occurrences in public space. In describing repeated happenings, such as a walk or a rehearsal exercise, one’s ongoing relationship to the surroundings, which are changing during the activity, is an important part of these descriptions. In an earlier artistic research project, I used ev­ eryday events and gestures as starting points for artwork and artistic research.19 Now I will concentrate on relationships: I describe everyday events in connection to their changing surroundings. The aim of the descriptions is to find out where and when ‘home’ happens. The aim is to bring us closer to the essence of the notion of home and to find out more about ‘home’ as momentum, the essence and nature of an action. How can we investigate the nature of an action or, at a more general level, the nature of anything? Roland Barthes suggests that we should consider the latter question by way of com­ parison. He asks: What is the nature of a pair of trousers? He excludes the sleek-ironed and folded object on a coat hanger in a department store from his considerations and instead suggests that the nature of a pair of trousers is the slack passive bundle of fabric left on the bedroom floor by an indifferent juvenile who took off his trousers (Figure 4.1).20 The nature of a thing has to do with what is left after its use. This leftover is not to be confused with scrap or waste; rather, it is energy, something that is gained by recklessly leaving it behind.21

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Figure 4.1 Research material: Trousers left on the floor after use. Photo by the author.

I adapt Barthes’ method of comparison to my own search for the essence of the concept of home. I am aware that comparisons always have their limits, they are always somehow ‘lame.’ Nevertheless, comparisons and metaphors can still give a different perspective and they might provide new insight on the matter of interest. Like in Barthes’ example of the neatly folded trousers, I look beyond the (clichés of) home as a place of shelter and safety with warmth and love. Instead, I will search for an unconcerned, indifferent, lived versions of home – the one used in everyday life. In the following, I describe notions of home that emerge in connection to actions or movements. In these actions, I emphasise the aspects of routine, repetition, and change. It is also essential to note the role of the objects, obstacles, and places found, formed, or built in connection to these human activities. Walking home

After locking myself out of my studio, I find myself in my socks in the hallway of an industrial building. I cannot reach my phone, my wallet, or my bicycle key, and no one else is working in the early morning hours, so there is nobody I could ask for help. I am forced to walk home to fetch the spare key to the studio. I take off my socks and start the journey barefoot – a trek of about 4.5 km that starts from the industrial area of Arabia, continues across the motorway and the Koskela hill, goes through the Käpylä residential district, and finally ends in Patola, in northern Oulunkylä. It is a

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sunny summer day, so I have nothing to worry about. Soon I can overcome the disappointment of having to spend my working hours to walk back home. I try to avoid stepping on the small pebbles on the asphalt but get stung by them anyway since my feet are not used to being in direct contact with the pavement. After a ca. 50-minute walk, I not only have blisters on my feet but many thoughts have also emerged in my mind: I remember that when I was a teenager, walking barefoot all summer evoked a sense of freedom in me, and in the end of the summer, the hard skin on the sole of the foot was a sign of connectedness to life on Earth, of being in touch with and at home on our planet (Figure 4.2). Now I only felt quite ridiculous, walking barefoot in the streets with my socks in my hand. The only direct reaction to my performance was from a small child pointing out to her mother: ‘See, the woman has no shoes!’ The mother gave a prompt answer: ‘That might be a healthy way to activate the blood circulation.’ Today, home meant going to fetch the spare key to the studio. But it also signified a connection to a memory of home through a concrete, although seemingly senseless and ridiculous, action of walking barefoot on the outskirts of the city. By engaging in this ridiculous act and by accepting the loss of control of what I wanted to do this morning, the ‘kitschy concept’ of home was dismantled, revealing a feeling of complete unreservedness. According to Plessner, the act of total openness in public space is harmful to us because when someone shows vulnerability, they put their individuality at risk. 22 By exposing oneself, one may become ridiculous. As an artist, I have the possibility to approach situations in public space through my profession. To work on the borders of the private and the public is part of my work, and I constantly learn and develop methods and tools to relate to the dichotomy of personal and common features within my working practice. In this line of thought, I wonder what happens to the visitors of cultural institutions that are asked to ‘use the public museum space like their own private living room’.23 Are they asked to ridicule themselves or are they asked to assume a role and play a game? Art museums and other public institutions are – in my experience – no-one’s home according to the definition of home of a safe, cosy harmless place; instead, they

Figure 4.2 Research material: Foot with a blister 14 days after the event of walking home barefoot. Photo by the author.

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create situations where you are exposed to and attacked by new ideas and surprised by new, emerging feelings of various kinds. 24 Rehearsing home

While working on the notion of home as an activity in public space, I recorded two video sketches that depicted actions related to urban space and its architecture: First, the repetitive physical exercise of an ice hockey professional in an almost empty arena, and second, the heavy wooden door of a cathedral that closes softly without making a noise. The continuity and concentration in the first action and the distinct repetitive closing of the heavy wooden door in the second video sketch start to define and give meaning to the respective spaces. The architectural space gave a home to these movements and actions. The skating hockey player’s figure-eight manoeuvres are transmitted not only visually but also through the sound of the skate blades on the ice and the trainer’s loud and distinct voice. The trainer is shouting ‘go!’ and ‘hard!’, the skater is speeding up and making a tight turn at the end of the ice rink, turning around, and pushing away the ice to the right and to the left on his way to the other end. After a while, the trainer yells ‘done.’ Now, the skater glides without a sound, bending his upper body forward and leaning on the hockey stick that is resting against his thighs to be able to breathe more easily. After half a minute, the exercise is repeated. The rehearsal25 confines the volume of the vast stadium with its movement and especially with its distinctive sounds, i.e., the yelled commands of the trainer and the sound of the skates pushing the ice aside. These sounds can be heard from far up in the grandstand. Without the spectacle and distraction of a hockey game event in the arena, the impact of the lone skater’s con­ centrated rehearsal is very impressive. Now, in the almost empty arena, the rehearsal of only one skater fills the whole space that seats 17,000 people! The architecture of the arena is designed to let the space be dominated by movement and especially by sound. The experience of space in the empty arena is set off by the movement and sound; it is defined by what is left of it right after the performance. For me, witnessing this ‘home of movement and sound’ is equal to experiencing the essence of an arena (Figure 4.3). In a similar way, the closing of the door of the cathedral in the second video clip regulates the air flow of the building (Figure 4.4). The dark and heavy wooden door opens and closes like a giant gill. This happens without a sound due to a soft obstacle that is placed between the two parts of the door. The obstacle is a velvet cord that is attached on both ends to the inner and outer door handle. The cathedral is breathing through the door, letting people in and out without disturbing the congregation or the silence of the empty cathedral. Following my suggestion of using the method of the Continuous Prototype to work with the video sketches, artist Alexandria Inkster wrote a screenplay based on the two video clips.26 She focuses both on the air flow described above and on a detail in the ice rink rehearsal video clip, which I had neglected to observe myself: Among the half a dozen spectators in the otherwise empty arena, there is one person sitting in the dark foreground of the video image reading a book. The reader in the arena – in his unexpected activity (Why would someone read a book in an arena?) – is indifferent to the events around him and is only immersed in reading. Through his reading activity, he creates an imaginative inner space that overlaps with the actual space of the arena. In Inkster’s screenplay, the reader gets company when several other readers join him in the ice hockey arena. Her one-page script ends like this:

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(…) gradually half a dozen a dozen two dozen spectators filter into the arena some in groups some alone they sit in the stands, and they read the coach yells the skater skates and the space breathes deeply, bodies and effort and expired air the arena is a library a meditative space and its players continue to rehearse the cathedral door closes. (Inkster 2019)

Figures 4.3 Research material: Still from the video work Go Hard! – Door Closes (2022). An ice hockey professional is practicing with his trainer in an almost empty arena. Photo by the author.

Figures 4.4 Research material: Still from the video work Go Hard! – Door Closes (2022). A closed heavy wooden door with an attached velvet cord. Photo by the author.

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Figure 4.5 Research material: Distribution of yellow cloth in the arena. Photo by the author.

Two years later I visited the same arena. Again, we are a small group visiting the empty arena. There is once again a practice session in progress on the ice, but now I start to look around inside the arena. Employees appear in the different sections of the seating areas carrying piles of yellow pieces of fabric in their arms. They start to furnish the back of each dark blue seat in the arena with a yellow cloth. Each employee starts in a dif­ ferent section, and they work slowly through the rows of seats. As they advance, the whole sitting area starts to change colour. ‘Hockey is for everyone’ is printed on the soft cloth. One corner of the cloth is equipped with a small LED lamp that can be turned on by waving the cloth back and forth or spinning it over the head while holding it in one hand. In the evening’s game, the audience will take these pieces of fabric from their seats and use them to cheer for the teams during the game. The preparation of the seats proceeds like a game of solitaire, where the playing cards are revealed one at a time, and soon all the spots are yellow. The employees disappear. I wonder what kind of screen­ play Inkster would write for this footage (Figure 4.5). A year later, I finished editing the video that now included the new clip of the dis­ tribution of the yellow cloth. The rhythm of the finished video is provided by altering the long shots of the happenings in the arena and the repetition of the same short shot of the cathedral door closing slowly and softly. I named the video Go Hard! – Door Closes. The video work also marks the time span when I was travelling around with my family to ice hockey practices and tournaments as a hockey mom. Gaining home

One seat in the arena is mine, I have a ticket for it. From this seat, I follow the evening’s hockey game in the arena. From this seat, it is safe for me to relate and react to the spectacle that is going on during a game, to show emotions, even to jump up and raise my hands, to wave the yellow cloth, to shout and cry, and to sit down again in my own seat. If I wish, I can rest for a while, start reading a book, and enter a different world. The seat in the arena has both a public and a temporary, private nature at the same time. Occupying it for a few hours gives me the feeling of being positioned towards the centre of a public event, while at the same time, it defines the outer borders of my own space in the

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surrounding spectacle. I tend to suffer from anxiety issues in large crowds, so I consider my seat in the stadium my safe place for the time of the spectacle. Here, I am safe from the other people. Since I have a seat of my own, I can participate in the spectacle and even enjoy it. According to Helmuth Plessner, humans are positioned out of the centre of the self without leaving the same centre. He calls excentricity (ex-centricity) a characteristic of humans, which describes their relationship to their surroundings. The self cannot be ob­ jectivized; it can only be actualized through an asymptotic approach to the borders of the inner world and the outside spectacle.27 Just like Plessner describes it, an imaginative gap opens between the hockey game around me and my inner world. In my mind, I can switch between me as a spectator, who focuses on the centre of the arena with the game in progress, and me distancing myself from the surrounding events and entering my own world, just like the reader of a book did in the empty arena during the afternoon practice. The outlines of the arena seat mark the physical border between the two worlds. I ex­ perience this gap not as distance, but rather as a parallax and a possibility to step mentally out of the centric view of the spectators following the game. This gives me a strong feeling of myself being simultaneously focused on the actions of the spectacle in the arena and excentred with regard to my possibility to sit in my chair as in an enclave and to concentrate on thoughts and ideas that have nothing to do with the hockey game. After this experience, I conclude that both positioning and ex-positioning oneself are relevant actions of humans when it comes to the notion of home.28 After I had participated in the mass event in the huge arena, I realized that public space is not a shared space for me, but rather a space that I have gained for myself by actively negotiating its borders. I also realized that I could extend my own experience of (inner) space into public space without having to own this space exclusively or in the long term. I make the space mine in the very moment I experience and relate to it. When the game ends, I leave my seat in the arena and give up its ownership. This was a temporary relationship, or ownership, of public space both because I had a ticket to the game and also because I sat in the seat during the game. Similarly, I might ‘own’ a pavement by walking or bicycling on it. I ‘own’ a public space for the time I sit, walk, or cycle there. Besitzen, the German word for ‘to own,’ means literally ‘to occupy’ or to ‘sit on.’ Perceiving an event in a public space with the means of artistic practice and con­ sidering Inkster’s thoughts on air flow and Plessner’s remarks on excentricity of humans, I define the notion of home as an ongoing negotiation of the borders between myself and the surrounding world. The feeling of home emerges in these lived moments. Moving home in public space In the following, I ponder further on sitting in a public space as an action of negotiating the borders of home. I aestheticize the notion of home in public space by bringing it into the realm of conceptual art. A prosthesis of home

In contrast to the seat in the stadium that enabled me to follow a hockey game, the subject of this chapter – a child bike seat – is in itself a seat in motion. Motion is one of the key concepts of a bicycle as it keeps its balance only in motion. The child bike seat is attached to this moving vehicle. A child bike seat is shaped according to one-half of a mould taken from a sitting child’s lower body. One can clearly distinguish the two legs,

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the bottom, the back, and even a small niche for the back of the head. Handles on both sides of the frame suggest the child’s small arms will rest on the rim of the mould or the frame, and their little hands can hold on to these handles. The child’s torso is secured with a three-point seatbelt. The child bike seat is mostly made out of plastic, and the design includes brims and additional folds to make the structure stronger. There are also sets of holes in strategic places to adjust the footgear and security belts to accommodate the changing size of a growing child. The child bike seat is an accessory to a bicycle and at the same time a prosthetic extension of the child’s body. It is quite an ugly, if func­ tional, object that integrates the body of a child as part of the bicycle. It is also a shell that protects the child. The seat integrates the child’s body into the bicycle’s anatomy as smoothly as possible to not disturb its functionality. The seat is attached to the frame of the bike with a lock around the stake that is located right under the saddle at the bar­ ycentre of the rider. Being detached from the bike, the child bike seat is an unbalanced object that consists of a plastic, often brightly coloured shell with padding, lining, and two metal rods that stick out of the seat and end in a metal blob (Figure 4.6). In the bicycle seat, the child forms a unit with the bicycle and a familiar human being, and they are on the move together. It is like a mobile family unit. The child is safe, protected (seat, seatbelt, and helmet), and accompanied by someone close to them. While driving, the adult and the child are at home on the bike, in motion. The feeling of safety, shelter, and closeness to a familiar adult is combined with the feeling of movement. Sometimes, the child falls asleep while being on the road. The notion of home is easily adaptable to this non-dwelling situation.

Figure 4.6 Research material: A child bike seat that has been removed from bicycle and put for sale on the net. Photo by the author.

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An aesthetic experience on the borders of the public and private

In order to manifest the above-described notion-of-home-in motion, I introduce the third operation. This operation brings the child bike seat into the realm of conceptual art. With the publication of this concept, I declare all child bike seats in public urban space as conceptual artworks. All bicycles with a child bike seat – whether parked in front of a shop or an office building, whether driving through the streets with or without a pas­ senger – are part of the artwork Child Bike Seat – At Home in Movement29. In this conceptual artwork, an everchanging constellation of the notion-of-home-in-motion is happening (Figures 4.7 and 4.8). In Child Bike Seat – At Home in Movement, the connections to conceptual art and the readymade are obvious, but why does it have to be an artwork? There are two reasons for this: First, I like to refer to James Shelly’s argument that there are artworks that do not necessarily have to be perceived with any of our five senses in order to be recognized as artworks that can provide an aesthetic experience.30 The child bike seat, the ugly prosthetic shell of a child attached to a bicycle, might not be received as an aesthetic object at all. However, in its use as a part of a home in motion, and by placing it in an art context, it might be the generator of an aesthetic experience.31 This aesthetic experience lies not in the object itself, but in experiencing the whole action of an adult transporting a child on a bicycle, or even in the potential of this action when encountering a parked

Figure 4.7 Research material: A bicycle with a child bike seat, random documentation of the conceptual artwork Child Bike Seat – At Home in Movement ( Ziegler 2021) in the centre of Helsinki. Photo by the author.

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Figure 4.8 Research material: A bicycle with a child bike seat, random documentation of the conceptual artwork Child Bike Seat – At Home in Movement ( Ziegler 2021) in the centre of Helsinki. Photo by the author.

bicycle with a child back seat. This situation might evoke a notion of a home-in-motion. Child Bike Seat – At Home in Motion32 emerges as an experience and a feeling of being at home in public space. Wherever a bicycle equipped with a child back seat is present, the Child Bike Seat – At Home in Motion artwork is happening. In city life, we can encounter this situation every day. By pointing out this everyday situation and declaring it an artwork, the encounters with these situations might start to communicate a new relation to our understanding of the concept of home in relation to public space. The work consists of many live moments of humans in motion rather than commemorating past events as public artworks so often do. Here the notion of home does not rely on the child bike seat as an object; rather, it emerges as an experience evoked by a situation, i.e., from encountering a bicycle with a child bike seat. By declaring it an artwork, I point to the socio-aesthetic qualities of this situation. The second reason to introduce my artwork Child Bike Seat – At Home in Movement33 stems from the fact that, over and over again, art historians and theoreticians have used the same readymade artwork, Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), as an example to demonstrate their insights in connection to conceptual art on various theoretical subjects. It is as if Duchamp’s work exclusively held the essence of conceptual art from past to eternity! As an artist and researcher, I become bored when I repeatedly see the same example of the signed urinal as an illustration of theoretical thoughts in different contexts. In fact, I object to artwork being mainly used to illustrate the ideas of a different author. I consider examples, experiments, and metaphors as research materials and methods that must be restituted and reinvented to be alive and effective. In addition to the existing classic examples of artwork, we need new metaphors and examples that bring new and different viewpoints to the discourse of the essence of art.

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In my opinion, the question of the aesthetic experience of the readymade has already left the gallery and exhibition rooms some time ago and re-entered the everyday life where its paradigms came from. In the artwork Child Bike Seat – At Home in Movement,34 motion and changing everyday situations become a part of the nature of the work. In this artwork, the notion of home can be considered an aesthetic experience on the borders of, and in parallax to, the public and the private. Wanderlust and the screen – representing the unreal-real home In this chapter, I introduce the fourth and final operation conducted to investigate the notion of home through an individual’s relation to public space. I examine two art pieces to demonstrate how the notion of home can be evoked by negotiations on the border of the imaginative and the real. In Glenn D’Cruz’s video work Tape Recorder (2019), the screen is like a plane for Wanderlust.35 It carries the author away. Into memories, into emotions, into a political statement. I get the feeling that the animated (rather than moving) images might constitute a Wahlheimat, a home of choice. In the work, this is translated and re-enacted through digital technology and through artistic work with images and sounds. To me, it is sur­ prising to find that this re-enactment of the past works best where it is at its simplest: One scene of the video shows a black-and-white still photograph of a simple one-story brick building in twilight. A cloudy sky, maybe moonlight. The voice-over is telling the story of a man working early shifts as a bus driver. Suddenly, in one of the windows of the house, a light is switched on. I suppose that technically this effect was created by adding a lighter area to cover the window area in the still image (Figures 4.9 and 4.10). This simple gesture of animating a still image not only individualizes the image and connects it to the story told by the narrator, but it also leaves the viewer outside of the house and in the darkness of the night. The gesture of switching on the light suggests that there is an inside to the image, an on-the-other-side to which the viewer has no access. The installation work Window Shutters36 has a similar affect on the viewer. An entire facade of a two-story house is restaged by mounting a set of authentic, beige-painted alu­ minium window shutters in wooden frames onto the wall of a high-ceiling exhibition space. All the window shutters are closed. There is only one window on the second floor with shutters ajar. This particular window shutter is slightly highlighted with a light source. The

Figure 4.9 Research material: Stills from Glenn D’Cruz’s video: Tape Recorder (2019). Photo by the author.

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Figure 4.10 Research material: Stills from Glenn D’Cruz’s video: Tape Recorder (2019). Photo by the author.

visitor to the exhibition passes by the reconstructed facade and might look up at the slightly opened window shutter. What is going on in there? The Window Shutters installation addresses an immediate spatial and formal reference. The window shutters block the light as well as the gaze from the outside. They divide two spaces, preventing access from one direction while allowing it from the other. The line between a simulation and the real life is drawn as an outline of the capacity to see obstacles and possibilities forming realities.37 The notion of someone possibly being at home and gazing through the window shutter emerges in the form of an imaginative possibility in the perception of the exhibition visitor. The notion of home manifests itself in the imaginable. At the same time, the notion of home confirms the position of the outsider – not as something that should be pitied or that would be problematic, but as a statement of a relation to home: The viewer is on the other side – outside – of an imaginative ‘home.’ Through the obstacle, and in relation to the other side of the image, the ex-positioning38 of the viewer is confirmed, and her standpoint is perhaps made more confident (Figure 4.11).

Figure 4.11 Research material: Denise Ziegler, Window Shutter ( 2010) sculptural installation. Photo @Patrik Rastenberger.

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The Window Shutter installation – similar to the scene with the switched-on light in D’Cruz’s video – makes it possible to address an experience of home that is real and unreal at the same time. To my mind, the video screen is particularly suitable as a medium for representing the unreal-real. It is not even exactly defined formally. For example, the border of a screened image depends on the individual screen used (with or without underscan). By escaping an exact formal definition, the negotiation of the borders of the screen becomes part of the medium. Conclusion Specific notions of home are to be found in public space in our everyday life outside of the place of dwelling. These notions of home go beyond a ‘home’ as a place, a flat, a house, a city, a landscape, a shelter, a safe nest where you sprung from and where your return is always welcome. They introduce home as an experience of relating to the things and situations around us. The notion of home may allude to a place and manifest itself in certain locations but only with the intention to evoke something else, something that is part of a specific action or a movement. The notion of home in public space includes a momentum, a created energy, that gives the impetus to further actions. Everyday habits, walks, exercises, itineraries, routines, and returning thoughts and imaginings in public space not only mark the changing borders of our mental and physical field of activity but they can also produce a feeling of calmness and serenity. I named this feeling of belonging to the surroundings through movement as notion-of-home-in-movement. It can be described as feeling at home in public space. By discussing four experiential operations, this text first connected the notion of home to the human body and to movement. Second, it described everyday occurrences and movements and their relation to public space. Then, as the third operation, the notion of home in public space was made into a conceptual artwork. In Child Bike Seat – At Home in Movement,39 the prosthesis for a child’s body that was attached to a bicycle ridden by a familiar adult evoked a notion-of-home-in-movement. Finally, the fourth operation was concerned with a feeling that emerges between the absence and presence of the feeling of home on the border of the imaginative and the real. The notion of home is an abstract concept just like conceptual art is. Both need new metaphors in order to get new insights into them. An artistic viewpoint allows us to approach our relationship to our surroundings and our movements in public space through distinct experiences. Home stands here for the attempt of the individual to connect with the surroundings. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Unesco 2020. Ziegler 2022. Go Hard – Door Closes. Ziegler 2021. Child Bike Seat – at Home in Movement. D’Cruz 2019; Inkster 2019; Ziegler 2010a. Window Shutter. Lindberg 2019. Róin 2015. Benjamin 1983, 52. Benjamin 1983. Plessner 2018. Ziegler 2022. Ibid.

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Denise Ziegler Ziegler 2010a. D’Cruz 2019. Inkster 2019. In the Continuous Prototype research method developed by Tero Heikkinen, Petri Kaverma, and Denise Ziegler in 2018, the present stage of an object or situation is taken as the starting point or prototype rather than an outcome and endpoint of an already finished development ( Heikkinen et al. 2017). HS 2019. Ziegler 2019. Kuusamo 1992. Ziegler 2010b. Barthes 1983. Ibid. Plessner 2018, 70. Seppälä 2003. Heidegger 1960. ‘Rehearsal’ meaning to go over again, repeat; literally rake over, turn over again the soil or ground (Online Etymology Dictionary). Inkster 2019. Plessner 1975, 295. Plessner 1975, 292, 295. Ziegler 2021 Shelly 2013. Barthes 1983. Ziegler 2021. Ibid. Ziegler 2021. Wanderlust: A strong desire to travel. Ziegler 2010a. Merimaa & Hujala 2019. Plessner 1975, 129. Ziegler 2021.

References Barthes, Roland. Cy Twombly – Non multa sed multum. German edition. Cologne: Merve Verlag GmbH, 1983. Benjamin, Walter. Das Passagen-Werk. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983. D’Cruz, Glenn. Tape Recorder, video. D’Cruz, 2019. Heidegger, Martin. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. Stuttgart: Reclam Verlag GmbH, 1960/2003. Heikkinen, Tero, Kaverma, Petri, Ziegler, Denise. “Taiteellinen tutkimus – jatkuva prototyyppi.” In Tiede & edistys, 2017(4), 299–319. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto, 2017. HS 4.2. 2019 https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-10628974 Inkster, Alexandra. “The mutable immutable — A proposition for a future situation.” In Text in response to rehearsing (in) public urban space (2019) by Denise Ziegler. Calgary: Viscosity Conference, Performance Studies International (Psi), 2019. Kuusamo, Altti. “Muistin taiteen muutokset.” Tiede & edistys 4/1992. Lindberg, Susanna. “Eurooppa: koditon alue vai utooppinen paikka.” In niin & näin 2019(3). Tampere: Eurooppalaisen filosofian seura ry, 2019. Merimaa, Arttu and Hujala, Miina. Conversation 7/5/2019. Online Etymology dictionary https://www.etymonline.com/word/rehearse (5/11/2020) Plessner, Helmut. Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1975. Plessner, Helmut. Grenzen der Gemeinschaft – Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2018.

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Róin, Ása. “The multifaceted notion of home: Exploring the meaning of home among elderly people living in the Faroe Islands.” Article in the Journal of Rural Studies. Online: Elsevier Ldt., 2015. Seppälä, Marketta. Kiasma omilla teillään. In: Kiasma magazine nro 19 vol 6. 2003. Shelly, James. “Das Problem nichtperzeptueller Kunst.” In S. Deines, J. Liptow and M. Seel (eds.), Kunst und Erfahrung, 181–194. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013. Unesco. Social and Human Sciences, Good Practices, Inclusion through Access to Public Space, 2020. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/urban-development/migrantsinclusion-in-cities/good-practices/inclusion-through-access-to-public-space/ (5.11.2020) Ziegler, Denise. Window shutter. Installation: Aluminum window shutters, wood. Helsinki: Kunsthalle, 2010a. Ziegler, Denise. Features of the poetic – The Mimetic method of the visual artist. Helsinki: Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, 2010b. Ziegler, Denise. On temporary routines, in sculpture expended – Moving laboratory of public art in Helsinki. Association of Finnish Sculptors, Parus Versus, 2019. Ziegler, Denise. Child bike seat. Conceptual artwork in public space. All over the world: In situ. The work has its digital home in the Helsinki Art Museum (HAM) collection, the website for public art and the service map of Helsinki, 2021. https://www.hamhelsinki.fi/en/sculpture/ lasten-pyoranistuin-kotona-liikkeessa-denise-ziegler/ Ziegler, Denise. Go Hard – Door Closes, video. D.Ziegler, 2022.

Part II

Aesthetics and practices Maiju Loukola, Mari Mäkiranta, and Jonna Tolonen

5

Photographic parafictions (an aside) Harri Laakso

Placing To practice periphery – to see it as a practice like one speaks of ‘practicing law, or religion or art’ is to work from a position of disorientation – which, of course, cannot be a position, because one has then already lost one’s sense of direction. It is also to work at a distance from fixed points and coordinates, staying away from an origin. Could one then say that it is an unoriginal approach? Let’s think about that. ‘Unoriginality’ does not sound very creative, and at the same time, it is difficult to call it an ‘approach’ either – if it doesn’t take me nearer to anything but rather seems to relish its indeterminate condition, its being without foundation, its being away and acting from afar. (If one was to call the approach ‘without origin,’ another problem would arise, the figure of absence, a lack.) Yet, the question of placing seems paramount for photography. A place is photo­ graphy’s locus of desire.1 For photography the idea of ‘near’ and ‘here’ are important. It is not easy to dismiss them. The thought of how an image is here (in material form, at this very moment, present and accessible, taking its place, taking place) and how it brings ‘here’ things that are not here (as trace, as re-presentation, as proxy) have determined much of the discussion on photographic images. And I don’t think it has changed that much with the new ways in which images are taken and made and shared nowadays. Even if one would expect otherwise – because one could just as well see the overconnected world as only adding to contemporary disorientation. ‘Hereness’ still seems to dominate. It might be that the ubiquity and the extraordinarily mobility of photographic image cultures have effected a reverse phenomenon, where the importance of the places where images are taken is amplified, almost as a form of reassurance of the stability of the material world, while acknowledging the distance at the same time.2 But what if one was to start instead from a state of aloofness? (Think of a play in which the actor makes ‘asides’ to the audience – without the other characters in the play hearing them. Imagine if those asides are no longer the exception but the play’s sole content.) If in this text there exists an ‘I,’ it is here for two reasons. It is a symptom of the anchoring, however dislodged, to the place from where this voice is uttered. And less opaquely: it is also an echo of a real-life being, the author figure, if you will, whose observations (and images, construction projects, house building, video artefacts) are at stake here. It’s not business, it’s strictly personal. This blatant inclusion of first person, the acknowledgement of my life as having a part in this, places these musings somewhere on the spectrum of approaches defined by the prefix ‘auto-’ (autofiction, autotheory), even if that emphasis is not really my focus here and even if I’m not looking for suitable classifications or definitions, quite the opposite. DOI: 10.4324/9781003348269-8

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The allusion seems relevant in some ways, nevertheless, given the similarities to the practice of autotheory (as Lauren Fournier describes it) as ‘referencing or placing alongside. The autotheorist reads and chooses citations they identify with, or that res­ onate with their experience; they then propose a hypothesis or theory based on the evidence provided by their life – the “auto” – and others.’3 At the same time, the relation to self – what I am after here – is something more vexed than Fournier’s description suggests (as it almost includes a method). An apt additional reference point can be found in artistic research. A sense of self-observation is in play, in the way that the writers of The Manifesto of Artistic Research suggest when they write that ‘[a]ll aesthetic or artistic research operates “zetetically” (in the sense of Pyrrhonean scepticism), i.e. as continual self-observation. It puts on the second gaze, exposes itself to the abyss of its endless subjectivisms, its bodily action, and the one-dimensionality of its expositions and their accompanying discourses or applied dispositives.’4 In a way artistic research annuls pre-existing frameworks and structures, creates new ones, and breaks them again. The writers of the manifesto call it ‘perennial self-doubt,’ underlining the inevitable, that art (and therefore artistic research) ‘begins anew with every work.’5 The mention of a ‘relation to self’ (and the prefix auto-), even when it is introduced as doubting, might nevertheless suggest a dissimulated firmness. However, this feeble centring is only in place as a reference to what is appearing beside and adjacent to it (para-) and around it (peri-). At best it is a semblance of a centre, from which skewed observations are made to what is beyond the object addressed, distinct from it, and nevertheless analogous to it. As such, it reflects the way in which the interest here is to discover things in their ‘asideness,’ under the cover of the deflection and conceptual detour it provides, when a direct gaze does not feel appropriate to the things that one wants to uncover. For this reason, I prefer ‘parafiction’ to fiction. When using this word I’m intending it partly in the way Carrie Lambert-Beatty has suggested: ‘like a paramedic as opposed to a medical doctor, a parafiction is related to but not quite a member of the category of fiction as established in literary and dramatic art. It remains a bit outside. It does not perform its procedures in the hygienic clinics of literature, but has one foot in the field of the real.’6 Alongside parafiction, I position the peripheral space of photography, echoing the poet Murat Nemet-Nejat, who has written that ‘most relevant is not what the photographer focuses on, but what he or she ignores’ and that the ‘most powerful space in a photograph resides in its peripheral space.’7 The stage, the table, is now set for the photographic paramedic, maybe a side table. But does this still describe too active a stance? Or does this erosion of self only describe that there is something more neutral in play, something less expressed? Or something of no concern: ± ± To live with something that does not concern him. This is a sentence easily received, but in time it weighs upon him. He tries to test it. ‘To live’—is it really life that is involved? And ‘with’? Would not ‘with’ introduce an articulation that precisely here is excluded? And ‘something’? Neither something nor someone. Finally, ‘this does not concern him’ distinguishes him still too much, as though he were appropriating to himself the capacity to be discerned by this very thing that does not concern him. After that, what remains of the sentence? The same, immobile. To live (with) what does not concern.8

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A relation (a-relation?) is being forged, a periphery beside. Something is being con­ structed, a foundation of sorts, while something is being obscured, passive, in shadow. Construction During the pandemic, we decided to build another house on our property. The building has no one function. It is something more than a gazebo or pavilion, a garage, a shed, a guesthouse, a studio, or an atelier. The building was constructed to withstand the rel­ atively harsh Finnish winters. It has stable foundations, generous insulation, and a tile red tin roof, on which rain and the odd falling pine cones drum. A great spotted woodpecker drums faster on the nearby lamp post (Figure 5.1). There it sits, the building, beside our house, a sort of reserve, an annex, a mirroring of our actual house, a supplement – complete and needing at the same time. It is very functional, entrusted with many tasks, everything that our actual house cannot accommodate. In the evening sun, it discreetly relinquishes its uses, becoming a sculp­ ture, an image. (I remember the costs of building and realize that the costs are fully subsumed neither in the building’s uses nor its uselessness. This leaves me with undefined residual anguish.) (Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.1 Photo by author.

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Figure 5.2 Photo by author.

Parafiction (a paradox)

Carrie Lambert-Beatty uses the term ‘parafiction’ to refer to a genre in contemporary art which, in a deceptive way, conflates historical events and fabulation. As a prime example, she mentions the artwork A Tribute to Safiye Behar, (2005) by Michael Blum.9 The art­ work, made for the Istanbul biennial of that year, was an installation in the form of a house museum, which used historical elements and materials to create the story of the woman Safiye Behar. The setup was convincing but in the ordinary sense it was a fabrication, no such person really existed. What characterizes parafiction in Lambert-Beatty’s view – and is of relevance here – is not only the fact that a fictional story has been concocted from reallife elements, but the way in which ‘real and/or imaginary personages and stories intersect with the world as it is being lived’ and the ways in which the fictional elements are ex­ perienced, for a time, as fact, or are appropriate for our historical moment.10 The idea of deception in art (or in political communication) is not new, nor is the attempt to pass fiction off as real events. At the time of Lambert-Beatty’s article in 2009, the idea nevertheless had an air of relative freshness in the contemporary art context. She provides many examples, like the Yes Men, the Atlas Group, and Walid Raad, while acknowledging that in the contemporary art context, the parafictional undercurrent can

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be seen as having existed since Marcel Duchamp. Now, in the early 2020s, over a decade after Lambert-Beatty’s article, we can see how the discussion about the post-truth condition has widened from an academic concern to become a focal point in public mainstream discussion (in politics and in art alike). From the perspective of today, several of Lambert-Beatty’s observations still stand. They could be seen as anticipating what was to become, and as bringing into visibility things previously obscured. Developing on her ideas one can surmise the following observations: First, parafictional projects can be seen to bring the mechanisms of scepticism and belief under scrutiny in a new way. When parafictioneers manage plausibility, they do not only set lies against established truths, but work a new imaginary. Plausibility is also not a characteristic of the work itself, but of the encounter with the work.11 In a par­ adoxical way this can be seen as diverting our attention away from the (autonomy) of the artwork (or photographic image). To see this shift, one could think of the infamous example of Damien Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, the grandiose exhibition that filled both Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice in 2017. The fictional back­ ground story was that the exhibition was composed of items salvaged from an ancient shipwreck. The show not only contained the original artefacts encrusted in corals, ‘and contemporary museum copies of the recovered artefacts’ – as the exhibition catalogue explains,12 but also an elaborate video ‘documentation’ about their underwater rescue. Without going into the exhibition’s potentially problematic relation with the corporate art world or its public reception – the acclaim, puzzlement, sneer, or ire it provoked – something significant happened in my private encounter when visiting the exhibition. It was caused initially and in part by the sheer volume of the exhibition, not so much by the nature of the deception, or by the individual artworks themselves. Having visited Palazzo Grassi first, and then entering the second venue Punta della Dogana, I distinctly felt a sense of ‘overflow,’ and an ‘inability of containment.’ I was puzzled by my own reaction, as I have seen large exhibitions before. I realized that it was not caused only by the vastness of the exhibition, the number of art pieces included, their size, or the realization that the exhibition just seemed to go on and on. Something was amiss. My first thought was that the reaction was due to the exhibition being produced in two parts. To encounter the exhibition in two parts at first gave a provisional sense of closure, which then turned out to give false hope. The second venue, in effect, tore open a wound that one thought had already closed. It was a stab at repetition itself. If the first venue was already excessive (going out, beyond a limit, beyond measure) the second venue should logically not be able to replicate that action. (When the milk is spilled it cannot be contained and spilled again.) The division into two venues made visible a cleft, worked the overflow, and thereby the limits and the periphery. It established, in its own structure, a repetition that was not really a repetition, but rather a kind of bifurcation. On another level, it manifested a salesperson’s logic, another economy, where one ‘no’ is only the preamble for another try. Even if my attention seemed to be diverted from the artefacts to the structures of display and the entirety of the event, I was clearly also influenced by the characteristics of the artworks themselves. The sense of excess and surplus was surely amplified by the material choices, the glitter, and the kitschy luxury, with mythological figures existing

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alongside figures from popular culture. The setting was permeated by clichés that worked against the grandiosity of display, dominating and obscuring one’s vision at the same time.13 The exhibition enabled its own erasure, an aversion or a neglect towards the artworks, gave license not to take it seriously, which then opened the way for other considerations. In this way, Hirst’s exhibition surfaced things on some other level than belief. The backstory with its sub-aquatic discovery and the name of the supposed ship, the Apistos (translated as ‘Unbelievable’) were therefore very much to the point. Something unbelievable was appearing. This brings up the distinction that was revealed in the process. That is the difference between an artwork and an artefact in a cultural museum. If the former often has a fictional dimension, the latter would get much of its potency from its historical veracity and originality. In Hirst’s exhibition, both genres seem un­ fitting (the pieces on display shun classification as artworks and as cultural artefacts). At the same time, the conventions of presentation become visible. It is a sort of ‘metamu­ seum’ or imaginary gallery, putting on display the ideas of a cultural museum and a contemporary art show instead of the particular exhibition that it was. It offered the possibility to enjoy the act of classification and collecting, versioning, showing the pieces in different stages (I remember the various versions of the cyclops, the unicorns, and the Greek nudes in pink marble), and associating them less seriously with particular ancient periods than with an amalgamated image of cultural history in general.14 This is related to the second observation I want to highlight in Lambert-Beatty’s article. It is the way in which parafictions expose the (paradoxical) tension within art as auton­ omously fictional (as a ‘fundamentally frivolous zone’) and as an engaging practice with social relevance. On the one hand, it should not come as a surprise that art makes things up, mixes them with facts, and even lies. One expects art to be a construction. Yet, we constantly also want it to have relevance with the issues in the world. It has been a tendency of the art world to encourage and emphasize this societal dimension in recent decades. At the same time there perhaps exists a ‘general tendency of mankind to credulity and a belief in the miraculous’ as Sigmund Freud thought.15 A tug of war, then, between a yearning for the real and for the extraordinary. In this light, the rise in parafiction is perfectly under­ standable given ‘art built on the contradictions between art’s ability to move into and change the world, and art as a space of only symbolic relevance.’16 A third development from Lambert-Beatty’s article could be a new understanding of what is meant by ‘fiction,’ even if it puts at risk some of the tenets of the article itself. In her text, Lambert-Beatty briefly mentions Jacques Rancière’s understanding of fiction, as ‘material rearrangements of signs and images, relations between what is done and what can be done.’17 This interplay between what is and speculation on what could be seems central to parafictional practice. A look at Rancière’s more recent formulations about fiction is instructive here (and of importance for artistic research). In several contexts, Rancière stresses how fiction should not be understood as inventing imaginary things and beings, or as a lack of reality. On the contrary, fiction is a structure of rationality, that is needed in constructing a sense of reality. Rancière asserts that fiction is ‘firstly a form of presentation of things that cuts out a frame and places elements within it so as to compose a situation and make it perceptible.’18 Fiction (which he does not limit to artistic or literary uses) is also responsible for creating the linkages and exposing the causal connections between events. Literary fiction (‘avowed fiction’) he sees as an ‘object of an explicit construction’ and also maintains that it is in fact more rational than theoretical accounts of it could be.19 Avowed fiction, for Rancière, is less an object of

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analysis than it is a laboratory ‘where fictional forms are experimented as such.’20 This aligns well with parafiction. Lambert-Beatty writes: ‘This is precisely the territory of parafiction, which at once reveals the way things are and makes sensible the way we want them to be; and which offers experiences of both skepticism and belief.’21 The fourth takeaway from Lambert-Beatty’s article is her observation that parafiction has consequences for academic practice – and, when coupled with a novel understanding of fiction, especially for artistic research. It underscores not only the speculative potential of artistic research, but introduces a suggestion to understand the ‘general nature’ of art. When Rancière describes (following Aristotle) how poetic fiction is able to tell ‘how facts might happen in general’ he even finds fiction to be a superior form in comparison to a chronicle of how events do happen in their particularity.22 For artistic research, this shift of perspective might turn out to be useful, as the debates on artistic research have often concentrated on how the (supposed) singularity of artwork could be shared – seeing it as difficult, if not impossible. Parafiction puts the viewer, and also the academic, in a state of alert. When fiction is still understood as a fabrication (and not in the meaning discussed above), there still exists the threat of being duped, even unknowingly. In that sense, parafiction acts as an antidote to vanity, as Lambert-Beatty suggests.23 It can shake and chasten the academic and destabilize scholarship in an interesting way, shedding unnecessary certainty and any unfounded sense of control or mastery. And, when the understanding of fiction changes, so will undoubtedly the effects of the parafictional. Perhaps we will need to acknowledge the provisional nature of our assessments and prepare to (or fear that we have to) change them at a later time. Lambert-Beatty even suggests that ‘We might develop forms of publication that expect and allow amendment.’24 Beside I am beside myself (Figure 5.3). Point taken Maybe the sense of disorientation and distraction has always existed at the core of photography’s yearning for ‘hereness.’ Think, for example, of a range-finder camera used in analogue photography, where one must take into account the difference between what one sees through the separate viewfinder and what the camera actually records through its lens. The closer one gets to one’s subject the greater the disparity, and the greater the need for parallax correction. This is a curious adjustment, similar to the adjustment of focus, but different. Focusing affords the image with crisp sharpness, or a softness, if the lens is focused ‘somewhere else’ than what is in view. In either case, the lens designates a ‘here’ and an ‘elsewhere,’ the loci between which the focusing negotiates, the depth it travels. Something else happens when adjusting for parallax error. The initial difference between the image as it is and what it aims to be is acknowledged. The adjustment does not work from a point of origin, or from an original, but rather towards a destination, a super­ imposition. At the same time, it carries a sense of relativity, an awareness not only of the position or direction of an object but the different viewing positions. Then again, an image is not a presentation of a point. Photographic lenses form an image circle from which areas are framed. Both the image circle and the framed image

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Figure 5.3 Photo by author.

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can be seen to have peripheric areas (and also areas beyond). At the same time that these peripheries gradually dissolve out of view, those same (sometimes unfocused) limit areas or border areas also encircle and create an ‘aroundness.’ This is to say that in the suburbs of the image, in all the aloofness, in all the asides, within the parallax, there can be moments of cohesion. Unknown fear

In The Infinite Conversation, Maurice Blanchot asks the question ‘What is a philoso­ pher?’ Blanchot’s answer: ‘someone who is afraid.’25 Blanchot explains that in the past he might have said that a philosopher is someone ‘who stands in wonder’ but at that time, in the late 1960s, he chooses to follow the ideas of his friend Georges Bataille. He chooses to associate a philosopher’s work with fear, not to imply cowardice, but to highlight that fear, by creating intimacy with what is frightening, causes us to leave ourselves, enables us to experience what is ‘entirely outside us and other than us: the outside itself.’26 Blanchot therefore tasks philosophy with confronting what falls outside knowledge, and more than that, confronting the Stranger, the Unknown as unknown, without reduction to the already known. He is thinking of the limit, and beyond, of otherness (autrui) that precedes knowledge, and in doing so resorts to the thinking of another friend, Emmanuel Lévinas. The impasse that becomes disclosed is relevant for artistic research and peripheral practice: ‘How can we discover the obscure without exposing it to view?’27 But how could one translate this to the thinking photography? The peripheral space of photography In his immense little book, The Peripheral Space of Photography (2003), the Turkish poet and translator Murat Nemet-Nejat’s introduces an intriguing theory about pho­ tography. It might offer ways to approach the periphery as something simultaneously placed aside (outside), yet poignant and around us (outside). Maybe it will assist us even in confronting the fear. In the book Nemet-Nejat explores photography as it existed in its historical early days, to get a glimpse of the medium ‘nakedly conscious of its potential,’ before it is engulfed by culture and outside influences.28 While he is perfectly aware that the idea of finding the photographic language in its pure form can only ever be an illusion, he is able to nevertheless make some profound discoveries, hypothesizing that his own reaction to photography was separate from any accustomed aesthetic principles imposed on the images.29 Instead, Nemet-Nejat introduces three ideas that he bases his approach on, that: 1) Photographs are formed by the democratic forces in friction with the lens. 2) More than a plastic or visual medium photography, for him, is a medium of reflection, in every sense of that word, as a visual phenomenon and as a form of meditation. In this way it is also rooted in language and concerns a meditation between image and word. 3) Photographic seeing is deeply Platonic, as seeing reflected images (like on the cave wall) always ‘requires a source, a numen.’30 These presuppositions, and what they imply or can be developed into, deserve a closer look. Nemet-Nejat asserts that the confrontation, the gaze that is directed at the lens by the subject photographed, is important, and a key ingredient in photography’s originality as a

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medium – and also something that separates photography from painting. A photograph establishes a dialogue between who or what is in front of the lens – defining itself through a ‘pose’ – and the observer, contemplating that photograph.31 This relation, whereby the subject imposes himself or herself on the viewer is also the source of the image’s democ­ racy. He asserts that photography’s democracy also resides there, rather than in photo­ graphy’s possibilities of reproduction or dissemination. Photography is democratic because it ‘gives speech to a previously silent multitude.’32 The subject paradoxically resists being subjected, resists being thematized, instead taking the place of the photographer (or sharing it), pushing the photographer towards erasure, pushing them aside. For NemetNejat the act of genuinely looking at the lens is the original act of photography.33 Nemet-Nejat also pays attention to the ‘failures’ in the photographs, to the instances when an effective photograph has qualities that could be classified as mistakes – where the image is out of focus, underexposed, or the subject has moved. He points out how these ‘failures beyond intention’ can also be seen as instances of the medium’s authen­ ticity, its limit, and the instability at its core.34 Photographs portray a welcome resistance towards perfection. Photographs, at their best, include varying areas where unheard subjects compete to assert themselves, where the subjects can be individuals, groups, or features of land­ scape.35 In the early days of photography the ways of posing did not yet exist and this form of unknowing created a new anti-painterly field for photography, which did not bow to the former aesthetic conventions, where tensions and excesses replaced any ideals of balance. The attention to two or more elements with equal focus also creates a sort of double gaze, which according to Nemet-Nejat eliminates choice, as ‘a double focus is the same as no focus.’36 Photography replaces the previous conventions of art with excess and equality, creates a new democracy, and takes an instinctive turn towards language. In this way, Nemet-Nejat dislodges photography to become a dialogue between the subject and the observer. At that moment the pose is something that is asserted by the subject, and not imposed by the photographer. Then the photograph is a democratic medium for yet unheard and unestablished voices. In this dialogue the crispness of photographic focus is not what elevates the image, but the mistakes, the unintended and uncontrolled. What becomes important are the little blurs, omissions, lack of control, insufficiency, and glow that extend beyond the frame to the peripheries of the image. For Nemet-Nejat the photographer is an intrusion and what ‘is most relevant is not what the photographer focuses on, but what he or she ignores.’37 The photograph moves away from the focus to the peripheries: ‘The most powerful space in a photograph resides in its peripheral space and the blank space, the glow, extending around, beyond the frame. This is the space of accidents, “failures,” social movement, contemplation. It is in the peripheral space that image turns into language, the dialogue between the subject and the observer of the picture occurs and the “frame” of the photograph is demolished.’38 Of particular interest as the medium’s ‘failure’ is the glow, the opacity of light, a characteristic of early photographs, which according to Nemet-Nejat is independent of the intentions of the photographer, rather a feature of excess and also of power.39 Photography’s real subject, which it essentially explores, is the relation of light and society. And words come into play as the consequence of imperfections in that process; because of light’s inability to create perfect images. Hence, photography is a double reflection. So far so good. Could one say further that the poetry of photography is born at that

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very instant of impurity, this reversal, when the photograph goes beyond the frame, overflows to language? In what sense are words and language implicated? The pose and the glow (the light) work against any attempt to contain, to frame. They seem to be simultaneously in service of the power of the image, but also point to a space beyond. But in addition to them, Nemet-Nejat mentions photography’s ‘thereness,’ which would seem to work in the opposite direction.40 By ‘thereness’ Nemet-Nejat refers to the capacity of photographs to be ‘of something,’ however imperfect that representation is. (This is related to what I wrote in the beginning of this text as photo­ graphy’s ability to bring things ‘here,’ as will be seen below.) Nemet-Nejat acknowledges and foresees the moments when the ‘thereness’ is threa­ tened or reconfigured in photography, for example, when the camera obscura model is eliminated (e.g., in rayograms) or when computer-generated images become as con­ vincing as photographs. Photograms provide the potential to take a step further, to create a ‘counter space’ that does not completely abolish the ‘god of thereness’ that haunts photography (because traces of things are still involved), but creates a new lan­ guage. Photograms are pregnant with words and offer a space of freedom (for the silenced) and a space of chaos (displaying photography’s unstable character).41 This shift is a dramatic one. It opens a view to photography that no longer asks what a photograph is a photograph of, and offers a ‘counter-echo space.’ ‘While our cultural space presses to blur the distinction between here and there, fake and real, etc., the counter space demystifies this process, obstructs, snips off the “natural” binds between the two.’42 The new counter-echo space is a seductive space where the ‘thereness’ is liberated from similarity (by removing the camera) and is instead based on difference. It is a luminous space that pulls ‘words into itself.’43 Nemet-Nejat proposes that this space is a verbal-visual continuum, also where eye and ear come together (mishearings being the aural equivalents of visual mishaps), and where also silences are heard. Nemet-Nejat prepares the reader for a shock. At the very end of his book, we learn that he has been misleading us all this time. What he has been describing is the space of poetry, where words inhabit space (and the white page) in a new way and ‘gain the potency of shadows.’44 He confesses: ‘In this last paragraph, I wish to remove my hat as a photography critic and reveal the driving purpose of this essay. It is an essay about language by a poet.’45 It becomes apparent that photographic images had inspired in him a new subversive and suggestive way of writing; a poetry forging a new relation with its reader and the surrounding culture. He was inspired by photography to reinvigorate words in a new way. He wanted to see poetic language acquire the subversive force that he detected in images, in how they were compelling the viewer to make choices, an active and demo­ cratic space (Figure 5.4). He was talking about words all along.46 Dissemination in place of a conclusion A conclusion promises to shut something, completely.47 Here, however, I am aware, that the wound that I have opened is a wound that needs to remain flowing. What is needed are diffractive peripheric gestures, instead of reflective ones.48 This text has been an experiment in such gestures that seek to escape rather than contain, and nevertheless remain surrounded. This is an exercise in various kinds of ‘asideness.’

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Figure 5.4 Photo by author.

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What connects these disparate strands is the exploration of things (photography, poetry, fiction) through their postures as scenic/staged bodies.49 It is to put on display the way in which the things in photography are embodied and transformed in encounters. As such they are also internally divided in that only a part is ‘put forth’ at any given time, while the rest remains as a supportive structure for every such exposure. Texts are read here alongside each other, in their incommensurability as well as in their similarity. Maybe the texts of Nemet-Nejat and Lambert-Beatty are like the lenses in a polarizing filter. Something passes through as they align, a glow, while some glares are lost. I have been guilty of similar manoeuvres as Nemet-Nejat when he mused on pho­ tography as a way to develop a new form for poetry. I, too, have been writing under guise; I have been writing about something else than what it seems, and perhaps about something else than what I had intended, or for another purpose. I have made a point of reminding that there is a life that is lived alongside any en­ deavour, completely irrelevant when looked at from the viewpoint of academic scrutiny, yet impossible to pull apart. Lastly, I have tried to practice periphery. To start from an unhinged position is lib­ erating. To me, it means a new possibility (or experiment or experience) for artistic research because it allows to start both image making and writing practice from the affinities in their non-positions – before they are subjugated by one another’s (or their own) accustomed ways. Notes 1 I am stealing from Lucy Lippard here, The Lure of the Local, 4. 2 There is something ‘nostalgic’ about the structure of contemporary photography, as it is used, e.g., in social media – it is an adherence to a ‘here’ from a distance. Nostalgia includes the memory of one’s commitment to oneself, one’s identity. The memory is that of the material as well as the immaterial things, such as one’s responsibilities. This kind of nostalgic memory is bittersweet, as Edward Casey writes: One finds ‘the pain (algas) of being absent merging with the pleasure of returning home (nostos). One is able to savor the past, because of its distance from the present, while one feels the bitterness because of its transience, because that past is immutably closed.’ Casey, Remembering, 113. 3 Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, 149. 4 Henke et al. Manifesto of Artistic Research, 51. 5 Ibid. 6 Carrie Lambert-Beatty, ‘Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility.’ OCTOBER 129, Summer 2009, pp. 51–84. P. 54. Lambert-Beatty makes the distinction in her use with the way in which ‘parafiction’ is used in literary studies to ‘designate true stories told in the style of fiction’ or postmodernism building on previous fiction and instead approaches a place where the dis­ tinction itself of history and fiction is placed under erasure. Lambert-Beatty alludes also to Rosalind Krauss’ use of ‘paraliterary’ to describe writers like Barthes and Derrida who put the distinction between literature and criticism under erasure. 7 Murat Nemet-Nejat, 37. 8 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, xxi. 9 https://www.blumology.net/safiyebehar.html 10 Lambert-Beatty, 54, 58. 11 Lambert-Beatty, 72–73. This seems like a more general shift from one idea of ‘truth’ (as veritas) to another. In photography theory, it is analogous to a shift from the emphasis and evaluation of truth value of a photographic image (its indexicality and objectivity) into a new appreciation of a photographic projects as fiction (which Philippe Dubois summarized in his article: “Trace-Image to Fiction-Image: The unfolding of Theories of Photography from the ’80

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12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Harri Laakso s to the Present” (OCTOBER 158, Fall 2016, pp. 155–166). It can also mean a re-evaluation of photographic belief from a discourse of assessing truth values of photographic objects to a thinking where the belief attached to a particular image is inextricable from it. See Harri Laakso, “The Comet’s Tail” in Where Do Images Come From? Detours around Ted Serios’s ‘Thoughtographic’ Photographs. Ed. Marjaana Kella. Helsinki: The Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, 2022. pp. 73–92. Exhibition catalogue, 3. I use the idea of cliché – and the ‘sensational’ – in the way, Gilles Deleuze has written about it, e.g., Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, 10–11. There are several very specific references, for example, to the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936. Freud, The Standard Edition vol. XXII, 33. Lambert-Beatty, 81. Lambert-Beatty, 66. She refers to Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, p. 39. I added the italics, as they are in Rancière’s text. “Fictions of Time” in Rancière and Literature, 2016, 25. See also Rancière, The Edges of Fiction, 2020. Rancière, “Fictions of Time,” 26. Ibid. Lambert-Beatty, 82. Rancière, “Fictions of Time,” 30. Lambert-Beatty, 82. Lambert-Beatty, 84. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 49. Ibid. Ibid., 51. Murat Nemet-Nejat, The Peripheral Space of Photography. Copenhagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer 76, 2003, 7. He examines especially the exhibition The Waking Dream at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993. Nemet-Nejat uses the word “aesthetic” in the usual sense of the word (as distinguished from, e.g., Rancière’s use in Aesthetic Regime). Nemet-Nejat, 10. Nemet-Nejat, 36. It is noteworthy that the pose is not only referring to people in the photo­ graphs. Nemet-Nejat, 14. For Nemet-Nejat the photography that imitates painting (or is organized according to its conventions) is an abomination that erases the ‘actual subject’ from photographic experience. Nemet-Nejat, 27. Nemet-Nejat writes a particularly convincing analysis of Gustave Le Gray’s Group near the Mill at Petit-Mourmelon, 1857 as a work where the various groups of subjects fight for attention and where the power of the photograph is precisely the ‘lack of balance.’ pp. 31–33. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 37. The frame being demolished also refers to moving away from the overemphasis on the photographer’s focus (=vision, =choice) that the conventional framing of photographic works with passepartouts, etc. often inconspicuously underlines. Nemet-Nejat also observes similarly how a broadside (for him specifically ‘Broadside for the capture of Booth, Surratt and Herold,’ from 1895, a public announcement with images and texts) can have a similar effect of spillage – becoming an ‘image of photographic language.’ Ibid., 45–47. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 95–96. Ibid., 96. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 98.

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46 Nemet-Nejat also applied these thoughts to his own poetry. He ends the book with his poem from the collection Io’s Song: ‘Formula for Organic Substances.’ (p.99). 47 Etymology of conclude: con + claudere (completely + to shut). 48 I am thinking of diffraction similarly to Haraway. 49 Esa Kirkkopelto has made a profound attempt to connect the body of words/text and a scenic/ staged body – the poetry in art and the art in poetry in novel ways in ‘Sanojen ylistys,’ Tiede & Edistys 3/2022. Kirkkopelto writes of the ‘näyttämöllinen ruumis’ (scenic/staged body) and also that the scenic/staged quality is not restricted to theatre. Here I am adapting some of Kirkkopelto’s ideas to photography.

References Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Casey, Edward S. Remembering. A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. New York: Continuum, 2003. Dubois, Philippe. “Trace-Image to Fiction-Image: The unfolding of Theories of Photography from the ’80s to the Present.” In OCTOBER 158, Fall 2016, 155–166. Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2021. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Vol. XXII. London: The Hogarth Press Ltd, 1981. Henke, Silvia et al. Manifesto of Artistic Research. A Defense Against Its Advocates Mixed with a Declination of the Collage by Sabine Hertig (2019). Zurich: Diaphanes, 2020. Kirkkopelto, Esa. “Sanojen ylistys.” In Tiede & Edistys 3/2022, 135–150. Laakso, Harri. “The Comet’s Tail.” In Where Do Images Come From? Detours around Ted Serios’s ‘Thoughtographic’ Photographs. Ed. Marjaana Kella. Helsinki: The Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, 2022, 73–92. Lambert-Beatty, Carrie. “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility.” In OCTOBER 129, Summer 2009, 51–84. Lippard, Lucy R. The Lure of the Local. Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: The New York Press, 1997. Nemet-Nejat, Murat. The Peripheral Space of Photography. Copenhagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer 76, 2003. Rancière, Jacques. “Fictions of Time.” In Rancière and Literature. Ed. Grace Hellyer and Julian Murphet. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Rancière, Jacques. The Edges of Fiction. Trans. Steve Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. New York: Continuum, 2011.

6

Formation of artistic identity Applying themes of narrative identity development in two artists’ life stories Mari Myllylä and Jonna Tolonen

Graffiti, a visual form of expression in its current form, was already born in the 1970s, but it took 40 years before it was globally accepted as a part of the art world. Pioneers in the field, artists such as Finnish EGS and American David Popa, have seen the rise of graffiti from ostracized periphery to near to mainstream phenomenon. Based on artist interviews, this chapter looks at life stories of two artists, who both began their careers as graffiti writers but have explored their creativity in other artistic forms, taking their artistic expression into new peripheries of their creativity. Their life stories bring to the fore how change and continuity are displayed on their artistic identity. This chapter employs some themes of narrative psychology that provide an epis­ temological approach for investigating the development of identity. Research on narrative identity is a subdiscipline of personality psychology.1 It proposes that ‘we come to know ourselves and to know about the world through the stories that we tell, and through the meanings that we construct from these self-defining narratives.’2 This biographically oriented narrative research differs from interactionally oriented narra­ tive studies or narratology. The latter is typically a methodology used in social sci­ ences. It focuses on individual and collective identities in interactions within different communicative discourses.3 Empirical narrative methods such as those used in the study of narrative identity are tools for science of subjectivity, which examines how people make sense and enact personal meanings about events, experiences, and especially, about the self.4 We will utilize McAdams’ method of life story interview5 with some modifications based on our hypothesis about the main factors of developing artist identity and on related literature.6 We are aware that McAdams’ method has received some criticism about the narrative identity as a methodological approach sufficient enough for em­ pirically studying identity and its development.7 Nevertheless, we find that McAdams’ method is rather flexible and therefore applicable to artists’ life story interviews, yet it does require prior knowledge of narrative psychology to assist the researcher to make a coherent analysis of the research material. Currently there is not that much research about development of artist identities that uses biographical narrative or life story as identity methodology. This kind of research approach has been used scarcely in studies about artists’ identity development, even less when researching graffiti artists. Some articles can be found, for example, from Watzlawik and Myllylä.8 Narrative identity analyzes how different aspects, related to events and personal characters, are reflected in stories people tell about their own lives and the self. We will be utilizing some of the ideas from McAdams’ concept of nuclear episodes,9 a term for the most significant incidents in a person’s autobiographical life stories. They consist of DOI: 10.4324/9781003348269-9

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two general types: either transforming and changing identity, or affirmating continuity and sameness. Furthermore, our interviewed artists’ narrative identities are organized around themes of agency, communion, and generativity. This chapter is based on autobiographical life story interviews with artist David Popa and EGS. His interview was conducted in October 2019 in his studio, and Popa was interviewed in February 2020 at his home. Both interviews were done separately by the authors, audio recorded, and later transcripted. We used McAdams’ method of life story interview,10 where the interviewed person is asked to think of his life as a novel, where each major chapter represents some important occurrence or key event in his life, which has also helped in the journey of becoming an artist.11 David Popa (born in 1978) is an American-born artist whose interest in art spawned from his father Albert Popa, who was one of the first graffiti writers in New York. He has studied arts both in the United States and in Finland. David’s work focuses primarily on the human psyche. For the past years David has lived in Finland, where he has started to experiment with natural ma­ terials and various techniques in natural settings, and classifies himself as ‘a cave painter, using the most developed technology.’ David’s works are large-scale pieces that are best viewed from high above with a drone (see, Figure 6.1). EGS (1974) is a Finnish artist working in Helsinki, who started his creative career first as a graffiti writer but has brought graffiti art to the mainstream art field with his graffitistyled India ink paintings, wall paintings, installations, and mouth blown glass works (see, Figure 6.2). He has studied graphic design in England. EGS is an anonymous meta char­ acter that is partly real and partly imaginary. ‘EGS’ is a part of his art, or as he states himself, it is a story that is always written with those three letters and where the story is the art. Only a small number of people know the birth name of EGS and what he looks like. David Popa and EGS have created most of their art in challenging circumstances. They have experienced the situation of producing pieces illegally when painting graffiti; now they have shifted into different harsh physical conditions as EGS does glass blowing with high temperatures at the furnaces, and David canoes in a wetsuit to paint on the rocks in an archipelago in the remote northern sea areas. These two artists seem to be generating their own artistic peripheries with new materials, techniques, technologies, and physicality. Becoming an artist and asserting an artistic identity are a result of a complex process that involves multiple factors ranging from individual characteristics to series of events.12 Being an artist is often associated with a genius myth that it is only people with a special talent that succeed at becoming an appraised artist. However, studies on cre­ ativity and success among artists have suggested that in addition, or instead of a special innate talent being the most important factor, also practice, resilience, social support, context, economical settings, and foremost chance play key roles in affecting who becomes an artist and who does not.13 Next, we examine how some key concepts of narrative identity appear in the comments of our interviewees. We will also discuss whether the artists have sometimes deliberately, as a result of their conscious or unconscious decisions, and sometimes by chance, shifted their artistic practice into a new and different creative mode that also changed their position in the art world. Narratives of artistic identity formation We humans may be understood as storytellers, as ‘homo narrans’14 where we have through evolution gained a unique mental ability to create stories to make sense of ourselves and others, our experiences, intentions, and actions in the world we live in, and

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Figure 6.1 David Popa’s artwork painted on Islet Rocks in Senja, Norway, with washable, natural pigments mixed solely with source water. 2020. Photo ©David Popa.

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Figure 6.2 EGS: Everyman’s Land 2, mouth blown glass sculptures, concrete, and spray paint. 2019. Photo ©Marko Rantanen.

to share those stories with other people within their culture to entertain and to share knowledge and values.15 Narratives can be understood as ways to make our experienced events ‘socially positioned and culturally grounded.’16 Forming narratives is an essential feature of human consciousness and how we construct sensible and coherent interpre­ tations of our realities and predictions of the future, also in the context of experiencing and thinking about graffiti.17 Stories can also be used to construct, transform, and maintain self-identity, as they can be told by the storyteller (as ‘I’) about the storyteller (as ‘Me’), giving the tellers’ lives a sense of unity, meaning, and purpose.18 However, instead of having just one story and one unified identity, an individual should be understood as being multiple storytellers with different, fragmented, and sometimes even contradicting stories of the self.19 For example, EGS20 notes that there are three different ‘EGS’; one for the graffiti artist, one for the visual artist, and one for the civilian self. According to EGS, having different identities feels ‘liberating’ as they are applied in different contexts and with different people and institutions. According to narrative psychology, people are social actors with distinct individual personalities and self-defined goals. Individuals are affected by interactions with other people and situations in certain historical and cultural contexts. An individual is also an autobiographical author who creates an identity in the form of a life story ‘to explain how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming.’21 Narrative identities reflect the individuals’ conceptions of themselves as social agents, and their

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understanding of the given culturally and temporally situated, continuously evolving society and its norms, themes, and expectations.22 Personal narratives are always set against their given sociocultural and historical master narratives.23 Stories share memories, and an individual’s own memories can interact and intertwine with collective identities of, for instance, those in the graffiti culture. However, memories are also easily prone to fade and distort.24 Identities as life stories,25 or narrative identities,26 where self-storytelling skills originate from the early childhood’s conversations with parents and other more experienced partners,27 are something that people gradually start to author as they enter adulthood, and they continue to develop for the rest of their lives. Those stories are psychosocial constructs that integrate the past, present, and future events into a continuing story of a meaningful and good life of that internally same person, creating identities as life stories that display both change and continuity.28 Interview of EGS reveals notions of change and continuity. He explains how his graffiti history can be understood as a larger story or series of artworks, where ‘doing, finding places and meeting people was that performative artwork.’ Now he has found a new way for his three letters to explore and perform in novel forms, while at the same time he is continuing his wider artist’s narrative: That [mouth blown glass] artwork that I ended up doing was a continuation to what I had done already before; that it was these three letters. It was in a way the absurdity of it, and also, I thought that there was a background story [of EGS] which might fascinate people and [make them] think ‘why this, exactly?’. And it is in a way a big story which does not tell anything. It is an artwork itself which began at the turn of the ‘ 80s’ to 90’s when I decided to start writing the name ‘EGS’. Now it is going to the glass museum, but at the same time [graffiti] paintings are being born altruistically somewhere else.29 Furthermore, now EGS feels that his art has made a full circle. He started doing professional graffiti ‘from outside of the society,’ and society spent money to decimate his art from trains and public places. Today, even though his graffiti identity is still as a social outcast, the institutions of society have taken a new role to acquire his glass and other artwork with society’s shared funds with ‘an obligation to take care and preserve them to the forthcoming generations.’30 Also, David’s stories about his career indicate notions of change and continuity. After living some time in Finland, David gave up doing graffiti and earned his living by painting commissioned portraits. He was not content with his artistic expression, not until he discovered painting in natural settings: Walls in nature! I found my own form. The obvious was all in front of me. It was exciting because I was pioneering something new but continuing something original like cave paintings. I wanted to paint on rocks! Did a ton of research, [found] two natural pigments. Most obvious thing didn’t occur to me: you don’t have to paint on a mountain − there’s a drone! Textures on the ground were a limitless canvas. There was a dialogue with live material − the earth − a huge turning point.31 After facing important moments of peaks and lows, people integrate these nuclear episodes into their life stories to have a mental image of a coherent self.32 Nuclear

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episodes are certain positive or negative experiences or incidents, which can help to determine ourselves, transform our identities, or affirm their continuity and sameness. They ‘define who we are, who we were, and perhaps who we are to become.’33 These episodes, which are to be understood as building blocks of the developing identity,34 have also been called as, for example, key scenes, self-defining memories, memorable events, autobiographical memory narratives, autobiographical episodes,35 or flashpoints, as named by Travis36 in her study of narrative artist portraits and the formation of young people’s artistic identities. An important life event can be about the revelation of finding new, personal forms to create art, as David’s discovery about painting in natural settings exemplifies. It can be also about finding and affirming personal forms of being an artist. This is illustrated in a story about the first moments when EGS began to ratify his visual art as it currently is: I had in a very small Napa-gallery [Finland] in 2009 my first [solo art] exhibition. Even then I didn’t think – whether I would do one more after that. But it was from there when it in a way perhaps began, that in some way I realised that ‘okay, I do art also with the name EGS.’37 The stories people tell of themselves, like the examples above, may affirm or change the ways artists understand themselves and their own life story schemas,38 their char­ acters in larger socio-historical settings, and what kinds of products they are able to create as artwork that exceed the limitations of their own existence.39 Also, the artists we interviewed describe memorable moments that have had a decisive influence on the development of their artist identity. Themes of agency and communion As a species we have evolved into social creatures who must be able to live with other people, either familiar or stranger, in complex, differing encounters. In order to get along and get ahead while living in social groups, we have evolved general tendencies to think and behave in some typical ways, and to recognize those similar, universal patterns in others.40 We may have also evolved to possess and notice some prominent variations in individuals’ typical characteristic traits in their thinking, feeling, and behaviour, which are consistent and continuous over situations and times and that may be particularly important for our social coexistence.41 Our social lives are guided also by a range of motivational, socio-cognitive, and developmental concerns and adaptations that may depend on situational contexts and social roles people take.42 In everyday lives people are driven by different goals and plans to achieve something that they value, in the ways they want, while avoiding what they do not want.43 Psychologically, we are motivated to achieve our goals by both sense of agency, which can include feelings of autonomy, power, and achievement, and sense of communion, which can be things such as feeling of community, connection to others, and love.44 As suggested by Ryan and Deci,45 we thrive and grow when we can function autonomously and in self-authored ways, when we can freely and spontaneously seek and explore for those challenges where we can extend our capacities and learn mastery, and when we feel we are safely connected and related to other people. In fact, the feeling of autonomy, competence, and relatedness may be understood as fundamental, basic psychological human needs, which also affect the ways people make sense of their lives

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and portray the fulfilment of these needs in their life stories.46 For example, Fransberg, Myllylä, and Tolonen47 have described how agency and autonomy, practicing one’s knowledge and skills, and social settings are important also in graffiti and street art research. Agency in life story may be understood as how much the storyteller is ‘able to affect change in their own lives or influence others,’ manifested in their stories often by ‘selfmastery, empowerment, achievement, or status,’ and emphasizing accomplishment and control over one’s own fate.48 Communion, on the other hand, may be brought into the fore by descriptions of experienced or expressed ‘interpersonal connection through love, friendship, dialogue, or connection to a broad collective,’ and where the focus is on ‘intimacy, caring, and belongingness.’49 Features of both agency and communion are present in David’s description of a successful print sale of his rock painting (see, Figure 6.1): People are buying the work that is speaking to them. With 90 euros they can buy [my] art. This is maybe coming close to the heart of what I want: tons of people who have never owned a work of art before, who do not collect art but can appreciate it. What meant the most, seeing my wife’s expression, what it means to be an artist, to be able to paint her [on the rocks], people are waiting to be able to buy my prints. People are resonating with the work, understanding it. It made a full circle. Bunch of print is a good source of income. Now, what I really want to do is also good business and bring food on a table. It is a new thing and a process to learn.50 Also, EGS has felt that he has been empowered as he has been able to take control of his own fate, and to somewhat become able to control the actions of others, as his artwork has been gaining social appreciation: In some way I experience a sense of empowerment or pride about the background that I have in a way been able to turn that world to the other way around. If before – my name has been mentioned [inside the police forces as an] example that ‘this is the one who does [graffiti] the most’, so suddenly [now] my paintings are turned into postage stamps of the Finnish state.51 In addition to changing society’s approach, EGS explains how through his art ex­ hibitions he hopes he has been able to influence people so that they might have more interest and find new meanings from art. Descriptions of agency and communion are also present as some of the persistent themes in people’s life stories, or what McAdams52 calls thematic lines, and our interviewees make no exception to this. Both artists had felt, at some point during their careers, to be out­ siders53 Myllylä 2023Myllylä 2023of the ‘traditional art world.’ Now, David has pur­ posely isolated himself from the art circles because he does not want to be exposed to the negative feedback but also mainly because he thinks that artists do not support each other enough: ‘Artists shoot other artists down – Affirmation [from others]? I don’t need it or want it.’54 David sees that ‘being a commercial artist’ might jeopardize his ‘honesty as an artist.’ Yet, he thinks that the feedback from his friends and close ones is vital to his working process. EGS had gained his position among the graffiti writers already in the 1990s but he felt insecure about shifting into the real art world with art glass figures, even if the critic would be towards his alter ego EGS that protects his civilian self.

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Contrary to David, who has chosen to sell the prints of his artworks online by himself, EGS has successfully entered the art world with curated exhibitions and art sales. Yet, neither one of the artists no longer feel that they require approval from someone or from the art world for their works − in fact, they both seem to be continuing to develop their skills and experimenting through art making. Communion is also present in our interviewees’ life stories. Both David and EGS explain how other people, whether they were close family members, friends, or colleagues, are also important to their achievements and development as artists. David, for example, named one of the chapters55 in his imaginary autobiographical book as ‘The Future’: The big question is what you consider is a good life? To encourage and support other artists, to support and love my family, fundamental things in life. I struggle with loving and being present. I’m realising now that it is about to be content, it is about basic things. Not constantly wanting something, there’s a constant desire. What’s about gaining the world if you lose your soul? I don’t want to fall into that.56 Also, we can find an example from the following excerpt from EGS: Graffiti has a lot to do with that [communality]. Even though it was made anonymously, you were still a part of a community, and they were done together. And when I was in a creative occupation for about 20 years, I had a work community. And now again, when I’m here alone in my studio, there is not much of any work community. So, it is in a way also that you do together with others, I get a lot of energy from it. That I work together with [glass] blowers who bring in their own backgrounds, and the end results that are born from it, neither one of us, nor none of us would be able to do it separately. And it creates a new kind of an encounter, which creates some story. So yes, these kinds of interactions are very important, or this kind of social interaction.57 The stories we have presented here highlight the importance of both autonomy and agency, and closeness and relationships with other people. Being an artist requires the freedom to do what you personally are passionate about, to develop your skills and invent new forms of artistic expression. However, sense of agency is not opposite to communion, and an artist needs both, as they may drive for artistic productivity. David and EGS want to share their experiences and creative endeavours with other people, and they also feel it is necessary to have support and learn from others, especially those who they feel are important in their lives. Generativity Generativity or generative scripts is a central concept in narrative psychology. As McAdams58 explains, for many of us at some point of our lives, we realize that our lives are finite. We begin to feel that we have to somehow bind ourselves as parts of the wider continuing narrative of our society, and to contribute to the future world in some meaningful way. This can be done via, for example, commitment in children, working life, communal activities, or works of art, which in a way or another continue creators’ legacies. Generativity means caring and productive actions, where one generates some­ thing that expands oneself and is then offered to society and the world, as may be in case

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of artistic contributions. David and EGS highlight art’s ability to reach people. They see the importance of art as a communication tool, a way for people to open conversations, unlock prejudices, and see new stories and content in the world. For example, EGS feels that it is his ‘duty as a responsible member of the society’ both to try to offer people the mysteries graffiti and art can entail, and to express his own opinions through his art. It is because, as EGS explains, his art ‘may have, maybe not a higher weight, but a larger crowd.’59 Both David and EGS emphasize that as an artist, neither emotional insights and ex­ periences can be translated into one work, nor should an artist be surprised by the audi­ ence’s wide scale of interpretations and feelings. For example, David recalls that after he did the ‘Born of Nature’60 project in 2019, in which he painted a baby’s portrait on the rocks, he got emotional messages from women that had had miscarriages: ‘The portrait was of my recently born and healthy baby girl, and some found deep comfort in the piece.’61 Also, EGS recognizes that he can only suggest ideas and thoughts that he would like to evoke in his audience, but in the end, it depends on everyone themselves how they interpret and react to his art: ‘I don’t want to push any kind of message with my art. What I can and want to do is to suggest and give hints from my own sphere of thought, and maybe make people look for more information about those topics that interest me.’62 The examples above illustrate the nature of generativity and how it plays an essential part in artists’ identities. As the artists put themselves in their artwork and then hand the pieces over to the world, they acknowledge that they are also letting go of their creations. It is then up to the receivers of the artwork how the artists’ legacies are interpreted, judged, and felt. The role of chance in becoming an artist Few events in life can be predicted or planned. The notion of chance is often accom­ panied, as in Abuhamdeh and Csikszentmihalyi’s63 and Kahneman’s64 arguments, by the idea of an uncontrollable, unpredictable, unexplained, random, and surprising. Painter Jari Jula, who has studied chance as a medium of art, has stated that chance is frequently seen also among artists themselves as ‘an irrational event, beyond the reach of rational control’.65 But, as Jula argues, ‘chance is possible when the insignificant becomes rele­ vant by entering into observation in the context of goals.’66 In cognitive psychological terms, we begin to pay attention to and be interested in the signals in our environments that our unconscious minds estimate as potentially important information67 for fulfilling needs, avoiding risks, and achieving goals.68 Being in the right place at the right time, able to notice and grasp an opening opportunity that has presented itself by chance, has been incorporated as an important event also in the life stories of our interviewees. This is highlighted, for example, in David’s story about how he ended up in Finland painting on the rocks with natural water-based colours, or what he sees as ‘a super weird happening’ entering by accident into a room of an artistic competition and becoming second with his on-the-spot idea of ‘making a mural that creates social change.’69 Both narratives above stress Jula’s70 thoughts on chance − these events were very much enabled because of David’s interest in art and his urge to create ‘something completely new’ − not because of irrational ‘good luck.’ Neither one of the opportunities would have not been tempting or occurred to a person with no interest and objectives in artistic creation. In his interview EGS emphasizes how chance has had a major impact in his art. He illustrates several examples of the role of chance in the development of his artist career as

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he has been in the right time in the right place, but also having the right background and an interest and will to develop his forms of artistic expression. EGS found his art studio in the mid-2000s by chance, and it opened a way finding new forms of visual expression: ‘also those maps were born out by coincidence, that suddenly one of my ink paintings looked like a map, a world map, and then I realised that there were letters E, G, and S, so that too was in a way an accident.’71 However, in other comments EGS notes that he has always been interested in expedition voyages and history. Maybe without that kind of personal background he would not have seen maps in his paintings but something totally different? Him turning into a glass sculptor happened also by chance as EGS was unexpectedly invited to the Lasismi cooperative (Finland) to try out making glass art. This corresponded to EGG’s existing need of finding new materials for creating threedimensional works. Embracing chance, and the possibilities it brings, enables artists to accept their work as something unpredictable, something that does not need to be based on presumptions, but something that develops as it is being made. Thus, a work of art is never a failure but an interesting process that has the potential to become a success. According to the stories of our artists, this can happen by letting go of the expectations and limitations, and surrendering oneself to the unforeseen, guided mostly by the artists’ abilities to notice and utilize unexpected opportunities. Conclusion This chapter included interviewing two artists; therefore, the conclusions we present are not to be generalized to a wider group of artists. Also, as we have argued in this chapter, these two artists can be seen as multiple storytellers with incomplete and uneven stories. If we would make another interview with the artists in some different stage of their lives, they might give us at least partly different stories about ‘the most important events, happenings and occurrences of becoming the artist that they are today,’ as also suggested by McLean and Lilgendahl.72 However, there are few specific findings worth highlighting. The first is that themes of change and continuity are important in both our interviewed artists’ life stories. For example, finding new forms of artistic expression represent change for both artists, as David has recently found painting in natural settings and EGS is experimenting with glass and other new materials. At the same time, they have established and are con­ tinuing their distinct identities as artists, which is displayed as a leading narrative in every format of their artwork. The second finding relates to agency and community, which can be found as some of the leading motivational forces also in our interviewees’ stories. Both David and EGS feel essential to be able to create their art and to be in charge of their own fate without external constraints. They get enjoyment and empowerment for being able to test their limits of creativity and skills. Also, influencing others, by presenting them hints and ideas, may be seen as an important aspect of agency for both artists. At the same time, they see it as an important factor to their success to have other people who they can feel closeness and relationships with, whether those people are close family, friends, or colleagues. The third finding is something that may be called generativity. David and EGS want to leave marks of their internal selves, to hand out their experiences and opinions to their society and the future generations to benefit from, as a part of their artistic legacies.

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Their artwork may be understood as generative creations, whether it be ephemeral paintings on the rocks, or more permanent artwork like prints and sculptures. The fourth finding is that chance plays an important role in artists’ life stories. Chance and unexpected occurrences have impacted both how David and EGS have found their forms of artistic expression, to the possibilities that have opened to practice their art, and in some sense, to the formation of their identities as artists. However, we argue that the same events, happenings, and occurrences may not have led to the outcomes they have today without the prior artistic interests, skills, and goals these two have. It is not only about ‘good luck,’ but also about the pre-existing characteristics and abilities of these artists that have affected how they have been able to notice and grasp on the opportu­ nities encountered by chance. The fifth finding worth highlighting relates to increasing the authors’ and the inter­ viewees’ understanding of certain phenomena. Thanks to this study, the authors have gained valuable knowledge and expertise about planning and executing interview-based research with artists. We believe that both researchers and artists have deepened their understanding of how people produce stories about themselves and how people narrate their lives. Currently there seems to be a gap in using narrative identity as a psychological framework to study artist identity development, where themes such as closeness and mastery, change and continuity, critical life events, or multiple developing selves in personal narratives against cultural master narratives are discussed. Therefore, we sug­ gest that using this kind of research approach could bring new and interesting forms of analysis and findings into the field of art and artistic research. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Adler et al. 2017; Singer 2004. Singer 2004, 454. De Fina 2015. Adler et al. 2017. McAdams 1988, 2017. See, e.g., Abuhamdeh & Csikszentmihalyi 2014; Bain 2005. See, e.g., Deppermann 2013. Watzlawik 2014; Myllylä 2018. McAdams 1988, 2017. McAdams 1988, 2017. Our exact question for the interviewees was: ‘Imagine that there will be a book published about your artistic career. This book would describe the most important events, happenings, and occurrences of you becoming the artist that you are today. How would you name the first nine chapters of this book?’ E.g., Bain 2005; Fransberg, Myllylä, & Tolonen 2023; Tolonen 2021. E.g., Abuhamdeh & Csikszentmihalyi 2014; Tolonen 2021; Travis 2020. Dudek 2016, 227. Dudek 2016; Fivush, Reese, & Booker 2019; Hiles & Čermák 2008; McAdams & Cox 2010; McAdams & Pals 2006; Singer 2004. Hiles & Čermák 2008, 149. Myllylä 2022. Hiles & Čermák 2008; McAdams 1988; McAdams & Cox 2010; McAdams & McLean 2013. McAdams 2017; McAdams & Cox 2010; Myllylä 2018. EGS 2019. McAdams 2017, 33. McAdams 2017; McAdams & Cox 2010; Myllylä 2018; Singer 2004.

Formation of artistic identity 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

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McAdams 2017; McAdams & McLean 2013. Myllylä 2018, 2022. McAdams 1988. McAdams 2017; Singer 2004. Fivush, Reese, & Booker 2019; McAdams & McLean 2013. McAdams 1988, 2017; McAdams & Cox 2010; Singer 2004. EGS 2019. EGS 2019. David Popa 2020. McAdams 1988; De Fina 2015. McAdams 1988, 133; McAdams & Cox 2010. Singer 2004. McAdams & Cox 2010; Singer 2004. Travis 2020. EGS 2019. Singer 2004. McAdams 1988. McAdams & Pals 2006. McAdams 2017; McAdams & Pals 2006. McAdams & Pals 2006. McAdams 2017; McAdams & Pals 2006. McAdams 1988, 2017; McAdams & Cox 2010. Ryan & Deci 2000. McAdams & Cox 2010; Ryan & Deci 2000. Fransberg, Myllylä, & Tolonen 2023. McAdams & McLean 2013, 234. McAdams & McLean 2013, 234. David Popa 2020. EGS 2019. McAdams 1988. Myllylä & Tolonen 2023. David Popa 2020. The chapters David named for his autobiographical book in chronological order: Conan, Michelangelo, Ego, School, Movement, The Free Wall, Finland, The Island and The Future. EGS’s were the following: Katajanokka 1986, Riihimäki 1992, Interrail 1994, London 1996, Napa Gallery 2009, Arco Madrid 2014, Make Your Mark 2016, Kunsthalle 2018 and The Finnish Glass Museum 2020. David Popa 2020. EGS 2019. McAdams 1988. EGS 2019. Video of the project available at David Popa’s Instagram account @david_popa_art: https:// www.instagram.com/p/B5qPy9Fhxmm/ David Popa 2020 EGS 2019. Abuhamdeh & Csikszentmihalyi 2014. Kahneman 2011. Jula 2018, 11. Jula 2018, 13. Unfortunately, people’s unconscious estimations and judgements are not statistically optimal but commonly flawed as they are imbued by various forms of psychological biases and erro­ neous thinking ( Bar 2007; Kahneman 2011). Bar 2007; Myllylä 2022. David Popa 2020. Jula 2018. EGS 2019. McLean & Lilgendahl 2019.

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References Abuhamdeh, Sami, & Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. “The Artistic Personality: A Systems Perspective”. In The Systems Model of Creativity. The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, edited by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 227−237. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014. 10.1007/978-94-017-9085-7_14 Adler, Jonathan M., Dunlop, William L., Fivush, Robyn, Lilgendahl, Jennifer P., Lodi-Smith, Jennifer, McAdams, Dan P., McLean, Kate C., Pasupathi, Monisha, & Syed, Moin. “Research Methods for Studying Narrative Identity: A Primer”. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 8(5), 519–527, 2017. 10.1177/1948550617698202 Bain, Alison. “Constructing an Artistic Identity”. Work, Employment and Society, 19(1), 25–46, 2005. 10.1177/0950017005051280 Bar, Moshe. “The Proactive Brain: Using Analogies and Associations to Generate Predictions”. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(7), 280−289, 2007. 10.1016/j.tics.2007.05.005 De Fina, Anna. “Narrative and Identities”. In The Handbook of Narrative Analysis, edited by De Fina Anna andGeorgakopoulou Alexandra, 351−368. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2015. Deppermann, Arnulf. “Editorial: Positioning in Narrative Interaction”. Narrative Inquiry, 23(1), 1−15, 2013. 10.1075/ni.23.1.01dep Dudek, Karolina J. “Working-life Stories”. In The Routledge International Handbook on Narrative and Life History, edited by Ivor Goodson, Ari Antikainen, Pat Sikes, and Molly Andrews, 235−246. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2016. EGS. Interviewed by author one, October 2019. Fivush, Robyn, Reese, Elaine, & Booker, Jordan A. “Developmental Foundations of the Narrative Author in Early Mother-Child Reminiscing”. In Handbook of Personality Development, edited by Dan P. McAdams, Rebecca L. Shiner, and Jennifer L. Tackett, 399−417. New York: The Guilford Press, 2019. Fransberg, Malin, Myllylä, Mari, & Tolonen, Jonna. “Embodied Graffiti and Street Art Research”. Qualitative Research, 23(2), 362–379, 2023. 10.1177/14687941211028795 Hiles, David, & Čermák, Ivo. “Narrative Psychology”. In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology, edited by Carla Willig and Wendy Stainton-Rogers, 147−165. London: SAGE Publications Ltd., 2008. 10.4135/9781848607927.n9 Jula, Jari. Sattuma taiteen tapahtumisen välineenä. [In Finnish] (Chance as a medium of art). PhD thesis. Helsinki: Aalto University, 2018. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Penguin Random House: Penguin Books, 2011. McAdams, Dan P. Power, Intimacy and the Life Story. New York, London: The Guilford Press, 1988. McAdams, Dan P. “How Stories Found a Home in Human Personality”. In The Routledge International Handbook on Narrative and Life History, edited by Ivor Goodson, Ari Antikainen, Pat Sikes, and Molly Andrews, 34−48. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. McAdams, Dan P., & Cox, Keith S. “Self and Identity across the Life Span”. In The Handbook of Life-Span Development, edited by Richard M. Lerner, Michael E. Lamb, and Alexandra M. Freund, 158−207. John Wiley & Sons, 2010. 10.1002/9780470880166.hlsd002006 McAdams, Dan P., & McLean, Kate C. “Narrative Identity”. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233–238, 2013. 10.1177/0963721413475622 McAdams, Dan P., & Pals, Jennifer L. “A New Big Five − Fundamental Principles for an Integrative Science of Personality”. American Psychologist, 61(3), 204–217, 2006. 10.1037/ 0003-066X.61.3.204 McLean, Kate C., & Lilgendahl, Jennifer P. “Narrative Identity in Adolescence and Adulthood: Pathways of Development”. In Handbook of Personality Development, edited by Dan P. McAdams, Rebecca L. Shiner, and Jennifer L. Tackett, 418−432. New York: The Guilford Press, 2019.

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Myllylä, Mari. “Graffiti as a Palimpsest”. SAUC − Street Art & Urban Creativity Scientific Journal, 4(2), 25−35, 2018. http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:jyu-202010126170 Myllylä, Mari. Embodied Mind and Mental Contents in Graffiti Art Experience [Doctoral dis­ sertation]. University of Jyväskylä. JYU Dissertations, 485, 2022. http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978951-39-8991-0 Myllylä, Mari, & Tolonen, Jonna. “Graffiti and Street Art Research: An Outsider Perspective”. Nuart Journal, 4(1), 111–115, 2023. https://nuartjournal.com/pdf/issue-7/12_NJ7-Myllyla.pdf Popa, David. Interviewed by author two, February 2020. Ryan, Richard M., & Deci, Edward L. “Self-determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being”. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68−78, 2000. 10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68 Singer, Jefferson A. “Narrative Identity and Meaning Making. Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction”. Journal of Personality, 72(3), 437−460, 2004. 10.1111/j.0022-3506.2004.00268.x Tolonen, Jonna. “‘Whatever I Can Do to Put Those People in Jail – Crisis Turns Spanish Artists to Street Activism”. In Political Graffiti in Critical Times: The Aesthetics of Street Politics, edited by Yiannis Zaimakis, Andrea Pavoni, and Ricardo Campos, 52–73. London: Berghahn Books, 2021. Travis, Sarah. “Flashpoints of Artist Identity Formation”. Art Education, 73(5),16−25, 2020. 10.1080/00043125.2020.1781438 Watzlawik, Meike. “The ‘Art’ of Identity Development − Graffiti Painters Moving through Time and Space”. Culture & Psychology, 20(3), 404–415, 2014. 10.1177/1354067X14542531

7

Temporal perspectives on Arctic peripheries Eimear Tynan

Introduction Time and the Arctic are at the heart of this chapter. More specifically Arctic peripheries are examined from three distinct temporal perspectives. I activate the notion of parallax, which I adopt as ‘the apparent change in appearance of an object when viewed from different positions.’1 Rather than take my position from different spatial points, how­ ever, I establish three perspectives over different frames of time. The study is located in the Norwegian High Arctic – a region that is undergoing significant change with regard to climate, geopolitics, and ecology. Accelerated warming conditions have prompted the disruption of ecosystems and weather patterns, meaning that the temporal dimensions of the Arctic are dramatically changing. It is timely, therefore, to begin to examine the Arctic through various time-oriented research approaches to further grasp how change is playing out in different ways. Examining this region through three distinct temporal lenses demonstrates how an emphasis on time offers a range of different readings of Arctic peripheries. The three temporal perspectives are positioned in historical time, deep time, and finally, contem­ porary time. In each of these perspectives I draw attention to specific cases, events, and personal explorations that ultimately disrupt the notion of Arctic peripheries as being fixed and static. Through this time-centred approach an Arctic region that is full of change, movement and fluidity emerge. Engaging directly with time can be challenging as it can be a very abstract subject. Contemporary philosopher Elizabeth Grosz explains that time: disappears into events, processes, movements, things, as the mode of their becoming. And it disappears into our representations, whether scientific or artistic, historical or contemporary, where it is tied to, bound up in, and represented by means of space and spatiality.2 To best articulate my temporal perspectives, I will employ the concept of duration or durée that was developed by French philosopher Henri Bergson (1959–1941). In his book Creative Evolution, Bergson describes duration as ‘the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.’3 Historical geographer Barney Warf adds that Bergson places ‘emphasis on process over stasis, on becoming rather than being, stressing the continual process of change that he called la durée … ’.4 The three temporal perspectives in this chapter will highlight how Arctic peripheries are

DOI: 10.4324/9781003348269-10

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integrally tied up with change and movement despite some efforts to maintain the Arctic as a static, remote region. The first temporal perspective offers an overview of how representations and per­ ceptions of Arctic peripheries and centres have evolved from pre-modern times to the present. I begin this section by taking reference from the written accounts of Arctic explorers and early cartographers of the Arctic region. I proceed to the present time, where I highlight, through examples, a growing critique of the fixity of borders and boundaries that reinforces the peripherality of the Arctic, which is often promoted from ‘outside’ the periphery. These examples, I argue, have led to a more fluid perspective towards how the Arctic is seen and perceived and go some way in reducing the prevalent dichotomies between periphery and centre. The second section of this chapter switches to a different perspective, where I examine Arctic peripheries through geological deep time. I take the Arctic island of Bjørnøya as an example and examine its geological journeys through a fossil discovered by geologists visiting the island in 2017. I follow its gradual, multi-climatic and northward shift from close to the Equator to its present-day Arctic location. The sense of stability and groundedness is associated with land that is disrupted, which I demonstrate through the continual travels of this island across the globe through the exposure of different durations of time. The section concludes in the present geological era commonly referred to as the Anthropocene. This geological epoch is presented as a ‘contemporary condition’5 and context that attends to the complex intertwining of human and more-than-human agencies of change. In the third and final section, I situate myself on the shores of Bjørnøya to undertake an experiential and relational time-centred study. I pay particular attention to the island’s coast through a multi-sensory approach. I convey the multitude of temporalities playing out in very different ways through the journey I take to the island on a Norwegian Coast Guard vessel as well as direct engagement with the island’s frozen shore. This is done primarily through photography and sound recordings. This multisensory approach to reading the island’s coastal peripheries exposes a rich variation of durations some of which feel immediate while others stretch to longer durations as I reflect upon the island’s past and future. Arctic peripheries From arctic peripheries to a Mediterranean centre

Early European descriptions and illustrations of the Arctic conjure up a remote and peripheral region presenting both an ominous and romantic existence. The periphery, setting the Arctic apart from the south, was created in the imagination before science and politics prescribed its boundaries and borders. Historical media relating to the Arctic reinforces ideas, concepts, and meanings connected to the notion of a periphery. Within these Arctic peripheries, one encounters a space that has been described, on the one hand, as barren, empty, hostile, and desolate and on the other as enchanting, beautiful, and peaceful by early explorers and visitors to the region.6 This is underpinned graph­ ically in the early cartographies of the Arctic. The 16th century map called Carta Marina, for example, displayed fierce sea creatures in the largely unknown regions of the Arctic.7 It is another reminder of the early and distant perceptions of the Arctic as an inhospitable and even fearful Northern region. Almost one century later another map of the Arctic, by

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Venetian priest Vincent Coronelli, illustrated a mostly blank Arctic region partially and conveniently concealed under the veil of a Northern Lights display.8 These ‘northern oceans represented the literal edge of Europe, but also the liminal boundary of civilized human existence.’9 Over the centuries as the Arctic’s resources, such as whale, walrus, fox, and coal became increasingly accessible as the maps became more detailed and precise. Pre-modern ideas of the North, which included the Arctic, acted as an opposite entity to the centricity of Europe’s Mediterranean according to Polly Jørgensen and Virginia Langum.10 The centre plotted against the periphery was largely based on dichotomies of distant and near, cold, and warm, negative and positive, outer and inner, empty and full, wild and tamed, barbarous and civilized. As Arctic exploration evolved and expanded, particularly during the 19th and 20th centuries, these dichotomies largely persisted ac­ cording to assistant professor in Russian and Eurasian Studies Daria Gritsenko.11 However, it is also evident that they often became blurred and sometimes eliminated as explorers from the south spent time living in the Arctic living amongst Inuit and other indigenous people.12 In other words, there was ‘an interplay of expectations and experi­ ences’ in Western perceptions of the Arctic and in many respects that is still the case.13 In the 1920s, there was a notable shift in the consideration of the Arctic as a central region when Canadian-American anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson suggested that the Arctic Ocean should be renamed the Polar Sea or Arctic Mediterranean. By this, he believed that the Arctic would be a new future transport hub ‘from which the continents radiate like the spokes of a wheel.’14 Geographer Philip Steinberg explains that Stefansson ‘references long-held beliefs about the (southern) Mediterranean as the heart of Western civilisation, and then projects them northward to a new arena of Mediterranean commerce and cultural exchange.’15 Steinberg follows this ‘Mediterranization’ of the Arctic to the present-day and highlights how different political leaders and government officials from Arctic states have conveniently re-produced this Mediterranean metaphor to either pro­ mote new connections and exploits within the Arctic or to warn of potential conflicts and tensions. Professor of geopolitics, Klaus Dodds, believes that Stefansson’s prediction is being realised today largely due to a rapidly warming climate that is allowing for increased activity in the Arctic.16 Here, we are witnessing a temporal space open up in discussions about the Arctic. There is an inherent and implicit connection to time in these arguments that Steinberg and Dodds present that are brought about through environmental condi­ tions altered by a changing climate. The arctic: the global gaze to the north

An accelerating warming climate is contributing to the attention being drawn to the Arctic today and further strengthens the notion of centricity whilst reducing a sense of the peripheral. The Arctic is warming up three times faster than the global average. A recent report from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) high­ lighted rapid and widespread changes to weather patterns, as well as an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme events.17 Some of the consequences of these changes that are discussed in the report include coastal erosion, increase in demand for resource extraction, disruptions to ecosystems, and changes to the livelihoods of indigenous communities. These changes have quickly opened up the Arctic and have ‘put this per­ ceived periphery at the center of the global map.’18 There is a profound consciousness that the changes that we are currently witnessing in the Arctic will impact the future, not

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only in this region, but globally. There is also an unavoidable confrontation with past activities presenting themselves through human-induced climate crises resonating with Henri Bergson’s ‘idea that the present contains all of the past within it, carrying it as it continuously transforms itself.’19 In a contemporary situation then, where does the Arctic periphery begin and end? A possible answer may lie in the examination of how boundaries and borders develop. These are often established through physical components of a region. One example that offers an interesting perspective is from a study conducted by Philip Steinberg and Berit Kristoffersen on the use of sea ice to establish an Arctic border. The authors compared how Norwegian and Canadian authorities mapped sea ice differently in the production of new maps in 2015. Aside from drawing attention to the political motivations and implications of these maps, they raise questions on the materiality of sea ice being used as a stable object for mapping purposes when it is in fact dynamic and constantly shifting. In doing so, the authors challenge fixed space ontologies and conclude that authorities continue to ‘map the unmappable, reducing the temporal and spatial complexity of ocean-atmospheric processes to singular representations.’20 They add that such maps ‘caution us to remain critical not just about where borders are mapped in complex environments but also about what is mapped at all’ [emphasis by authors].21 Steinberg and Kristoffersen point out how a disconnect arose when the ice was taken to be a fixed material and was approached in much the same way as land is surveyed and mapped. The dismissal of the temporal, and the hugely unpredictable durational qualities of sea ice, made these cartographic efforts con­ venient for political pursuits rather than representing the materiality of this ‘border.’ To summarize the main points of these historical insights into Arctic peripheries, it is clear that perceptions of the Arctic have progressed from being a remote, distant peripheral region to one that is very central to climatic and political issues today. ‘Viewed over la longue durée, the intellectual narratives of the European Arctic evoke shifting meanings and rela­ tions between peoples, territories and resources which have varied throughout different points in history.’22 In pre-modern times a romantic image of the Arctic was pitched against a region of terror and foreboding. Today, the ‘power of polar imagery coupled with anxiety over planetary destruction is everywhere evident.’23 In the examples provided, attention towards the complex and unpredictable temporal attributes of the Arctic is emerging. Journeying to the centre of the earth A deep-time view

This section continues to explore the notion of peripherality with a second temporal par­ allaxal reading. I take a new perspective by examining the geological or deep time histories of the Arctic island of Bjørnøya. Although this is a time-centred endeavour, it cannot be fully understood without connecting it to a spatial context. The purpose of referring to Bjørnøya’s geological past, through a deep-time enquiry, is to demonstrate that the island is continu­ ously moving, albeit at a pace that we cannot sense in our (human) lifetime. Whereas the previous section drew attention to the changing perceptions and representations relating to the Arctic’s periphery, this section focuses on a different form of duration encompassing movement and materiality and begins to put the non-human aspects of the island to the fore. It will specifically pay attention to fossils, which according to field geologist, palaeontologist and stratigrapher, Jan Zalasiewicz, offer ‘the best practical guide to deep time.’24 The concept of deep time offers an enormous context in which to look at a place differently. It moves us to temporal and spatial scales that are very difficult, and perhaps

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impossible to comprehend. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud suggests that we approach rocks as verbs rather than nouns.25 This emphasis on activity and movement is stressed by another geologist Michael Welland, where he outlines the different journeys that a grain of sand can take over an infinite number of time scales – from spontaneous volcanic eruptions to the slower processes of continental drifts and glacial movements.26 Writer Robert Macfarlane explains that deep time has many descriptions and attributes: ‘Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland. Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past.27 To provide a more tangible sense of how deep time can manifest, I will describe the journey of a fossil based upon its discovery on the Arctic island of Bjørnøya in 2017 by a group of geologists. Bjørnøya’s deep time exposures

Bjørnøya is a small Norwegian island that lies to the north of mainland Norway. It is a part of the extensive Svalbard archipelago in the Norwegian Arctic (Figure 7.1). The island is predominantly rocky and flat with three peaks located to the south of the

Figure 7.1 A map showing the island of Bjørnøya.

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island. Historically the island was host to whale and walrus hunters in the 1600s and later experienced a short-lived coal mining industry from 1916–1925. In 1918 a radio and meteorological station was established on the island and continues to operate to the present day.28 Unlike many other islands in the Arctic region, no indigenous people are living, or have lived, on Bjørnøya. The inhabitants on the island are restricted to nine people who work at the meteorological station on six-month work rotations. Despite the island’s remote location, its weather observation service has provided vital weather forecasting, especially for marine-based activity. The island has attracted geologists since the 19th century, not only for surveying potential resources but because of its exposed geological strata that are clearly visible and well defined.29 Many fossils have been discovered on the island, offering clues to its origins and geological development. Tetrapod trackways

In 2017 three geologists working with the Cambridge Arctic Shelf Programme dis­ covered a fossil in an overhanging slab along Bjørnøya’s western coast. More specifically, they discovered a fossilized trackway displaying tracks and traces from the movement of an organism. Further analysis of the fossil revealed that the trackway captured the movement of a tetrapod transitioning from swimming to walking (Figure 7.2).30 What is perhaps most intriguing about this study is the way in which the geologists also identified the type of material and environment this tetrapod is likely to have inhabited. According to their findings, the tetrapod’s movement was captured in the process of swimming in shallow water to walking on wet muddy sand. Zooming out to the wider environment it is likely that the tetrapod’s habitat had a ‘fluvial association, abundant flora, a relatively high water-table and possibly a relatively warm and humid climate.’31 Zooming out yet again this environment was located at a tentative paleolatitude of 30°N. Today that same line of latitude spans across northern Africa, the Middle East, Nepal, southern China, and Northern Mexico. The research conducted by these three geologists illustrates an eventful story of movement over different timeframes. The rock, appearing as a static object, encompasses different time durations. We get a moment captured in the form of a lithic screenshot when the tetrapod arises from the water and steps onto land, dragging its tail. This

Figure 7.2 An outline of the fossilized trackway discovered by geologists visiting Bjørnøya in 2017. ( Herron et al. 2020). Original illustration desaturated and infill colours removed by author.

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tetrapod transcribed one movement of its life onto mud that ultimately became a geo­ logical record helping to piece together the story of Bjørnøya. We are also provided with insights into the fluvial environment the tetrapod inhabited as we try to conceive of Bjørnøya’s early development in a completely different location to where it lies today. The descriptions from this fossil journey give us an otherworldly impression of a pre­ vious era on and within Bjørnøya, where it began near the centre of the globe. Visiting the island’s remote, Arctic location today provides a very different picture of bare rock, sparse vegetation, and a chilling breeze. However, this fossil discovery is an important reminder of the continuous movement of the ground beneath our feet over a long- and stretched-time concept of duration. Disrupting temporal structures

Different considerations of deep time discussed in the previous section ‘compels us to ponder our brevity … ’ according to professor of English Jeffrey Cohen.32 Our brevity, however, has made such a significant impact on the earth as to propose a new geological epoch that is commonly referred to as the Anthropocene.33 Human activities that are embedded in this layer are recognized as a geologic force.34 It lays witness to massive depositions of material that can reach the scale of mountains and enormous erosional scars from the extraction of mineral resources. The Anthropocene weighs heavily with different meanings and interpretations. Although the origins of this term are scientific, it has had a rippling effect across academic disciplines and news media. This epoch has signalled a crisis and an awakening with particular regard to climate, exploitation (from geologic to human), and inequality (human and more-than-human). Unlike other geological epochs that are firmly classified in a retrospective stratified completeness, the Anthropocene enfolds different temporalities by classifying itself in the past, bringing attention to the present-day consequences of human activities, and directing attention to future uncertainties. Anthropologist Christián Simonetti suggests that two attitudes exist in today’s geological thinking. They are imaginative and chronographic. He explains that: While the imaginative attitude tends to liquefy the solid by contemplating it in deep time, the chronological attitude tends to solidify the flow of earth processes by fracturing them in punctuated chronologies. Put differently, while the former emphasizes becoming, the latter emphasizes being.35 Through his appraisal of contemporary geological thinking and attitudes concerning the Anthropocene, Simonetti refers to ideas of flow, the more-than-solid processes on the move, and anti-boundary sentiment. The fossilized trackway discovery on Bjørnøya demonstrates the dynamism of materials through time and challenges conventional thinking and approaches to how we read and classify geology. Literary scholars such as Robert Macfarlane and David Farrier urge us to engage with deep time knowledge as a means to consider the future that stretches far beyond human lifetime. Farrier chillingly states that ‘ten million years from now, every human structure that exists on the surface of the earth will have been worn away’.36 In his book, Footprints, Farrier asks the reader to reflect upon what humans have inherited on this planet and to consider what future generations will inherit from us. This attention towards future geologies offers an opportunity to reflect upon how human and more-than-humans interact. Each has its

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own durational time and undergoes varying processes and states that ultimately condi­ tion the future of the planet. Making impressions along Bjørnøya’s coast The third and final parallaxal Arctic perspective is situated along the shores of Bjørnøya. Unlike the previous historical and geological perspectives, this is grounded through a con­ temporary experiential and relational engagement with material and immaterial encounters. I will demonstrate how thinking through time, with consideration for processes, conditions, and phenomena can be assigned more practically to a site. I attend to the finer multitemporalities experienced during a visit to the island in 2019. The following two examples demonstrate my approach, as a landscape architect, in exploring and defining different temporalities experienced along this coastal site. The intent is twofold. First, it attempts to foreground the dynamic processes that are enfolded in the material and immaterial com­ ponents of this coastal site. In doing so, it challenges the static appearance of a frozen shore. Second, it shifts to forms of representation that require overlaps of multiple methods such as photography, sound recording, and illustration to convey the temporal. Sailing through an ice field

Water and air. So very commonplace are these substances, they hardly attract attention ― and yet they vouchsafe our very existence. Mystery of mysteries, water and air are right there before us in the sea. Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing. (Hiroshi Sugimoto, n.d.)37 I will begin with a sea journey that I took with the Norwegian Coast Guard (kyst­ vakten) in March 2019 to reach the island of Bjørnøya. Although a journey to a site is rarely documented in landscape architecture practice, I present this journey to give a sense of the larger context to which Bjørnøya belongs. Moving through this oceanic space highlights the constantly shifting conditions that I experienced as we approached the island. Figure 7.3 shows six photographs that were documented as we approached Bjørnøya. A band of sea ice had unexpectedly drifted from the North and had accu­ mulated around the North coast of the island, where we were due to disembark. With worsening conditions, we were eventually brought ashore onto the small gravel-beached inlet at Teltvika that lies to the Northwest of the island. The six photographs that are documented in Figure 7.3 capture the raw and distinct elements of the sky, sea, and ice in a constantly shifting scene. They convey how the conditions of wind, temperature, and light change their tone and textures and coerce the elements to react to one another. As a result, the visibility of the horizon is impacted, causing a disorientating spectrum of open and closed spaces. This attention to the swiftly shifting conditions of water and air is a theme explored by photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto in his series Seascape. Referring to Sugimoto’s work, Mirjam Wittmann observes that: In each photograph the oscillation between change and stasis, clarity and fog, detail and totality, transparency and opacity becomes obvious, creating an atmosphere of meditation and flotation, which the artist calls ‘time exposed.’38

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Figure 7.3 Six photographs illustrating the changing sea ice, sky, and light conditions on the approach to Bjørnøya. Photographs by the author.

Sugimoto draws attention to the spontaneity of time as the sea and sky constantly effuse different moods and atmospheres. Rather than approach photography as ‘freezing’ time, he exposes it. Historian and philosopher of art Thierry de Duve ex­ plains that time exposure in photography does not refer to actual time but rather it is ‘understood as a pause in time, charged with a potential actualization.’39 This reso­ nates with the notion of becoming mentioned by Simonetti in the previous section, where in this case the photograph, rather than the geology, has the ability to enclose temporalities whilst offering opportunity to evolve and change.40 The notion of becoming in a photograph was underpinned by Roland Barthes, where the moment captured no longer belongs to the present but in the past, allowing an awareness of time passing to be evoked. The six photographs that I took were immediately assigned to my memory of a specific time and place, but these photographs also evoke a sense of loss when I consider the likelihood that the presence of sea ice will become less fre­ quent in this region of the Arctic. Resonances of snow and ice

Audio recordings were conducted along the coast of Bjørnøya in March 2019 as a means to capture different aspects of the materials and conditions that I was experi­ encing during my stay on the island. In environments, such as the Arctic, where there are significant seasonal differences, surfaces can dramatically and temporarily change from stone to snow or from liquid sea to ice. Audio recording is an effective technique

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in capturing these material changes. These changes that condition the materials are brought about by processes beyond the confines of a site such as wind, temperature change and tides. The elemental processes and conditions are often not adequately captured through photography, and therefore, audio recordings can supplement new readings of a site. Additionally, audio recordings serve to express a range of tem­ poralities that are playing out within a coastal site such as gusts of wind, the squawking of seabirds, the crashing of the ways on the shore, and perhaps the movement of the person recording the sounds. The main motivation for conducting audio recordings in my study of Arctic island coasts was to actively involve another sense, beyond the visual, to engage more fully with these unique landscapes. Attention to sound offers a different kind of immersion in space and can potentially enrich perceptions and knowledge of a specific environment. Landscape architect Michael Fowler points out that working with sound acts as a ‘mediating language between listener and environment.’41 Author Paul Rodaway ex­ pands on this with the introduction of the term auditory geography. This encompasses both the ‘sensuous experience of sounds in the environment and the acoustic properties of that environment through the employment of the auditory perceptual system.’42 In my research, the sound recorder behaved as an auditory device whilst the experience of the sounds was represented with textual interpretations. During my fieldwork I implemented two different audio recording techniques. The first was mobile, where I recorded the sound of my walking towards a beach called Kvalrossfjære (Walrus beach) that lies less than one kilometre from Bjørnøya’s meteoro­ logical station. The second audio recording was stationary where I placed a contact microphone on the sea ice that was approximately ten metres from the shore (Figure 7.4). This recording followed the movement of the sea ice as it shifted with the tide.

Figure 7.4 Conducting audio recordings on the sea ice along the shores of Bjørnøya. Photograph by author.

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Figure 7.5 A textual interpretation of sounds recorded as I walked on the ice and snow along Bjørnøya’s coast. Illustration by the author.

Figure 7.6 A second textual interpretation of sea ice audio recordings where the text is positioned and arranged to align with the movement of the tide. Illustration by the author.

The two audio recordings were subsequently translated into different arrangements of words that represented how I perceived and experienced these sounds (Figure 7.5 and Figure 7.6). The textual illustrations were experimental and were a means to represent a sonic experience rather than anchoring the sounds precisely in spatial and temporal terms. The placement of the words attempted to capture the rhythms as I walked on the ice or snow and the movement of the tides moving the icy surface up and down. Collectively they capture a short, yet dense, multi-temporal experience that I spent during my fieldwork activities on Bjørnøya. The audio recordings give minute detail to the material richness of this frozen en­ vironment over a short period of time. It is very much rooted in the present but engaged with multi-temporal materialities. Each of the materials encountered are continuously responding and behaving differently to the processes around them. These processes included the impact of my walking on and through these materials, the wind shifting the snow across an icy surface or the tide pushing and squeezing the compact sea ice. The recordings allow for the fluidity of these materials to persist, which visual forms of

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representation such as photography and mapping cannot fully grasp. Landscape architect David Buck claims that: If landscape is an alchemy between place and time … then attempting to freeze these experiences into static instances in time in order to draw them, will inevitably exclude the temporal qualities of the experience.43 Paying close attention to the materials I encountered along Bjørnøya’s shore directed a contemplation of the different durations that existed during my short time on the island. I was aware that the predominant materials, such as snow and ice, were a temporary cover over the brown and grey earth. From my previous visits to the island, I knew that there were conglomerations of seaweed, sand, pebbles, lichen, logs, and plastic debris hidden under the snow and ice. All these materials have their own durations, but in order to comprehensively understand such durations, they must be viewed from various multisensory perspectives so that we are better informed on where they originated, what conditions they presently live in, and what threats are likely to impact them in the future. Regarding the shores of Bjørnøya, it is certain that the annual presence of sea ice is nearing its finitude. On a pessimistic note, a warming climate may mean that the island will become a hub to support the ever-advancing petroleum and mineral extraction industries in the Barents Sea. Rather than dwell on this prospect, however, it is possible to speculate that warming conditions may mean that Bjørnøya will become a vital refuge for migrating birds and animals. Conclusion

This chapter examined Arctic peripheries from three different temporal perspectives namely historical, geological, and relational. These perspectives were specifically framed and expressed through the time concept of duration or durée. Collectively these perspectives may be regarded as parallaxal durations that take different per­ spectives of time with the aim of unfolding the complex multi-temporal nature of perceptions, representations and materialities of the Arctic. The durations exposed in this chapter first drew attention to the dichotomous perceptions between periphery and centre that have evolved over time. The transformation of the Arctic from a peripheral region to a global centre, with regard to climate and geopolitics, continues to uphold dichotomous associations, but these are starting to be challenged. This is helping to cultivate non-dualistic attitudes of the Arctic and its peripheries, where the processes ‘within’ this region resist predictability and stability. Second, through this time-centred study I observed disruption emerging towards fixed space and stable ontologies. This was exemplified in my discussions about fixed boundaries, static rocks, and frozen shores. By utilizing the concept of duration, the inanimate world comes alive where processes of movement, fluidity, unpredictability, and instability emerge. Attention to the more-than-human presents itself as much more than a backdrop to human presence and activity but is, instead, an active participant in changes that we are seeing locally and globally. And finally, drawing attention to the situated and relational engagement with Bjørnøya’s coast helped to elevate the dense temporal and material specificities that were present during my visit there. This tan­ gible engagement was essential in acquiring specific knowledge of a coast that is very vulnerable to change in a warming climate.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Timms 2008, 95. Grosz 1999, 1–2. Bergson 1988, 4. Warf 2008, 138. Ellsworth and Kruse 2013, 19. For example, Norwegian geologist Balthazar Mathias Keilhau who visited the Arctic island of Bjørnøya in 1827 observed: ‘everywhere the earth carcass lies naked’ (in Hagenæs-Kjelldahl 2006, 23). Over a century later, Austrian artist Christiane Ritter who spent a year in Northern Svalbard, in 1934, recounts her experience of the Arctic: ‘If only people at home knew how wonderful it is here. It is a pity that in Europe they can imagine only the terrors of the polar night’ ( Ritter 2019, 128). This is described by Harper 2014 and Tynan 2020. Theutenberg 1984. Szabo 2016, 146. Jørgensen and Langum 2016. Gritsenko 2016. For example, the Norwegian explorer Fridjof Nansen spent much time with the Inuit in Greenland in the late 1880s and admired their morals and authentic culture ( Jølle 2001). Ryall, Schimanski and Wærp 2010, x. Cited in Steinberg 2016, 180. Steinberg 2016, 180 Dodds 2010. Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme 2021. Wormbs 2018, 1. Grosz 2013, 132 Steinberg and Kristoffersen 2017, 637. Steinberg and Kristoffersen 2017, 638. Shadian 2013, 261. Yusoff 2008, 116. Zalasiewicz 2010, 102. Bjornerud 2018. Welland, 2010. Macfarlane 2019, 15. The original location of the station was to the northeast of the island. After the Second World War, a new station was built on the north coast and has been in use since 1947. Hagenæs-Kjelldahl 2006. Tetrapods are four-legged amphibians, reptiles, and mammals ( Herron et al., 2020). Herron et al. 2020, 13 Cohen 2015, 86 The Anthropocene term was introduced by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the ecol­ ogist Eugene Stroemer in 2000. It is a proposed term and has not been formalized yet by geoscientists. Our current geological epoch is, in fact, the Holocene. Prominski 2014; Malm and Hornborg 2014. Simonetti 2019, 15. Farrier 2020, 51. Sugimoto n.d. Wittmann 2009, 182. de Duve 1978, 121. Fyfe 2017. Fowler 2013, 113. Rodaway 1994, 84. Buck 2017, 4.

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References Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme. Arctic Climate Change Update 2021: Key Trends and Impacts: Summary for Policy-makers. Tromsø: Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, 2021. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell. 1911 Mineola: Dover Publications, 1988. Bjornerud, Marcia. Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018. Buck, David. A Musicology for Landscape. London, New York: Routledge, 2017. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. De Duve, Thierry. “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox”, October, 5, 113–125, 1978. Dodds, Klaus. “A Polar Mediterranean? Accessibility, Resources and Sovereignty in the Arctic Ocean”, Global Policy. 1(3), 303–311, 2010. Ellsworth, Elizabeth and Kruse, Jamie. Making the Geologic Now. New York: Punktum Books, 2013. Farrier, David. Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils. New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2020. Fowler, Michael. “Soundscape as a Design Strategy for Landscape Architectural Praxis”. Design Studies. 34(1), 111–128, 2013. Fyfe, Jan Barbara. “Meanwhile/Becoming: A Postphenomenological Position Exploring Vision and Visuality in Landscape Photography”. DEd. Manchester Metropolitan University. 2017. Accessed 21 November 2022. https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/62092 4/ Gritsenko, Daria. “Arctic Future: Sustainable colonialism?”. The Arctic Institute. 2016. Accessed 21 November 2022. https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/arctic-future-sustainable-colonialism/ Grosz, Elizabeth. Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures. London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Time Matters: On Temporality in the Anthropocene”. In Architecture in the Anthropocene, edited by Etienne Turpin, 129–138. Michigan: Open Humanities Press, 2013. Hagenæs-Kjelldahl, Dag. Bear Island: The Story of an Isolated Arctic Island — Exploration, People, Culture and Nature. London and Whitby: IK Foundations and Company Ltd, 2006. Harper, Tom. “Magic Mountains and Sea Serpents: The Secrets of Early Arctic Maps”. The Conversation. 2014. Accessed 21 November 2022. https://theconversation.com/magic-mountainsand-sea-serpents-the-secrets-of-early-arctic-maps-34342 Herron, Seán Thór, Fleming, Edward James and Flowerdew, Michael John. “Transition from Swimming to Walking Preserved in Tetrapod Trackways from the Late Carboniferous of Bjørnøya, Svalbard”. Norwegian Journal of Geology (Norsk Geologisk Tidsskrift), 100, 2–6, 2020. Jølle, Harald Dag. “The Tension between Culture and Nature: Fridtjof Nansen’s Understanding of Arctic Minorities”, Acta Borealia, 18(1), 3–23, 2001. Jørgensen, Polly and Langum, Virginia. “Envisioning North from a Premodern Perspective”. In Visions of North in Premodern Europe, edited by Polly Jørgensen and Virginia Langum, 1–12. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2016. Macfarlane, Robert. Underland: A Deep Time Journey. Hamish Hamilton, 2019. Malm, Andreas and Hornborg, Alf. The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative. The Anthropocene Review. 1(1), 62–69, 2014. Prominski, Martin. “Andscapes: Concepts of Nature and Culture for Landscape Architecture in the ‘Anthropocene’”, Journal of Landscape Architecture, 9(1), 6–19, 2014. Ritter, Christiane. A Woman in the Polar Night, trans. Jane Degras, London: Pushkin Press, 2019. Rodaway, Paul. Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense and Place. London: Routledge, 1994.

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Ryall, Anka, Schimanski, Johan and Wærp, Howlid Wærp (eds). Arctic Discourses. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. Shadian, Jessica. “The Arctic Gaze: Redefining the Boundaries of the Nordic Region”. In Science, Geopolitics and Culture in the Polar Region, edited bySverker Sörlin, 227–258. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013. Simonetti, Christián. “The Petrified Anthropocene”. Theory, Culture & Society, 36(7–8), 45–66, 2019. Steinberg, Philip. “Europe’s ‘Others’ in the Polar Mediterranean”, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Georgafie, 107(2), 177–188, 2016. Steinberg, Philip and Kristoffersen, Berit. “‘The ice edge is lost … nature moved it’: Mapping Ice as State Practice in the Canadian and Norwegian North”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2(4), 625–641, 2017. Sugimoto, Hiroshi. “Seascapes”. Accessed 21 November 2022. https://www.sugimotohiroshi. com/seascapes-1. Szabo, Vicki. “Northern Seas, Marine Monsters, and Perceptions of the Premodern North Atlantic in the longue duree”. In Visions of North in Premodern Europe, edited by Polly Jørgensen and Virginia Langum, 145–182. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2016. Theutenberg, Bo Johnson. “Mare Clausum et Mare Liberum”, Arctic., 37(4), 481–492, 1984. Timms, Benjamin. “The Parallax of Landscape: Situating Celaque National Park, Honduras”. In Landscape, Tourism, and Meaning, edited by Daniel Knudsen, Michelle Metro-Roland and Charles Greer, 95–108. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008. Tynan, Eimear. “Arctic Islands, Archival Exposures”, Shima, 14(1), 67–89, 2020. Warf, Barney. Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2008. Welland, Michael. Sand: The Never-Ending Story. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2010. Wittmann, Mirjam. “Time, Extended: Hiroshi Sugimoto with Gilles Deleuze”. Image & Narrative, 10(1), 176–189, 2009. Wormbs, Nina. Competing Arctic Futures: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Yusoff, Kathryn. “Ice Archives”. In Bi-Polar, edited by Kathryn Yusoff, 116–123. London: The Arts Catalyst, 2008. Zalasiewicz, Jan. The Planet in a Pebble. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

8

We, a peripheral time-space-body Notes on encounter-investigation, corpo-reality, and the gentleness of stones Christoph Solstreif-Pirker

A flickering landscape

Figure 8.1 View across the snowy valley end of the Safiental. Photo by the author.

Safiental, Grisons, Switzerland: When I first encountered this place, I had no idea where its landscape might lead me. I had travelled to this Alpine terrain for participating in an artist residency and a symposium on Land and Environmental Art in September 2020. Although I was familiar with the framework and the tasks set for me as a participant, I felt cold inside: not because of the early onset of winter, which was already imminent here at this time of the year, but rather because of my despondency, which intensified with each kilometre of my arrival and even did not subside when I finally reached my destination, the village of Tenna. I simply did not know how to work with this place. My artistic research focus on the relationship between trauma, landscape, and humans, which I had previously explored in highly ambiv­ alent milieus and territories, seemed to find no application amid this Alpine idyll. With its DOI: 10.4324/9781003348269-11

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picturesque scene and the omnipresent sublimity of the Alps, this place remained strangely distant to me – reminding me of a temporal vacuum into which the resonances of the current planetary requiem had not yet entered (Figure 8.1). The place’s altitude reflected, as it were, the distance with which I saw myself detached from any kind of reality; it was a borderless place – superficial, smooth, alone for itself: ʻa landscape which is absolutely “finished”: because it is, so to speak, relationless and lacks any possibility of shifting and of counterplay with something that would be its correlate.’1 In encountering this local finitude, I thought about the borderless condition of the present. While the notion of the border prominently and highly problemat­ ically appears within the Western neo-fascist geopolitical climate, political leaders seem, at the same time, to be endowed with immunity to it: while the border is promoted as a key ideo­ logical concept, its subversive potential is negated and suppressed (Does not the border – contrary to its excluding power – also have an agency of inclusion, self-determination, and tolerance?) The borderless and relationless Alpine landscape allowed me to experience this global mindset most immediately. It made it clear to me that I was not only part of a borderless discourse, but equally part of a borderless planetary ecology, whose mechanisms of dominion and oppression had only recently become even more concrete. The longer I moved within this borderless space and set my footsteps on the smooth Alpine terrain, however, the more something different appeared as if the visible landscape were only the first surface of a moving picture puzzle in which a second landscape slowly began to emerge (Figure 8.2).

Figure 8.2 View of the road from Turrahus to Tomülpass, overlaid with a 1942 construction photo. Photo and montage by the author.

This second landscape resembled a fragile network, a faintly flickering fabric that stretched across the meadows and the rocks. There were paths that emerged, lines, curves, branches – sometimes hidden like a barely visible crack in the rock, sometimes

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explicit like a scraped wound. I perceived an otherness in this landscape that took on a depth, a history, a border. These flickering borderlines made me pause and situate myself in the landscape. As distant this context was to me at first, as close it became right now. I realized that I was strangely related to this landscape, its paths, cracks, and scrapes in a novel yet archaic way. Despite their otherness, the borderlines drew a space of com­ munity into which I inscribed myself and, it seemed, into which I had always already been inscribed. Against all expectations, this place had unfolded a space that continually mutated its borderless condition and made a peripheral condition perceivable. In the following reflections, I will trace the dimensions of this peripheral condition, analyze my situatedness in it, and see where such a space ultimately leads to. For this second landscape was neither a mere image, nor a delusion; instead, it was the departure point for something new, for an alternative form of thinking that might unsettle the under­ standing of subjectivity, art, aesthetics, and, most fundamentally, the view of how planetary coexistence can be possible in the face of ecocidal regimes. This article es­ tablishes a transitive oscillation between the psychic and the physical sphere – and between the human and the more-than-human realm – to arrive at a state of blur where thinking and acting are no longer performed dialectically, but according to an oscillating transsubjectivity. To present the ethical, aesthetic, and political implications of such a transitive condition marks the objective of this article. Based on the encounter with the flickering Alpine terrain, this essay also intends to unveil a different perspective on landscape, as transformed from a condition of cold borderless-ness into intimate ecol­ ogies of encounter. Such a venture introduces the peripheral to become the main actor of an alternative and hopeful form of political practice. Many of them cried In the summer of 1940, Switzerland accepted a large number of soldiers who had fought the invasion of Nazi Germany in France. Once their imminent defeat was near, 25,000 French and 12,000 Polish soldiers immigrated to Switzerland and were distributed as ʻinternees’ over the entire Swiss territory. These ʻinternees’ were not part of the local population but lived outside the villages in guarded barracks. Some contemporary witnesses later reported on their first impressions of the Polish soldiers: ‘The Polish internees were partly very young soldiers, 18, 20? Every evening they had the main muster. And then they sang the Polish national anthem. Many of them cried. They were very homesick’2. With the so-called ʻOrange Command’ of November 1, 1941, the everyday life of the soldiers became even more constrained. They were forbidden any contact with people outside the camp, and they were not allowed to do any work. It was, as one witness described it, a ʻhopeless barrack life, comparable to imprisonment because of the narrowness, uniformity, and isolation.’3 After this first phase of internment, the soldiers were assigned specific work that had often been planned for a long time but not yet carried out due to a lack of labour power. This work included agriculture, mining, and road construction. For very low wages, the soldiers built roads and trails in the Alpine terrain, which later entered Swiss historiography as ‘Polish roads’ [Polenwege]. With these roads, an extensive network-like infrastructure was created, in which the soldiers’ fates, their trauma of remoteness, grief, and isolation were equally inscribed. This network continues to shape the Swiss landscape to this day, adding ambivalent layers to the Alpine idyll and making the landscape appear in a completely different image. What it revealed to me was not a borderless a-historic surface, but a scarred ground, full of incisions and wounds. The roads made literal borders perceivable, which the

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ʻinternees’ felt with their bare skin: rejection, contempt, ridicule, mockery, torment. In observing that I was equally inscribed in these borderlines, however, I also discovered a concealed potentiality: Might these very borderlines unfold hopeful spaces of encounter? If I had discovered myself within these spaces, did I not bear responsibility for them (and they for me)? What forms of alternative ethical paradigms could be opened through them? Interestingly, these reflections pointed from the concrete site to a much broader horizon of transitivity and community (Figure 8.3).

Figure 8.3 Historical photo of the 1942 road construction from Turrahus to Tomülpass. Unknown photographer.

Based on the observation of this second landscape and my enigmatic proximity to it, I am claiming here for an immediate relationship between human and more-than-human subjec­ tivity in the form of a transsubjective corpo-reality. Such a claim is neither based on a Heideggerian being-in-the-world, nor on narratives of biologistic symbiotic fusion. What I suggest is a different corpo-reality; a shared time-space-body that moves in an oscillating inbetween space and sees hegemonic solidities as fundamentally relational, interdependent, and responsible for each other: my ʻI’ always already bears traces of the ʻother’ within it, just as the ʻother,’ in turn, sees itself as interwoven with my ʻI.’ As Bruno Latour has recently noted, it is precisely a matter of recognizing ʻwhat other actors are, want, desire, or can do – and this applies to workers as well as to birds in the sky […] to bacteria in the soil, to forests as well as to animals’ and that ʻwe are not seeking agreement among all these overlapping agents, but we are learning to be dependent on them. No reduction, no harmony.’4 Here, the dichotomy of subject and object is fundamentally abolished, and a communal, shared corpo-reality emerges in which the most diverse agents and agencies are interwoven and interrelated with one another. Being as transsubjectivity can be described in Bergsonian terms as ongoing becoming, insofar as – in reference to Gilbert Simondon – the individual can only be understood as such when it is in the process of individuation, in the process of forming itself. Such a view of human subjectivity means lifting the separation between the psychic (human) and the physical (more-than-human) sphere and noting that the human being is composed of entirely different psychic and physical multiplicities than has been assumed until now. This view seems to be adequately illustrated by a fragile network, wherein fine agential threads overlap, join, relate, tear, reunite, and form a membrane of transsubjective liveliness. In this

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sense, my proximity to the network in the landscape, with all its paths, stones, and tears, from which my corpo-reality was formed, became clear. The borderlines of this place, the traumatized ʻPolish roads,’ were nothing less than fragments of my corpo-reality: a blurred, im-pure part of what I was made of and for which I bore responsibility. This shared reality was truly peripheral; it was about a mutual carrying – referring to the roots of the word periphery: to the ancient Greek perí, (ʻaround, for, about, near’) and phérō (ʻI bear, carry’). With this original concept of peri-phery as carrying for/carrying around, the borderlines of the place changed from an excluding limit to an including threshold of ʻcarrying for’: a peripheral time-space-body. I felt the soldiers’ tears on my cheek (Figure 8.4).

Figure 8.4 Christoph Solstreif-Pirker carefully digging out a stone as part of the performance series Many of them cried. Photo by the author.

From limit to threshold The feminist psychoanalytic theory of Bracha L. Ettinger (b. 1948) provides a key to our thinking about this peripheral border space. It can first clarify the concept of carrying, which then leads to transforming a narrowing limit into a hopeful threshold and to fun­ damentally redefining subjective agency. Recognizing an etymological relation between the words of ʻsubject’ and ʻcarry’ in Hebrew, Ettinger stated that ʻwhile the Latin term sub­ jectus is linked (… …) to “subject of attributes and predicates” and to subjugation – this is very different in Hebrew where (… …) “subject” does not indicate being subjugated, but on the contrary: CARRY! Bear! Support!’5 Ettinger understands subjectivity as profoundly relational, in that each subject in its constitution refers back to the first prenatal encounter with the carrying mother: ‘each one of us, who came to life, came to life since she was carried inside a female body for a long-enough duration.’6 The traces of this archaic ‘encounter-event’7 are carried in and with each subject throughout her or his life. Such traces, Ettinger noted, are traces of carrying: both in a literal sense – as when we say a child is being carried – and metaphorically in the sense of holding or giving support to the other. The notion of carrying always means a compassionate and caring carrying: it is a ‘carecarrying,’ an expression of ‘carriance.’8 With this carrying inscription in the constitution of

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subjectivity, the Ettingerian Matrixial theory (‘matrix’ in Latin means ‘womb’) formulates an important alternative to the masculine tradition of thought. Only when we are carrying, in the sense of ‘carriance,’ we are true subjects: ‘I care-carry ergo sum.’9 However, it is not only through this feminine approach that any subject exists as a carrying being, but also through the double meaning of the Hebrew root N.Sh.A, which means both ‘subject’ and ‘carry’: ‘the subject is NOSSE [‫( ]נושא‬again from the root N.Sh.A), meaning: “to carry.”’10 This inseparable link between ‘subject’ and ‘carrier’ relates to a significant ethical insight reported at the beginning of the Old Testament: there God spoke to the roaming Cain after his offering was rejected by God (and before he will murder his brother Abel in the field), ‘Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door’ (Gen 4:6–7). Ettinger suggested an alternative translation of the fragment ‘will you not be accepted?’ based on the original Hebrew word ShETH [‫]שאת‬: ‘The literal and figurative meaning of ShETH [‫ ]שאת‬is to bear, to tolerate, to lift, to suffer. But to begin with: to carry.’11 Here, then, an entirely new meaning of this biblical commandment emerges in the sense of ‘if you will be doing what is good: carry (… …) in the past and in the future’12. Only when we carry – for the past, the present, and the future – the first ethical commandment from God to humans will be fulfilled, only then a subject will truly become a subject. This carrying act, however, always requires a choice, a decision between doing well and not doing well – between carrying and refusing to carry, that is, either ‘the desire to abandon and betray, the desire to possess and appropriate the other’13 or taking the path towards humanity (Figure 8.5).

Figure 8.5 Christoph Solstreif-Pirker seen from the back, walking along the road to Tomülpass as part of the performance series Many of them cried. Photo by the author.

With this expanded notion of subjectivity as a carrying agency with the freedom to decide for the humane, my proposal of a peripheral time-space-body becomes contextualized. Periphery means a condition in which the state of being carried, the expression of ‘car­ riance,’ occurs immediately; the moment when a second landscape unfolds before my eyes, and I become aware of myself as a part and carrier of this landscape. For Ettinger, periphery then transforms from a place of contempt, oppression, and abandonment to a place of transition to and relation with the Other – who is no longer a total Other, but a known Other: an ‘almost-Other’14 Such a relation with the ‘almost-Other’ occurs when a surprising

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and affecting dialogue with the place emerges, and when I notice grains of my very own subjectivity imprinted in that very place: when ‘I and non-I’15 are no longer dialectically opposed, but recognize their being-inscribed in each other. The landscape is ‘non-I’ for me, just as I am ‘non-I’ for the landscape. Here, an ongoing transsubjective community occurs, an entangled alliance and resonance of a psycho-planetary relatedness. As Heidegger sug­ gested with his late concept of the ‘fourfold’16 [Geviert], being-in-the-world relates to the interplay of ‘earth and sky, divinities and mortals.’17 However, with the peripheral timespace-body, I am proposing the re-conceptualization of the Heideggerian ‘fourfold’ via the Ettingerian Matrixial theory: this entails a multidimensional interplay not materializing as the Heideggerian ‘clearing’18 but as a fragile and ambiguous threshold beyond any totality and duality. Such a process of materialization is a responsible co-poietic process, always related to acts of ‘communicaring’19 – and not to a Heideggerian ‘gathering.’20 The rigidity of the Heideggerian ‘fourfold’ mutates into a transitive state of mutual inscription, relat­ edness, and responsibility – it branches into the indefinite paths of the real. When the world is conceived peripherally, ‘a space inside a physical site’ will open, ‘although this site remains different from it.’21 Not just a momentary encounter, an ephemeral exchange, or a tem­ porary gathering takes place here, but an intimate and yet separate world: a space of ‘jointness-in-differentiating.’22 The peripheral unfolds when the decision to carry has been made, and the subject fulfils its true destiny as a carrier – as a ‘human being’ [‫]אנוש‬. Place has turned to a non-harmonious and differentiated time-space-body of which I, the stone, the grass, the animal, and the sky are equally part, and bear responsibility and ‘carriance’ for each other. With this peripheral corpo-reality, shared between psychic (human) and physical (more-than-human) spheres, a ‘passage’23 can then emerge which transforms the ‘wounds of the world’24 into fragments of hope and beauty (Figure 8.6).

Figure 8.6 Christoph Solstreif-Pirker carefully digging out a stone as part of the performance series Many of them cried. Photo by the author.

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Near and yet far Becoming aware of my peripheral time-space-body did neither occur through any rational analysis of place, nor through its determination as a subject of properties and quantities; the encounter was the only necessity. Bound to this was the realization that such an encounter always refers back to the very first, original encounter with my ‘non-I’ in the womb-space – this immediate embedding in a ‘web of meeting of one with-in the other’25 and the affirmation of having always already been a carried and carrying subject. Encounter is the fragilization of my subjectivity in favour of an expanded constitution of myself in terms of a transitive, everchanging time-space-body. The landscape had become my corpo-reality, ‘it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it – only differently.’26 In this affective confrontation and affection lies a proto-ethical dimension, as the peripheral time-space-body consists of transitive multiplicities that are both subject and object and can also deliberately change these attributions; they form a collective of ‘severality’27 that continuously overlaps, inscribes into, and re-forms itself – and asks me to carry. In this ‘encounter-event’28 or encounter-investigation with the Alpine landscape and the traumatized borders inscribed, I focused on this transitive community of subject and object and began to address the specific objects of which the border spaces of this landscape were made: stones. In doing this, I felt again reminded of a word by Buber when he described the encounter between him and a piece of stone (Figure 8.7): On a gloomy morning I walked upon the highway, saw a piece of mica lying, lifted it up and looked at it for a long time; the day ways no longer gloomy, so much light was caught in the stone. And suddenly as I raised my eyes from it, I realized that while I looked, I had not been conscious of ‘object’ and ’subject’; in my looking the mica and ‘I’ had been one; in my looking I had tasted unity. I looked at it again, the unity did not return.29

Figure 8.7 Detailed view of a stone wall constructed by ‘internees’ in 1942 along the road from Turrahus to Tomülpass. Photo by the author.

I felt similarly about the stones of the ‘Polish roads.’ In encountering them I realized a community occurring between me and them: a shared subjectivity took place in that the stone represented both an object and a subject of/for/in myself, ‘both a transject and a transubject.’30 Yet this was beyond totalitarian unity, sameness, and symbiosis. Ettinger already made a

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critique of such unity public in her first reflections on the Matrixial theory when she stated that ‘the Matrix conceptualizes not-one-ness, prenatal experiences of I and not-I(s) in coexistence without assimilation and without rejection.’31 The ‘not-one-ness’ with the stones was an expression of my carrying attention and awareness of inscription. My encounterinvestigation with and into them involved recognizing and appreciating their particularity and subjectivity – their ‘I’ that was ‘non-I’ to me. With all of these embedded reflections, I made the stones tangible and took responsibility for their inherent narratives of trauma. On site, I initiated a series of performative unearthings with the only ambition of encountering the place, fragilizing my corporeality, and making conscious my dependence and reliance on it. My intention was to peripherize the visible, centralized, and borderless landscape: to adopt a stance in which I can care-carry for (‘peri-phery’) what was taking shape before my eyes and beyond. As a first step, I placed my attention on the road and its materiality. I walked barefoot, establishing a first relation with the place and its layers. The walking was not a walking on the road, but a walking with the road, a ‘walking-with place’ that initiated a relational, intimate, and tangible entanglement with the lithic eco-materiality of which we are all a part.’32 During this attentive ‘walking-with place,’ a focus evolved on the ‘eco-materiality’ of the road and its stones. During my performative investigation and bodily fragilization, I devoted myself to four stones along the road, kneeling to them and unearthing them slowly, thoughtfully, non-invasively: reaching out to these stones and establishing a close bodily relationship with them, as if searching for fragments of my corpo-reality. Digging with my hands and fingers was a procedure of investigative memorialization and practice of periph­ erizing myself and the landscape. Once I unearthed these stones – once I unearthed myself – I held them in my hands and carried them on – not only literally but also in a femininetransitive sense – towards the second sequence of this encounter-investigation33 (Figure 8.8).

Figure 8.8 Christoph Solstreif-Pirker carrying a digged-out stone on the road from Turrahus to Tomülpass as part of the performance series Many of them cried. Photo by the author.

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The sound of subversion ‘Care-carrying’ always requires a practice of translation and transition: a passage ‘from transjectivity and transubjectivity to subject and object’ and likewise from ‘response-ability to responsibility, from wit(h)nessing to witnessing, from proto-ethical aesthetic revelation to subjective agency.’34 The first encounter with the landscape, the slow tracing of the stones’ transsubjective and transjective agency, the bodily relation with them through the perfor­ mative act of non-invasive unearthing and carrying them on was an expression of psychoplanetary dependence and relatedness; an investigative ‘being-together-with’35 or, in Ettingerian terms, a ‘wit(h)nessing’ – ‘dwelling with your subject-matter, taking your time, giving yourself time, remaining with it, in your body.’36 As such, it was the first sequence of a passage toward an ethical, hopeful, and politically highly relevant form of thought and practice. However, processes of translation became necessary for ‘arriving at a human action’37 that entails immediate ethical, political, even cosmological consequences. Such movement is about transgressing from the carrying community and the transsubjective and transjective state into a reality, in which a ‘subjective agency’ can become effective. For Ettinger, this transgression consists of a ‘withdrawal from the matrixial stratum,’ which is ‘a withdrawal in the service of humanizing the subject.’38 The transgression again refers to Buber when he claims that ‘every You in the world is doomed by its nature to become a thing or at least to enter into thinghood again and again.’39 This obligatory movement from the proto-ethical to the ethical, on the way to a humanization of the humane, took place through a transmedial translation of the stones’ inscriptions. In the village of Tenna, a few kilometres from the road investigated, I brought the history of the Polish ‘internees’ to the centre of the stage. In the Reformed Church of Tenna – a building from the early 15th century – the stones became part of a sound installation with the pipe organ. The stones were placed on the organ’s keyboard, and their weight made very subtle, carpet-like clusters of sound. The result was a four-movement cycle of organ and stones, which, in a more ephemeral form, brought the isolated voices of the Polish ‘internees’ into the societal centre of the place – the church.40 Here a sound-space was created, wherein the voices, laments, mourning, crying, prayers, and hopes of all those silenced people became audible and immediately created a yet-unknown presence within this historic building (Figure 8.9).

Figure 8.9 Interior view of the church building of Tenna, Christoph Solstreif-Pirker is placing a stone on the keyboard of the pipe organ as part of the performance series Many of them cried. Photo by the author.

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Based on Ettinger’s description of an encounter with the water in the lagoon of Venice, a similar situation took place with the wave-resonances inside the church of Tenna: ‘Immersed in this wavelength, no difference was there yet there was. A wound-space in the [sound] carried my heart and its space with-in it.’41 By making the stones audible, a ‘breath-touch’42 emerged, leading to a truly peripheral and humane form of practice that insisted on feminine-matrixial ‘jointness-in-differentiating’ as a shared time-space-body. What opened up in this second sequence of my encounter-investigation was a passage ‘from wit(h)nessing to witnessing,’43 insofar as the translated sound that I had previously perceived only with my body-psyche now filled a social and political space: the sound of the stones on the keyboard of the organ was audible not only in the church of Tenna, but also outside, in the alleys of the village, in the fields, on the mountains, in the clouds; the sound was immediately perceptible and embraced any actor in this Alpine milieu. With this sound, a sensory dimension was created in which the peripheral became witnessable and allowed its trauma to flow into everyone; it was impossible to escape these frequencies; it was ‘impossible not to share,’44 impossible not to carry on. In this shared communal timespace-body, wounds became perceptible – the place’s specific wounds. And yet, this was not a depressive but a hopeful dimension: a sound-space or a ‘breath-touch’ affecting everyone and initiating a transformation of trauma into a hopeful and humane way of thinking and acting. Periphery’s subversion had become concrete (Figure 8.10).

Figure 8.10 View of the pipe organ with one stone lying on the keyboard as part of the performance series Many of them cried. Photo by the author.

Towards a peripheral being With this peripheral approach, it is now possible to fundamentally reconsider the dualism of the relationship between humans and nature and to develop an ethical-aesthetic form of thought and practice capable of introducing inclusivity, responsibility, fragility, and difference into hegemonic discourses. Such a paradigm entails thinking within the psycho-planetary timespace-body that emerges in the immediate encounter with an existing more-than-human surrounding. Beyond the impossibility of relationality – as Simmel defined the Alpine land­ scape – any site can be peripherized when it is made conscious in its immediate relation with and dependence on myself. Noting that subjectivity is very fundamentally a carrying entity and that it is possible to enter the real and embrace its traces calls for a new trusting commitment

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that opens to the humane: the ʻcapacity to elaborate the traces of the trauma of one another’ and ʻto give the outside a transjective state.’45 Such a perspective means not seeing such an outside dialectically or negating it fundamentally, but noting that there is ‘no pure presence, no pure absence, no pure schism and their price to pay, but transmissions and transgressions, impurity and hybridization, fragmentation, partialization and pluralization, and their special price to pay.’46 There is only an inside-outside with infinite gradations in between. Such a claim entails a ‘special price to pay,’ namely, that cultural, political, or philosophical legacies are fundamentally stripped of their masculine-phallic structure – or, more precisely, that this structure undergoes a matrixial-feminine mutation. Both subjectivity and the planet have ceased to exist in dualisms but equally ceased to be an endless multiplicity. Instead, what emerges is a psycho-planetary being, a peripheral being, that is based on trust and maternal being-together without establishing any (gender) primacy: ‘the matrixial model does not promote natalism and is relevant not to mothers only but indicates a substratum in the subject of any sex and gender.’47 It is trust and peripheral community as ‘jointness-in-differentiating’ that can ultimately allow planetary life to branch into fragile, painful, and yet hopeful and birthing directions. With these reflections about an ‘encounter-event’ in the Alpine border space and the resulting carrying paradigm, I am emphasizing the interplay of site, senses, and en­ vironment, which can perform the peripheralization of the world – not as a quasitotalitarian attitude, but as a practice of micro-politics, on the way from proto-ethical investigation to ethical and truly humane agency. It is necessary to enter into the trauma of this world, find the stone within us and carry it on – to a stone that can become a new sound and a new way of thinking and acting: beating within us is a heart of stone, but a vibrant and gentle one (Figure. 8.11).

Figure. 8.11 Photo montage of Christoph Solstreif-Pirker touching the earth of the road from Turrahus to Tomülpass overlaid with a 1942 photo of the road construction. Photo and montage by the author.

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Epilogue After the sound installation in the church, the unearthed stones were left back in unrevealed positions in the village area of Tenna. The village thus became a terrain of ongoing memorialization, even without references and explanations. The presence of the stones is enough. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Simmel 1993 [1911], 183. Belart 2006, 55, translation mine. Zaba 1990, translation mine. Latour 2018, 87. Kaiser and Thiele 2018, 110. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 107. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 113. Ibid. 113. Ibid., 113. Ettinger 2004, 89. Kaiser and Thiele 2018, 107. Heidegger 2012 [1949/1957], 11. Ibid., 18. Heidegger 1993 [1935/36], 178. Ettinger 2019, 187. Heidegger 1993 [1951], 355. Kaiser and Thiele 2018, 116. Ettinger 2020 [1995], 253. Ettinger 2020 [1994], 140. Kaiser and Thiele 2018, 121. Ettinger 2005, 704. Buber 1970 [1923], 58. Ettinger 2011, 11. Ibid., 7. Buber 1964 [1913], 140. Ettinger 2019, 212. Ettinger 1992, 178. Springgay and Truman 2019, 33. An edited performance recording can be accessed via this link: http://y2u.be/A6wWFHz2JX8. Ettinger 2019, 197. Solstreif-Pirker 2019, 69. Kaiser and Thiele 2018, 105. Ibid., 108. Ettinger 2019, 197. Buber 1970 [1923], 69. Audio recordings can be accessed via these links: http://y2u.be/eopiRBntJpc, (part 1), http:// y2u.be/bJVyLkLVi4Q (part 2), http://y2u.be/sA1cR5YTU7g (part 3), http://y2u.be/i54O4M_ PiVA (part 4). 41 Ettinger 2015, 355. 42 Ibid., 366.

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Ettinger 2019, 194. Ibid., 191. Kaiser and Thiele 2018, 123. Ettinger 2020 [1996], 315. Ettinger 2019, 186.

References Belart, Caroline. “Viele von ihnen weinten: polnische Internierte in der Schweiz und insbesondere in der Gemeinde Thalheim (AG) während des Zweiten Weltkriegs.” Argovia: Jahresschrift der Historischen Gesellschaft des Kantons Aargau vol. 118, 2006, pp. 47–63. Buber, Martin. Daniel: Dialogues on Realization, translated by Maurice Friedman. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964 [1913]. Buber, Martin. I and Thou, translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Scribner, 1970 [1923]. Ettinger, Bracha L. “Matrix and Metramorphosis.” differences vol. 4(3), 1992, pp. 176–208. Ettinger, Bracha L. “Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event.” Theory, Culture & Society vol. 21(1), 2004, pp. 69–93. Ettinger, Bracha L. “Copoiesis.” ephemera vol. 5(x), 2005, pp. 703–713. Ettinger, Bracha L. “Uncanny Awe, Uncanny Compassion and Matrixial Transjectivity beyond Uncanny Anxiety [2010].” French Literature Series vol. 38, 2011, pp. 1–30. Ettinger, Bracha L. “And My Heart, Wound–Space With–In Me: The Space of Carriance.” In And My Heart–Wound Space, edited by Bracha L. Ettinger, 353–367. Leeds: The Wild Pansy Press, 2015. Ettinger, Bracha L. “Beyond the Death–Drive, Beyond the Live–Drive—Being–toward–Birthing with Being–toward–Birth: Copoiesis and the Matrixial Eros—Metafeminist Notes.” In Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research, edited by Paolo de Assis and Paolo Giudici, 183–214. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019. Ettinger, Bracha L. “The Becoming Threshold of Matrixial Borderlines [1994].” In Ettinger, Bracha L. Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics. Volume I 1990–2000, edited by Griselda Pollock, 131–156. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Ettinger, Bracha L. “Matrixial Gaze and Screen: Other than Phallic and Beyond the Late Lacan [1995].” In Ettinger, Bracha L. Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics. Volume I 1990–2000, edited by Griselda Pollock, 241–286. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Ettinger, Bracha L. “Red Cow Effect: The Metramorphosis of Hallowing the Hollow and Hollowing the Hallow [1996].” In Ettinger, Bracha L. Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics. Volume I 1990–2000, edited by Griselda Pollock, 287–323. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art [1935/36].” In Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, 139–212. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993. Heidegger, Martin. “Building, Dwelling, Thinking [1951].” In Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, 343–364. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993. Heidegger, Martin. Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight into That which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking [1949/1957], translated by Andrew J. Mitchell. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012. Kaiser, Birgit M., and Kathrin Thiele. “If You Do Well, Carry! The Difference of the Humane: An Interview with Bracha L. Ettinger.” philoSOPHIA vol. 8(1), 2018, pp. 101–125. Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018. Simmel, Georg. “The Alps [1911].” Qualitative Sociology vol. 16(2), 1993, pp. 179–184.

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Solstreif-Pirker, Christoph. “Being-Together-With the World-Without-Us: Performative Investigations Into the Traumatized Planetary Space.” PhD diss., Graz University of Technology, 2019. Springgay, Stephanie and Sarah E. Truman. Walking Methodologies in a More-than Human World: WalkingLab. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. Zaba, Tadeusz. “Internierung der polnischen Divisionen in der Schweiz von 1940 bis 1945,” Manuscript March 1990, unpublished.

Part III

Visual culture rearticulations Maiju Loukola, Mari Mäkiranta, and Jonna Tolonen

9

Something is happening in and to the margins Black and Brown cultural interventions changing a multiple Northern periphery Leena-Maija Rossi

The narrative of Nordic ethnic and racial homogeneity, of monolithic Northern Whiteness, has for a long while been constructed as the hegemonic truth in the Nordic countries.1 In the Finnish society this narrative has been historically coupled with the story of Finland’s location in the utmost periphery of Europe, both geographically and mentally. This em­ phatically narrated ‘remoteness’ and ‘isolation’ have been used as an explanation for the reiterated Finnish exceptionalism,2 both in good (originality, naturalness, purity, assumed/ constructed innocence in terms of racism and colonial processes) and bad (always lagging behind other Western countries in terms of progress, international influences travelling slowly). Thus, the hegemonic discourses in media and education have managed to create a strong imaginary idea of the ‘state of Finland,’ which I conceptualize in this essay as a ‘multiple Northern periphery.’ Recent cultural studies, especially intersectional gender studies, studies of racism, antiracism and racial relations, and critical studies on Whiteness have complicated these normative and societally stagnating narratives.3 Researchers have pointed out that the populations in the North have always consisted of different groups of people moving about, coming to the North from different directions.4 Already the fact that there have existed such age-old minorities as the Sámi and the Roma in the Northern areas challenges the notion of homogeneity of the people. It is the multiplicity of living and breathing people and communities, which has diversified and are diversifying the Nordic social coherence. As Suvi Keskinen points out, ‘some of the groundbreaking theoretical insights on mobilization across differences and the politics of solidarity have been created by feminists of colour and transnational feminists.’5 The same applies to cultural and social initiatives and interventions, which I interpret as disrupting the Whiteness of the Finnish society. As examples of this dis­ ruption, I will in this chapter discuss with some public activities of young (in their 20 s and 30 s) Black and Brown women in Finland, and the productive interventions they have made into the media discourses on racialization and ethnicity. Discussing with them textually meaning that I am trying my best to put myself in dialogue with verbal and audiovisual cultural products authored by them, rather than taking them as objects of my White researcher’s gaze. This practice will invite the media presence and music videos of the young female rapper Yeboyah (Amare Kuukka), and the media platformBrown Girls (in Finnish Ruskeat Tytöt) to become part of this chapter. Brown Girls was launched as a concept and as a media initiative by Koko Hubara, a writer and an activist, who first started writing a blog with the same title. The blog soon evolved into an

DOI: 10.4324/9781003348269-13

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internet publishing forum for other young Brown and Black writers as well (https:// www.ruskeattytot.fi/media). My method consists of trying to recognize and make recognizable some of the subversive tactics used by the aforementioned agents in their textual and audiovisual products. I am talking about ‘agents’ not to downplay gender – quite the contrary, since Yeboyah, Hubara, and other Brown Girls are self-identified feminists – but to also emphasize the role of Brown Girls as a collective with a multifaceted agency. The tactics of both Yeboyah and Brown Girls, I will point out, can be described as cultural politics for decolonization. My theoretical reference points include anti-racist, post- and decolonial6, inter­ sectionally feminist, and queer discussions, and my aim is to address the representative and epistemic changes Yeboyah and Brown Girls have managed to produce in the Finnish cultural scene during the 2010s. I will be writing with their work as a White feminist ally of a different generation (in my early 60 s). I will do my best to show how they have indeed changed the possibilities and terms of representation, also for others, assumed by the White majority to be stuck in a racialized minority and considered as peripheral when looked from the White ‘centre.’ Thereby, I argue, they have managed to construct new kinds of agencies of colour in the allegedly White, self-acclaimed periphery also called Finland. It is my argument that by connecting their own agency to inter- or transnational anti-racist discourses while talking back7 to the Finnish society they have, for their own part, changed the notion of Finland as a periphery – discur­ sively, visually, and corporeally. I am aware of the difference between postcolonial and decolonial approach, of my own limitations as a White middle-aged scholar having been trained through the post­ structuralist ‘epistemic grid,’ and having first learned a postcolonial perspective, which even though critical towards colonialism still largely maintains its foothold within the confines of US-anglo-theorization, and therefore aims to, paraphrasing Audre Lord’s words, bring down the master’s house by the master’s tools.8 Therefore, I acutely rec­ ognize the need to bring forth voices, bodies, and images that use different tools and do not settle for the ambiguous ‘post’ but strive towards ‘de,’ or even trans, when it comes to the old colonial order. Or to the old order of nationalism, for that matter. When using quotes of Koko Hubara, Brown Girls, or Yeboyah, I have included the original Finnish text in footnotes. This, for me, is a way to make visible their Finnishness, while I am also writing about their cultural approach and impact, which cross the national borders. Brown girls – a virtual space by and for Brown people In 2015, Koko Hubara began writing, in Finnish, her blog titled Brown Girls. The blog was published on the platform titled Lily, a web community connected to the Trendi magazine and geared towards the niche of young female audience. Hubara’s starting point was to address an audience, which did not find its own representations and topics discussed in the largely White mainstream media. In her blog in October 2016, Hubara drew a grim picture of the situation of herself as a child, and of other Brown and Black children in the White landscape constructed by the Finnish media and school system at the end of the 20th century: In my school there were no other kids that looked like me, not to mention adults. My history was not taught there. The adults in my family were working class, so I was too

Something is happening in and to the margins 145 often seen as a working-class kid as well, despite my grades. On television and in the newspapers, there were almost exclusively white people. It was (and it still is) almost impossible to find information on what I am and what I can become. That I can become anything. So I had to develop other skills and ways to get the information I really needed: I had to learn to listen in situations, in which at first hand nothing seemed to be happening; I had to learn to grab hold of situations, of small signals, and to change my plans in a fleeting moment; I had to learn to trust myself, and to trust the idea that my knowledge matters, even though it would not be taught anywhere yet.9 It was this experience of all-surround Whiteness, Brown invisibility, and the gap in the mainstream knowledge production that engendered first Hubara’s personal blog, and then the broader platform Brown Girls. Media scholar Kaarina Nikunen has discussed the media visibility of ethnic minorities in Finland, and like Hubara she notes that ethnic minorities have not been widely represented in Finnish public life, politics, and factual television. In fact, in the first decade of this millennium the resources for multicultural public television even decreased, and the visibility of minorities in television drama has been scarce. This scarcity has been further framed by the rise of neo- and ethnonationalist populism with anti-immigration and xenophobia at the core of its politics.10 In her analysis, Nikunen uses the term multiculturalism to name policies used by media companies to manage and produce particularly multicultural programming. The term multicultural here refers to the level of diversity in a certain culture and society. By cultural diversity she refers to ‘market-oriented mainstreaming of diversity.’ Nikunen stresses the combination of global and local, analyzing how the combination of global media formats and local adaptations create what she calls trans-national mixtures with political and social impact. Even though Brown Girls as a media is a small-scale en­ terprise, and not an adaptation of a global media product, I argue that it participates in multiculturalizing the Finnish mediascape. As a forum for young Brown and Black writers, photographers, and designers with diverse backgrounds it brings together global and local, and thus intervenes and unravels the self-acclaimed marginality of its context, the Finnish culture. I would even say that in its foregrounding of cultural diversity Brown Girls as a media platform forms a subtle space for subaltern counterpublics11 in relation to the ‘persistent nationalism’12 represented by the White mainstream media. Brown Girls provides its content producers an arena where they can ‘invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs.’13 This kind of forum is needed in the Finnish society, which has not yet even achieved a multiethnic or multicultural state of public broadcasting, not to mention any strong representation of the social multiculturality in the commercial media.14 Brown Girls may also be thought of as an independent decolonial media, in the sense that unlike a postcolonial initiative, which would strive towards critiquing Euro- or White-centric media from within, it functions within its own realm and is primarily interested in Brown audiences. Thereby, it abandons the whole idea of the mastery of the White culture, ‘which then ceases to maintain its imperial status’15 in the forum provided by Brown Girls. What is important, the viewpoint, or standpoint – to use the feminist term – in Brown Girls media content is the one of POC, people of colour, through and through. As they say on the platform’s Home section, it is the ‘first media from the Brown people to the Brown people’ in Finland.16 The aim of the platform is to broaden the field of representations, not only in Finland but also in the Nordic countries at large. Their mission is to ‘strengthen the societal participation of racialized minorities through

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arts, media, culture, and education.’17 The collective has strived towards their educational goals also by launching RT Lit Akatemia, a writing and media school, which focuses on issues of norm-criticality and diversity. Educationality can be seen also in the way the media provides careful definitions for both ‘Brown’ and ‘girls.’ According to them, Anyone who becomes racialized in Finland may be Brown. Racialized people often face stereotypical expectations and prejudices concerning non-whiteness. Brown is thus an umbrella term we have chosen for people and groups who in Finland are often called ethnic minorities, foreigners, people with foreign background, immigrants, people with immigrant background, etc. Being Brown is, however, also a matter of self-identification.18 Furthermore, the collective has a broad and inclusive definition for ‘girls’: by the term they refer to ‘especially all those genders, which are not “men” or “boys,” and those positioning themselves outside the binary.’19 However, in their use the term ‘girls’ also includes multiplicity of gender at large, so the media does not strictly exclude anybody. In just a few years, the platform has published 140 pieces, including articles, podcasts, and videos. In addition to this, Brown Girls collective has produced a five-part series of short documentaries on young style influencers, Se tyyli (That Style) to the Finnish broadcasting company Yleisradio. The podcasts include a four-part series on the history of Afro-Finland. The topics on the platform vary from research to literature and media, music and style, daily life and self-care, politics, and visual arts. The overall approach of the media is thoroughly international, and often intersectional covering the interlocking and mutually constructive relationships of ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality. Among ex­ amples of this intersectionality are an interview of Hassen Hnini, the chairperson of the Helsinki-based organization for sexual equality HeSeta20 and the whole podcast series Pehmee, which combines issues of fatness, colour, gender, and crip activism.21 With its plurality of perspectives and voices, Brown Girls media makes it possible for Brown and Black people to no longer carry the burden of a single representative, which often lies heavily on the shoulders of the few people of colour who have managed to find their way to the mainstream media in Finland.22 The relations of power are very different in the Brown Girls platform compared to the other media environments. All the people writing, photographing, or designing for Brown Girls are people of colour. However, the media does not emphasize, or aim towards, excluding White audiences either; quite the contrary – in the Home section of the media, the collective addresses both ‘Brown people’ and ‘the whole population [of Finland].’23 All the content is open access and free of charge, and this can be seen as a tactics for drawing all kinds of audiences. There are no comment possibilities at the end of the articles, which means that the platform offers a safe(r) space for its content producers; it even intends to offer a space for dreaming.24 The safety of the medium means that the writers and the photographers do not have to become exposed to accusations for producing propaganda, or ‘manipulative multicul­ turalism.’25 Brown Girls has been noted as a venue for possible cultural change also outside its primary audience. In 2018 the collective received the ETMU prize awarded by the Finnish society for ethnic relations and migration, and in 2019 they were among the artists receiving the Suomi (Finland) prizes, which are awarded yearly by the Ministry of Education and Culture. Furthermore, Kone Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, and Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation – the major private foundations that finance arts,

Something is happening in and to the margins 147 social sciences, and humanities in Finland – have funded the RT Lit Academy and thereby supported the educational activities of the Ruskeat Tytöt collective. The attention from these organizations, especially the state-level acknowledgment, forms a proof of making societal change. Brown Girls has not been working for cultural diversification and decolonization alone, either. Such other agents as the dancer-choreographer Sonya Lindfors, writer and activist Maryan Abdulkarim, Feminist Culture House, and Arts for Equality, which challenges Finnish art institutions to diversify their policies,26 are all part of the change, which spreads from the margins of the Finnish periphery not only towards the centre of the society, but inter- or trans-nationally, together with decolonizing in­ itiatives taking place elsewhere. In Finland this kind of action and activism dismantles the idea of White innocence27 and demands White people to see how profoundly racialization works in a welfare state with a self-image of a land of equality. No wonder Koko Hubara has herself been surprised by the impact of Brown Girls.28 Something has happened since she wrote in her blog: Ruskeat Tytöt (Brown Girls). They are the only two words of Finnish language that I am totally sure of. That I have ever been sure of. - - [T]hose two words have been in the internal use of my family, with my little sisters, already for years. Those two words have described me and my sisters in a more exact way than any nickname ever. - - I dare to claim that we brown girls do not walk around thinking all the time that we are brown, have a foreign background, are exotic, exciting, different. We do not think about our roots and ethnicity all the time, but quite often it feels that others do. - - There are only few of us seen in the papers. There are only few of us seen at the university. You do not see us at all among the decision makers and directors.29 Those two words are now quite widely known to refer more than just a few girls. Yeboyah – picturing different Finnishness, making new spaces of comfort In its ‘World 2021’ section, published together with The Economist, the biggest Finnish daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat listed 11 Finnish people, who, they predicted, were going to be talked about in 2021. The 24-year-old DJ and rap artist Yeboyah was the only Black person on the list. The article mentions that on her first single Broflake Yeboyah ‘shook up the macho culture of the Finnish rap scene,’ and that her visual album Elovena ‘skillfully dealt with the everyday racism, and what it means to be Finnish in the contemporary world.’30 Both expressions, ‘shaking up the macho culture’ and ‘skilfully dealing with racism’ have connections to two affective discourses: those of gender and race. They also describe the twofold tactics of Yeboyah: in her lyrics and visual representations of her music videos, she both resists gendering and sexualizing power of words and images, and imagines or pictures a different, soft world of friendship and comfort, which at the same time becomes a different representation of Finnishness. In her book Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), queer-feminist thinker Sara Ahmed writes about queer feelings. She ponders how a social ideal (of the White, middle-class, normatively heterosexual part of the population) is often represented as threatened by the mere existence of others. She writes about how compulsory heterosexuality31 ‘shapes bodies by the assumption that a body “must” orient itself towards some objects and not others.’32 In this very instance she talks about sexuality, but it is easy to broaden this notion of orientation to include ‘others’ racialized as non-White (in the previous column

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Ahmed herself mentions strangers, immigrants, and the fear of miscegenation). Like compulsory heterosexuality, compulsory Whiteness also shapes bodies and their rela­ tions to other bodies; it influences what one can do in social spaces and with others. As Ahmed formulates: ‘[N]orms surface as the surfaces of bodies; norms are a matter of impressions, or how bodies are “impressed upon” by the world, as a world made up of others.’33 It is, therefore, norms like compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory Whiteness that also affect the feeling of comfort or discomfort that bodies – and minds connected to them – feel in their social surroundings. Ahmed is interested in critical and productive friction against the public comfort provided by heteronormativity: when a queer subject encounters the comforts of het­ erosexuality, ‘they feel out of place, awkward, unsettled.’34 Discomfort is an effect of bodies ‘inhabiting spaces that do not take or “extend” their shape,’35 but this discomfort may work both ways: both normative and non-normative bodies feel it: the former as observers of ‘out-of-place bodies,’ and the latter feeling unsettled. It is precisely here that lies the possibility of transforming, queering, or colouring these spaces differently, changing the equation of comfort. While watching Yeboyah’s way of treating space in her music videos, one is affected by the way she imagines spaces where bodies othered in White-dominated environments may feel comfortable while transforming the spatial and visual experience for themselves, as well as for viewers of all colours. I argue that some of the videos provide possibilities for queering the space, and queering the ways of looking and listening, too. Yeboyah published her visual album Elovena in the summer 2019. The album consists of an intro and four pieces (Aili, Skitti, Peili, and Elovena), of which I here focus on two, Aili and Elovena. The whole album has been described in the mainstream media as ‘having shaken up’ the Finnish music scene. In an interview for the Finnish commercial media channel MTV Yeboyah describes how, even though her videos are personal and do not make any direct political statements, already the starting point is political: I just tell things the way they are. Then me and my friends, we’ve gone to my summerhouse, to my mother’s childhood home, to shoot the video. Art, however, always reflects what is happening in the society, and so this [the visual album] has hit the jackpot. – Besides, already the fact that I am a brown woman doing that in this scene [Finnish field of music] is political without me underlining it.36 Yeboyah’s mother was37 White, her father is Black, and she was born in Finland. She invited a group of her friends, many of whom come from multicultural families, and most of whom are Brown or Black, to participate in the visual narration of her videos. In Elovena, the title piece for the whole album, Yeboyah (who has been the co-writer with the director Geoffrey Erista) brings to the screen symbols that the White Finnish audience has become used to recognize and interpret as signifiers of ‘monocultural Finnishness,’ especially when represented syntagmatically together (Figure 9.1): a Finnhorse, a country landscape with fields of golden crop, certain type of wooden buildings, and even a tractor (Figure 9.2). The video begins with a close-up of Yeboyah’s own brown eye, and the picture then gradually opens showing her black hair tousled by the wind, and finally her whole body, sitting bareback on the horse, and obviously being in command of the situation. The camera pans her Black and Brown friends, standing in well-organized rows and witnessing her ride. When she starts singing the lyrics, telling about (herself as)

Something is happening in and to the margins 149

Figure 9.1 Rap-artist Yeboah riding a horse in her music video Elovena. Still image from the video. Copyright @Yeboyah.

Figure 9.2 Young Black and Brown people posing with a tractor. Still image from the music video Elovena. Copyright @Yeboyah.

Elovena, the group also starts moving around and dancing with her. The core message of the lyrics is that Elovena is a child of nature: sensual, but also attracted to knowledge, sapiosexual. The name Elovena is a direct reference to a maiden figure used for almost a hundred years (since 1927) for marketing a specific Finnish brand of oatmeal.38 The national(ist)-romantic image of Elovena maiden has become iconic in the Finnish culture. It represents a young blond woman in a national costume-like dress standing by an oat field. Now Yeboyah has adapted the image into a new visual language, that of Finns who can be also people of colour (Figure 9.1).

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The knowing looks of Yeboyah’s own eyes, and her friends’ who have been filmed posing in the garden and on the stairs of the summer house, solemnly meet the looks of the audience of the album, be they of any colour. It is interesting that besides the mainstream media having given Yeboyah credit for ‘skilfully dealing with everyday racism,’ ‘shaking up structures of power,’ being a ‘changemaker,’ and ‘the most political rapper in Finland,’39 for some people she has represented ‘appropriating Finnish cul­ ture.’40 Yeboah has talked back to this kind of response, stating that Many people do not understand that I am Finnish. They do not understand that if I make a video at my own summer place, I do not practice cultural appropriation, since I am a Finn, and I make stuff out of my own culture.41 This is not even the first time when the ‘Elovena girl’ has been re-interpreted as a Brown or Black woman. In 2006 the Swedish newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet used in its marketing an image of a Black woman posing in a picture very similar to the iconic brand image. The company producing Elovena oatmeal complained about the adap­ tation of the image, and Hufvudstadsbladet withdrew the campaign, the editor-in-chief asking, nevertheless, why this kind of picture cannot be represented by a woman of colour.42 Actually, the first Elovena was not even a blonde. The Elovena figure was first created by the artist Joel Viktor Räsänen in 1927, as a brown-haired young woman. After that the picture has been modified by the company several times: in the 1950s when the hair was presented in the same yellow colour as the oat field, 1960s, 1980s, and twice in 2010s, and latest in 2020.43 Yeboyah’s version is hence but one in a long historical continuum. Yet there is more to the videos than switching a national icon’s colour. Watching both Elovena and Aili makes me think about Sara Ahmed’s musings on comfort.44 The Brown Elovena may be seen as a postcolonial reversal of representing Finnishness. In Aili the challenging and unravelling national imagery – where there has not been space or place for Black and Brown bodies – goes even further. The way Yeboyah and her friends are imaging45 comfort and comfortability, the ability to feel comfort, may be interpreted even as a form of decolonial doing and being. This kind of performative doing with images makes it possible to produce and reproduce common and shared imaginary and shared imagining.46 It also makes an intervention to the idea of the hegemonic and normalized White communities being the only ones entitled to comfort.47 For me it looks like this way of corporeal being in the space is characterized by relaxation, serenity, and respectful enjoyment of the surroundings. In the Aili video (Figure 9.3) this is even emphasized by the group of Yeboyah and her friends lingering in the lap of nature, and in the laps of each other. The footage takes place in the middle of a recognizably Finnish forest, which the camera crops in a manner, which makes the landscape seem to be filled with the peaceful presence of Brown and Black bodies. Young people of different genders – some supposedly female, some male, some maybe nonbinary – alternately lie on the ground, as a group entangled with each other, or stand among the trees enjoying the sunshine, leaning to each other in pairs. Some of them are jamming softly to the music, and at some point, they all make up a big circle sitting down on the tussocks, holding each other’s shoulders, and swaying harmoniously. Their bodies are of different shapes and sizes, so the video also has a sense of body positivity to it. There is both unity and diversity in the group (Figure 9.3).

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Figure 9.3 Young Black and Brown people relaxing in Finnish nature. Still image from the music video Aili. Copyright @Yeboyah.

It is meaningful that the title of the video, Aili, is also the middle name of Yeboyah (Amare Aili Kuukka), as well as her maternal grandmother’s name. In the lyrics, Yeboyah addresses her namesake: Your skin is soft, your nature’s gentle, I warm to you, you are dope Gorgeous hair with healthy ends, you’re beauty inside out Your plan is clear, your moves are strong, wherever you go you turn heads, you make wonders You make me float in the air, the only thing coming out of my mouth is: wow One cannot hold you down, you’ve got the power One cannot own you, you’ve got the power You’ve got vibes, you’ve got drive, you’ve got life, you’ve got them all – Aili You make me think of agave and green tea, of yellow sea of sunflowers You are therapy when apathy takes over, you’re healing power, my own pharmacy Check out the mirror if you’re looking for a hero –– you’re my fantasy Beautiful yellow saffron, balm to the soul48 Some of the verbal and visual metaphors are drawn from nature or natural materials, and nature also surrounds the group performing in the video. Birdsong plays an essential audio role on the whole visual album. This respectful relationship to the nature and the safe spaces for Black and Brown bodies together build a gentle decoloniality into these images: unlike emphasizing commodification of bodies and environment, individualism, and separation, they bring forth interconnectedness and reciprocity. This kind of visual thinking, and I would say, kind visual thinking, comes also close to the idea of indige­ nous worldviews.49

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These are bodies that, when surrounded by Whiteness, may become objects of neg­ ative orientation; White bodies turning away from them or White people’s eyes looking to another direction50 Yeboyah’s audiovisual re-presentation leaves this possibility of negative orientation behind. People portrayed in them are now made visible as bodies enjoying their surroundings, being both playful and restful, in touch with each other and nature, being comfortable. This chapter has tried to bring to the fore that something is indeed happening, and has already happened, in the periphery called Finland, in and to the self-defined margins. The media production of Brown Girls and the music videos created by Yeboyah and her team construct new kinds of decolonial textual and visual places in the context of the North, for a long time narrated as hegemonically White. These places are safe and inhabitable for Brown and Black people. As a White feminist ally, I have read, watched, and listened to these texts and images in some of their Finnish contexts. It was my intention to invite the producers of these Black and Brown cultural texts into a dialogue. For this purpose, I quoted them at length, letting them speak for themselves and frame my interepretations. It is arguable that Brown Girls and Yeboyah have made powerful interventions into the very centre of the Finnish culture and changed the imagined and constructed per­ ipherality and marginality of that culture dramatically. This has enhanced the political agency of young Black and Brown cultural agents and practitioners at large. The change they have contributed to, has already made way for discursive, material, and corporeal spaces, which prove that they ‘exist all the time, not depending on racism and white­ ness’.51 At the same time the multiple margins have started to turn into something else, and the multiculturalization of the Finnish mediascape has made progress. Notes 1 Loftsdóttir & Jensen 2012; Ilmonen & Rossi 2019. 2 On the term see, e.g., Rastas 2012. 3 Keskinen 2020; Loftsdóttir & Jensen 2012; Keskinen et al. 2009; Ilmonen & Rossi 2019; Seikkula 2020. 4 See, e.g., Loftsdóttir & Jensen 2012. 5 Keskinen 2020, 10. 6 On the affordances and limits of postcolonial theorization, see, e.g., Gandhi 1998, Hall 2000, Doy 2000, and Tlostanova et al. 2019. 7 hooks 1989. 8 See also Tlostanova et al. 2019 and Doy 2000. 9 Koulussa ei ollut näköisiäni lapsia, saati aikuisia. Siellä ei opetettu minun historiaani. Perheeni aikuiset olivat duunareita, joten minutkin nähtiin liian usein sellaisena, arvosanoistani huoli­ matta. Televisiossa ja lehdissä oli melkein pelkästään valkoisia ihmisiä. Oli (ja on edelleen) lähes mahdoton saada tietoa siitä, kuka minä olen ja mikä minusta voi tulla. Että minusta voi tulla mitä vain. Minun oli siis kehitettävä muita taitoja ja tapoja saada oikeasti tarvitsemaani tietoa: opittava kuuntelemaan tilanteissa, jotka vaikuttivat ensisilmäyksellä siltä, ettei niissä tapahtunut mitään; opittava tarttumaan tilanteisiin, pieniin signaaleihin, ja muutettava suunnitelmaa lennossa; opittava luottamaan itseeni ja siihen, että minun tiedollani on väliä vaikkei sitä opetettaisi vielä missään. Hubara 2016. (Transl. by the author) 10 Nikunen 2013. 11 Fraser 1992. 12 Nikunen 2013. 13 Fraser 1992, 123. 14 Nikunen 2013; Husband 1996; Malik 2018. 15 Tlostanova et al. 2019, 293.

Something is happening in and to the margins 153 16 https://www.ruskeattytot.fi; See also Hubara 2017. Brown Girls may be positioned on the continuum of Brown and Black literature initiated by such authors as Umayya Abu-Hanna and Jani Toivola. However, unlike Abu-Hanna and Toivola, the collective has defined Brown people as their primary audience. 17 https://www.ruskeattytot.fi 18 https://www.ruskeattytot.fi 19 https://www.ruskeattytot.fi 20 https://www.ruskeattytot.fi/rtmedia/vapaudestajavastuusta 21 https://www.ruskeattytot.fi/rtmedia/pehmeepodcast. 22 Nikunen 2013. 23 https://www.ruskeattytot.fi 24 E.g., Lemma & Geagea 2017. 25 Nikunen 2013. 26 See Rahmati 2020. 27 On White innocence, see Wekker 2021. 28 Hubara 2017. 29 Ruskeat. Tytöt. Ne ovat ainoat kaksi suomen kielen sanaa, joista olen täysin varma. Ruskeat. Tytöt. Vaikka itse aamu olikin vähän sattumanvarainen ja epäselvä, nuo kaksi sanaa ovat olleet perheeni sisäisessä käytössä, pikkusiskojeni kesken, jo vuosia. Nuo kaksi sanaa ovat jo vuosia kuvanneet minua ja siskojani eksaktimmin kuin mikään hellittelynimi. - - Uskallan väittää, että me ruskeat tytöt emme kävele ympäriinsä ajatellen koko ajan olevamme ruskeita, ulkomaalaistaustaisia, eksoottisia, jännittäviä, erikoisia. Me emme koko ajan mieti juuriamme ja etnisyyttämme, mutta aika usein tuntuu, että muut miettivät. - - Meitä näkyy aika vähän lehdissä. Meitä näkyy aika vähän yliopistolla. Meitä ei näy ollenkaan päättäjissä ja johtajissa. Hubara 2018, 19–20, italics in the original text. (Transl. by the author.) 30 Seuraa heitä vuonna 2021. 31 On the origins of the concept, see Rich 1980. 32 Ahmed 2004, 145. 33 Ahmed 2004, 145. 34 Ahmed 2004, 148. 35 Ahmed 2004, 152. 36 Kerron vain niin kuin asiat ovat. Sitten ollaan menty mun kavereiden kanssa meidän mökille, mun äidin lapsuudenkotiin kuvaamaan toi video. Mutta taide heijastaa aina sitä, mitä tapahtuu yhteiskunnassa, niin tuo on osunut tällä hetkellä sellaiseen kohtaan. – Lisäksi pelkästään se, että olen ruskea nainen tekemässä tuota tuossa skenessä on jo poliittista, vaikka en itse sitä millään tavalla alleviivaisi. Yeboyah in Haili 2019. (Transl. by the author) 37 Photographic artist Raakel Kuukka (1955–2022). 38 Elovena; Tuominen 2020. 39 Seuraa heitä vuonna 2021; Honka 2020; Haili 2019. 40 Haili 2019. 41 Tosi monet ihmiset eivät ymmärrä, että mä olen suomalainen. He eivät ymmärrä, että jos teen mun omalla mökillä videon, niin en omi kulttuuria, koska olen suomalainen ja teen mun omasta kulttuurista juttuja. Yeboah in Haili 2019. 42 Musta Elovena-tyttö närästi Raisiota 2006. 43 Elovena.com; Tuominen 2020. 44 Ahmed 2004. 45 On the concept, see de Lauretis 1984. In this case, I refer to making a community visible through images – and producing images of and by this community. 46 De Lauretis 1984, 38. 47 Ahmed 2004. 48 Iho pehmee, luonne lempee, sulle lämpeen, oot doup hiukset upeet, latvat terveet, oot kaunis inside out pläni selkee, varmat elkeet, mihin vaan meet käännät katseet, ihmeitä teet saat mut leijaileen, suusta tulee vaan wow sua ei pysty holdaan, sullon voimaa sua ei pysty ownaan, sullon voimaa Susson vaibii, susson draivii, susson laiffii, susson kaikkii – Aili Agave ja vihree tee, se sust mieleen tulee, keltanen auringonkukkameri Oot terapiaa kun mut valtaa apatia, oot parantavaa voimaa, mun oma farmasia Tsekkaa peiliin, jos etit sankaria – oot mun fantasia Kaunista keltasta sahramia, sielulle balsamia (Transl. by the author)

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49 See e.g., Tlostanova et al. 2019; Valkonen & Valkonen 2018. 50 Ahmed 2004. 51 Hubara 2018, 25.

References Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London & New York: Routledge, 2004. de Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t. Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984. Doy, Gen. Black Visual Culture. Modernity and Postmodernity. London & New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2000. Elovena. Accessed 20 September 2023. https://elovena.com/fi/elovena Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In Habermas and The Public Sphere, edited by Craig J. Calhoun, 109–142. Boston: MIT Press, 1992. Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Haili, Aino. “Suomen poliittisimmaksi räppäriksi julistettu Yeboyah ravistelee valtarakenteita: ‘En omi kulttuuria, koska olen suomalainen’.” (Yeboyah who has been called the most political rapper in Finland shakes up the structures of power: ‘I don’t apporopriate culture because I am a Finn’) MTV Uutiset. Accessed 25 August 2019. https://www.mtvuutiset.fi/artikkeli/suomenpoliittisimmaksi-rappariksi-julistettu-yeboyah-ravistelee-valtarakenteita-monet-eivat-ymmarraetta-olen-suomalainen/7505612#gs.q2ivpf Hall, Stuart. “The Multicultural Question.” In Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruption, edited by Barnor Hesse, 209–241. London: New York: Zed Books, 2000. Hooks, Bell. Talking Back. Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press, 1989. Honka, Niina. “Rap-artisti Yeboyah kaipaa alalleen Suomessa kantaaottavuutta: ‘Perustavanlaatuinen ydin rapissa ja hiphopissa on rasisminvastaisuus.’” (Rap artist Yeboyah misses politics to her field in Finland: ‘The core of rap and hip hop is in antiracism’) Yle. Accessed 4 September 2020. https://yle. fi/uutiset/3-11528903 Hubara, Koko. “Kiitos Lily kaikesta – uusi Ruskeat Tytöt on auki.” (Thank you Lily for every­ thing – the new Brown Girls has been launched). Accessed 3 March 2017. https://www.lily.fi/ blogit/ruskeat-tytot/2017. Hubara, Koko. Ruskeat tytöt (The Brown Girls). Helsinki: Like, 2018. Hubara, Koko. “Sattumanvaraisen oppimisen taidosta.” (On the skill of haphazard learning). Accessed 2016. https://www.lily.fi/blogit/ruskeat-tytot/sattumanvaraisen-oppimisen-taidosta/ 2016. Husband, Charles. “The Right to be Understood: Conceiving the Multiethnic Public Sphere.” Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 9(2), 205–215, 1996. Ilmonen, Kaisa & Leena-Maija Rossi. “Intersectionalizing the Homogenous Commonplace: Finnish Feminist party and the Diversification of the Story of Nordic Social Coherence.” In Thinking with the Familiar in Contemporary Literature and Culture: ‘Out of the Ordinary,’ edited by Joel Kuortti, Kaisa Ilmonen, Elina Valovirta & Janne Korkka, 54–74. Leiden & Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2019. Keskinen, Suvi. “Antiracist Feminisms and the Politics of Solidarity in Neoliberal Times.” In Feminisms in the Nordic Region: Neoliberalism, Nationalism and Decolonial Critique, edited by Suvi Keskinen, Pauline Stoltz and Diana Mulinari, 201–221. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020. Keskinen, Suvi, Salla Tuori, Kuura Irni & Diana Mulinari. Complying with Colonialism. Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region. Farnham & Burlington: Ashgate, 2009.

Something is happening in and to the margins 155 Lemma, Aurora & Noora Geagea. “Radikaalista unelmoinnista.” (On radical dreaming) Ruskeat Tytöt. Accessed 9 June 2017. https://www.ruskeattytot.fi/rtmedia/radikaalistaunelmoinnista Loftsdottir, Kristín & Lars Jensen. “Introduction: Nordic Exceptionalism and the Nordic ‘Others’”. In Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: Exceptionalism, Migrant Others and National Identities, edited by Kristín Loftsdottir & Lars Jensen, 1–12. Farnham & Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. Malik, Sarita. “‘Keeping it real’: The politics of Channel 4’s multiculturalism, mainstreaming and mandates.” Screen, 48(3), 343–353, 2018. “Musta Elovena-tyttö närästi Raisiota.” (The black Elovena-girl caused heartburn to Raisio) Turun Sanomat. Accessed 20 September 2023. https://www.ts.fi/uutiset/1074147616 Nikunen, Kaarina. “Difference in Reality: Ethnic Minorities and the Boundaries of the Nation in Reality TV in Finland.” Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture, 11(4), 303–317, 2013. DOI: 10.1080/15405702.2013.838249 Rahmati, Elham. “Arts for Equ(al)ity: Cheerleading Change in the Helsinki Art Institutions.” Mustekala Kulttuurilehti. Accessed 11 December 2020. http://mustekala.info/teemanumerot/instituutiokritiikki3-2020-vol-79/arts-for-equality-cheerleading-change-in-the-helsinki-art-institutions/?fbclid= IwAR3dTR5r9UgR2yqQ9iiQnL1EVj539sXu-dHLVWWFwRWKXiVFx1btVonv-EQ Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs, 5(5) Summer, 631–660, 1980. Rastas, Anna. “Reading History through Finnish exceptionalism.” In Kristin Loftsdottir & Lars Jensen (Eds.). Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region: Exceptionalism, Migrant others and National Identities. London & New York: Routledge, 2012, 89–103. Ruskeat, Tytöt. Accessed 20 Sptember 2023. https://www.ruskeattytot.fi Seikkula, Minna. Different Anriracisms: Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Perspectives on Activist and NGO Discussions in Finland. Academic dissertation. Publications of the Faculty of Social Sciences 172 (2020). Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2020. “Seuraa heitä vuonna 2021. HS kokosi listan eri alojen henkilöistä, joista tullaan puhumaan vuonna 2021.” (Follow them on 2021. HS put together a list on people in different professions, who are going to be talked about in 2021). Accessed 20 September 2023. https://www.hs.fi/ talous/art-2000007686382.html Tlostanova, Madina, Suruchi Thapar-Björkert & Ina Knobblock. “Do We Need Decolonial Feminism in Sweden?” NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 27(4), 290–295, 2019. 10.1080/08038740.2019.1641552 Tuominen, Petra. “Legendaarisiin kaurapaketteihin tulossa historiallinen muutos – tiedätkö mitä nimi Elovena oikeasti tarkoittaa?” (The legendary oatmeal packages will go thorugh a historical change – do you know what the name Elovena really means?) MTV Uutiset. Accessed 15 January 2020. https://www.mtvuutiset.fi/makuja/artikkeli/legendaarisiin-kaurapaketteihin-tulossa-historiallinenmuutos-tiedatko-mita-elovenan-nimi-oikeasti-tarkoittaa/7691622#gs.pjbc5i Valkonen, Jarno & Valkonen, Sanna Viidon Sieiddit – saamelaisen luontosuhteen uudet mitta­ suhteet (Viidon Sieiddit –The new proportions of the Samí relationship to nature). Rovaniemi: Kustannus Puntsi, 2018. Wekker, Gloria. 2021. White Innocence: race and cherished self-narratives in the Netherlands. Keynote lecture 12.1.2021 at the ETMU 2021 Nordic Migration Research Conference, 11-14 January 2021, Online/University of Helsinki. Unpublished.

10

Touching gestures An affective reading of a photograph of asylum seekers Mari Mäkiranta and Eija Timonen

Photographer Laura Böök has followed the lives of Congolese families who moved to Pudasjärvi, a small town in northern Finland. Her experiences have inspired her to create Walking on Rivers/Jokia kulkien,1 a series of photographs depicting people who ended up in northern Finland after almost 15 years in refugee camps. Their vivid memories of the mighty Congo River have faded, yielding images of the now more familiar Ii, a waterway melted in summer and stilled by ice in winter. Böök’s work presents the migratory journey of individual Congolese people and families, one spanning Europe from its southern end to its northern edge in Finland. The visual narratives of the families are not merely images of private lives, but they reflect the fates of many other refugees and asylum-seekers who find themselves in similar circumstances. There have been several exhibitions dealing with the refugee and migrant experience in Finland. One of them was Pakolainen, evakko, ihminen/Refugee, evacuee, human at the National Museum in Helsinki in 2016. The photographs tell the story of emigrants from Europe to North America and refugees fleeing Russia after the Revolution. Also featured in the exhibition are images of children evacuated to Sweden during the Lapland War (1944–1945) and the lives of refugees from Chile, Somalia, and many other nations who have found a new home in Finland.2 Media artists Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts have created works dealing with the meanings of refugee status and contributed to the debate on nationality and national identities.3 For example, in Maamme, Rainio and Roberts bring together people with different cultural backgrounds to sing the national anthem of their new homeland and highlight that Finland is home to many cultures. What one sees in the previous artwork are structural changes that have affected how and where people have lived, the clash of the new and the old, ‘next-door neighbours’ in another country just across the border, and the socioeconomic problems and war impacting the North. Böök’s images add a new dimension to these above-mentioned ways of seeing North. The people we see in her work embody multiple marginalities: women, children, and refugees who have been photographed by a young woman in peripheral, remote, and rural communities. Lately, there have also been several international photography exhibitions related to refugees and migrants, such as Through the Lens of a Refugee – Travelling Photo Exhibition Raises Awareness about Life as Refugees (2020),4 The Dreams We Carry (2021),5 and The Healing Power of Self-Expression: Photography by Female Refugee Artists (2022)6. In addition, art galleries have been founded focusing on the modern refugee experience to provide a platform for refugee artists, such as the Refugee Eye Gallery. In these cases, the refugees have photographed their lives by themselves, DOI: 10.4324/9781003348269-14

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whereas in Böök’s project the photographer has participated in Congolese asylum seekers’ lives and seen them through her lens. After looking at Walking on Rivers, scrutinizing the detail, and querying its meanings, we were particularly moved by one image (Figure 10.1). At the centre of the picture are two Congolese women who have come to a little town in northern Finland as asylum seekers. When looking at the Böök’s photographs, we cannot avoid the fact that millions of Congolese died during the genocidal and colonial period at the turn of the 20th century. The government of Belgium and Leopold abused and terrorisedterrorized the Congolese people during his reign and created inhumane conditions in the Congo. One of the two women in the picture is dressed in a Congolese outfit and sandals; the other is wearing a jacket and winter shoes. Their choice of clothing highlights cultural differences relating to place and individuals’ habits. A winter coat is associated with the north, whereas a colourful summer outfit seems out of place where winter is near. One can well imagine that the snow in the photograph is the first snowfall: it is no more than a dusting, and yellow autumn leaves can still be seen on some of the trees and bushes. The women are standing near each other in the middle of an empty road; they are practically leaning on each other. The road stretches out behind them, empty, van­ ishing into a single point on the horizon. The women’s clothing, both the black jacket and the yellow dress, stand out clearly against the background – a sky washed grey and trees white with the fresh snow. The quiet northern highway and Congolese women are a combination we have not encountered often in our daily lives in the north. The landscape in the image and the snow-covered road that emerges behind them anchor the new re­ sidents to the north and to an environment we know inside out. The way in which the women have been situated in the photograph, the road continuing on behind them and

Figure 10.1 Walking on Rivers / Jokia kulkien. Photo @Laura Böök (2016).

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the northern Finnish forest at once both separate and merge them into the backdrop, archetypical Pudasjärvi. Pudasjärvi has a population of 8,500, and it is exceptional in one respect: it set itself a goal of getting new residents by 2018, one-tenth of whom would preferably have an immigrant background. The town was advertised as being a travel destination in Ostrobothnia featuring natural beauty, with Lapland just over the town line going north. Its image and appeal are derived from its multicultural character, natural resources, tourism, and proximity to northern Finland’s most populous city, Oulu. Despite the town’s ambitious goals, most of the refugees who settled there eventually moved away in search of work, educational opportunities, and better social networks. Most of the asylum seekers who moved there have been Pentecostalists, and it is the Pentecostal Church, rather than the natural surroundings and tourism, that has proven instrumental in bringing the migrant community together.7 In public forums, immi­ grants and refugees often become defined primarily as representatives of a particular religion, and discussion of their issues fails to recognize the manifold intersections of different religions, gender, class, race, or nationalities.8 When looking at the photograph, we become aware of how national identity, the Finnish landscape, and Western whiteness are produced in relation to racialized, nonWhite others.9 Migration from Africa to Europe has a colonialist history. Viewing people who have moved from Central Africa to Finland as hierarchically other can reproduce colonialist signification.10 Nordic countries have been considered homoge­ neous, White territories.11 This has caused racism against other ethnic minorities who have lived and live in Finland.12 Moreover, Whiteness in the Nordic countries as well as in Finland is today in flux due to the increased mobility and mobilization of domestic minorities like the Sámi, Jews, and Roma.13 We could say that Congolese women, whom we see in the photograph, now belong to this tradition of Finnish minorities. The photograph invites us to undertake an affective reading and engage in a sensorycorporeal dialogue with the women. What we see are the women and their gazes; the intertwined differences and sameness resonate in our bodies. The photograph also offers an enticing opportunity to deconstruct the view of the world based on dualisms, to rise above this and strive for change, progress, and a non-essentializing approach to the world.14 The image prompts us to reflect on being Finnish – Finnishness – in historical terms, to see it as a constantly unfinished process shaped in interaction with other cul­ tures.15 In our reading of the picture, we see an interplay between the differences, power positions, sameness, and otherness that are intertwined with gender, ethnicity, race, and cultural background. Our focus on the affective is reflected as an approach to reading the photograph that combines emotion, experientiality, and dialogues. Our theoretical and methodological inspiration comes from affect theories on em­ bodiment and visual media, as well as from the contributions of art research to the development of new materialist thinking.16 Inspired by art research and materialaffective approaches, we bring theorizing on sensuousness and affectivity to the field of visual studies. In this chapter we ask, what kinds of dialogues and affective reading does the image bring out? What kind of method can be developed in two researchers’ col­ laboration and meetings with the representation of asylum-seeking women?17 Affective and multisensory approaches In our reading of the photograph, we sought to show the dimensions of affectivity, embodiment, visuality, and sensuousness present in our reading. Our analysis of

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emotions and sensuousness is closely related to materiality – to the recognition by materiality that is ultimately grounded in material substance, such as embodiment, place, even the material basis of the photograph. This kind of ontological understanding of the materiality can never be reduced to pure linguistic performance. The photograph of the two women on a snowy road forms bodily vibrations in us, brings out aural images and memories that are difficult to verbalize or are ineffable. In this sense, our thinking runs parallel to that of materialist feminism18 and is congruent with the ontological turn reaching to deconstruct cultural dualisms such as self and other, south, and north, place and displacement, peripheries and central. The viewers of the photograph – the two of us – are White women from northern Finland, privileged in many ways wherever we might go around the globe. We have lived in both urban and rural environments in Finland that have enjoyed peace. We have had the benefit of free education and parental leave. Before Covid-19, we had the chance to travel essentially anywhere in the world – of our own free will. In foreign countries, we are treated and greeted as tourists, travellers, foreign workers, or Finn expats. One of us is a grandmother, and the other is the mother of two school-aged girls. We both practice art and research and are photographers. In embarking on an affective and multisensory reading of the image, we do not try to account for the women’s experiences. Rather, our aim is to draw out the questions the photograph raises in us as well as the cultural encounters, sense of displacement, and crossing borders that emerge. The picture of the Congolese women appears as a fluid image, one constantly taking on new shapes, rather than as a static and foundational artefact. We engage in a dialogue and negotiation to ponder who belongs in a Finnish landscape and who is portrayed as being part of one. Images showing people in landscapes serve to construct a people’s and nation’s values, affects, and meanings. These meanings are not, however, immutable; they are objects of constant negotiation and struggle. In what follows we use the ex­ pression ‘Congolese’ women to refer to the two women in the photograph and write ‘Finnishness,’ using the quotation marks to emphasize the constructed and fluid nature of nationality. The picture of the women does not stand sharp and clear cut before our gaze but is constantly in flux and is sensorially interpreted. The photograph as a site for sensory experiences The visual has typically been considered the primary element in reading a photograph; however, the eye is constantly working in concert with the other senses. The upshot of this is that looking at something is an aspect of our multisensory existence and en­ gagement as human beings. The interaction of the senses reinforces and structures how we perceive reality and our attachment to place, landscape, and people. Sensory ex­ periences interact not only with one another but with memories, emotions and thoughts, a familiar scent may evoke memories and link them to the here and now. Our social and cultural background also affects our sensory perceptions. Sensing always entails choice and is always corporeal. Our bodies are the instrument we use to direct our senses, and we focus our observations in keeping with the models our culture has instilled in us. Thus, when we look at an image, our personal experiential knowledge and cultural background are present in the act of interpreting it. The collaboration of the senses acts to open the world around us and that the convergence of different sensory experiences gives rise to novel interpretations of what we have experienced and what we have seen in the past.

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The Böök’s photograph has a number of interpretive frames. The outermost is the natural environment, which seems to extend far beyond what we see in the picture and beyond the women. The next frame consists of houses in the background and the highway running through the town, with tyre tracks in the freshly fallen snow; the tracks impart a sign of motion, technology and the other people living in the town. In the centre of the image, the most private frame, is the interpersonal, intimate space formed by the women, which has been made public and shared in being photographed. The women’s mutual space is defined by the viewpoint of the photographer, whose gaze we follow when we look at them. The framed layers of the image evoke different corporal practices. In assimilating our cultural background, nature is associated with a calm and relaxed pace, cars with quick and effortless mobility, and dialogic encounters with intense spatial proximity to others. The spatial layers of the photograph are reflected accordingly in our reading of the photograph, as well as in our dialogue. Emotions are spatial; they are spaces that open and close within us and have a physiological and embodied basis.19 Materially oriented research emphasizes space as an enabler and guide to human activity. No space or place manifests itself in us stagnant and detached from its environment but as part of a temporal continuum.20 The highway seen in the image of a small town getting smaller is a scene that exudes peace and quiet. Pudasjärvi is a town with a declining population; those still living in the community tend to be older. It is the road in such a community that the women have chosen as the location in which to pose, have their picture taken, and be interpreted. Here, on a road running through a town in decline, they represent new residents. On the one hand, the image prompts us to reflect on how women bring new life into a community, adding to the hum of daily work and play, and injecting fresh routines. On the other hand, the image gives us pause to consider how constraining our interpretive frame is. Do we see the women and their culture as a commodity, one we are happy to ‘buy’ when it suits our needs, enriching ‘Finnish’ culture? Why have the women ended up in a shrinking com­ munity? Is it because they represent the working-age women it is so desperately looking for? Or is the question about Finland’s immigration policy to settle asylum seekers in different parts of Finland? The picture makes us ponder what kinds of human interaction we can expect between new and old residents: Are these kinds of encounters between locals, new residents, and asylum seekers always more complex than we might expect? The auditory image evoked by the photograph is dynamic and full of contrasts. The thin cover of snow muffles the naturally muted sounds of the quiet town and its forests. The highway, too, is still. As people have moved away, their sounds and voices have gone with them; they are now heard in the cities where they study, play, and work. The defining element in the image is the silence of the surroundings: it is almost as if the background pulse of the culture, technology, and economy of this little northern Finnish town is being played sordino, with a mute. With this all-embracing soundscape, the women, too, exude a tranquillity. Might the reason for this be that a tranquil environ­ ment makes a people aware of their solitude and of their oneness with the space they are in? Yet, the silence, too, is challenged. In our sensorial imaginations the women embody sounds and voices from distant. They talk in a language we do not understand. The women bespeak years spent in a refugee camp and the cacophonous, in part chaotic, din around them there. In the picture, the regular, cyclical rhythm heard in the sounds of nature meets the non-repetitive rhythms we associate with the women.21 The auditory worlds of the image vary depending on what we fix our attention on. This challenges our assumption of silence as an integral to the northern Finnish landscape.

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The image also evokes smells. The first snow of winter brings forth the pleasant smell of wet earth; the frosty nights to come will gradually snuff out the smells – until the following spring restores them. Perhaps the deserted, abandoned houses in and near the town all smell stuffy now, overcome by different mixtures of mould and rot. The house in the picture, very much alive, is filled with the sweet smell of food and home. The image itself is dripping with moisture and the anticipation of rain or snow. The earth sends up the heady smells of autumn from under the first snow. In the offing, but unseen, are the wintry days and nights to come, when the nose is treated to the sharp cold as well as smoke from cozy chimneys and, occasionally, exhaust from the highway. Depending on the weather – high pressure or low – it either rises into the clear air or hugs the highway and floods the senses of those on it. Our senses smell something opposite than the smell of first snow when we look at the woman in the yellow summerlike dress. The younger woman’s clothes bear smells familiar to us from commercial textiles. Smell and taste have been considered the senses least bound to place.22 The photograph conveys physical sensations of warmth as well as cold. Neither of the women is wearing gloves. The one wearing a dress with a deep neckline and short sleeves and sandals on her feet does not seem to mind the snow between her toes or the cold on her bare arms. Neither the way the woman is standing nor the expression on her face gives any indication that she is cold or sensitive to the cold. The picture was taken in a matter of seconds, and the weather was mild for winter. Her sandals and bare toes also evoke an image of the ground, giving off heat that keeps her feet warm. It is as though what she is wearing on her feet clearly has no place in the landscape in the photograph. Then again, the woman’s outfit tells us she has planned what she is going to wear down to the last detail. The details of the picture refer to the concept of autobiographical materiality that is often condensed into objects that convey information about one’s own background, such as family, childhood, and place of residence. In their research, Kajander and Koskinen-Koivisto23 say that emotions, moods, and affectivity relate to everyday objects. The idea assumes that objects accompany people at different stages of life, maintain existing identities, and enable attachment to a new environment. This is exactly what we see in the picture of a person’s clothing. The woman in the middle of the picture looking straight at us communicates, ‘These are my clothes, my background, my aesthetics and my home.’ The person in the picture wants to be seen dressed in this way as the subject of her own life. This is what evokes in us the idea of the coexistence of different types of cultural codes in Finland. When winter comes, light gets scarce in the north. The sun is up for just a few hours. The photograph was clearly taken precisely during one of these brief moments, as the image suggests that the overall light is blue grey. What natural light there is comes fil­ tered through a thin layer of clouds. At the same time additional light has been focused on the woman in yellow, creating a tension between the woman and the backdrop. Even the red of the house by the road is subdued. In contrast, the yellow birch leaves, and the woman’s dress radiate warmth; these provide a stark contrast to the overall tone of the picture. Of these two splashes of colour, one is a product of nature, the other a human creation. The colourful yellow dress stands in contrast to the black outfit of the woman standing next to its wearer. The light establishes a tension between the little town and the women. It also creates a contrast between the women. It highlights the woman in the yellow dress, in particular the line to the right of her neck and her right shoulder and casts a shadow on the right side of the smaller woman in the dark clothes. The shadow adds to the dramatic effect of the black outfit. Here we can see how light can tell a story

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in an image. Black slightly challenges yellow. At the same time, the colours become linked to the women’s strength and determination. As much as colour, the lighting in a photograph can determine what kinds of meanings and atmospheres the photographer wants to create. In the north, we are used to having a cray and flat light during the darkest winter and autumn seasons. In the picture, the light is not harsh or bright; instead, we sense the delicate light of an evening. Light creates a certain kind of materiality in the picture, placing these women into the environments and weather conditions familiar for us. In this sense, our approach and way of multisensing the photograph emerges within the framework of ‘new’ materialist thinking. A new kind of turn has been experienced in cultural research, in which sensory experiences and affects related to objects have been raised alongside representations. As a result, objects and environments have risen to a new role as actors influencing our ex­ periences. Non-linguistic ways of knowing and affection have become the focus of research. This affective turn can be seen in our study by sensing photographs as objects that impact our experiences. Not only do photographs represent, reflect, or represent something, but they also affect us differently in their existence and materiality. Photographs, like other objects, do not convey cultural meanings and twists but par­ ticipate in the construction of meanings as active parts and actors.24 As two photographers, we start to think about the composition and poses of the women and how they have been portrayed and made visible to others. Would the poses and compositions be different if the women were from Ukraine? In 2022 in Finland, the atmosphere towards Ukrainian refugees, women, and children has been completely different from the atmosphere towards refugees from Iraq and Africa in 2015 or earlier. This atmosphere is difficult to prove in the way a viewer senses and feels it. However, the atmosphere of the photograph is always tied to depicted people, places, things, and objects. The atmosphere brings together different materials, intangible, social, and affective things that produce different emotions. Atmosphere is also social, and it can be shared and understood together with other people. At the same time, people may experience atmosphere in different ways, as the associated experience of materiality is tied to past experiences and memories.25 In addition to objects, atmosphere is affected by other material factors, such as a sense of lighting or imaginary smells or air temperatures in the photograph. In such a con­ struction, the affective and the representative are present simultaneously. Affective resonance in a photograph In the work of Sara Ahmed,26 affect is associated not only with corporeality and ex­ perientiality but also with emotion. Unlike emotion, affect is not limited to the body but is located in the meeting of two or more material – corporeal subjects, a lived place, a community, and social agents. We define affectivity as an unanticipated and often sur­ prising emotional intensity that acts as a catalyst shaping the relationships between and meanings associated with people, environments, and places. We conceive of affect as a corporal emotional effect that is influenced by bodily experience and related to culture and disallowed meanings.27 An affect is not simply born of an individual’s body and experience, but through encounters between two or more materially embodied subjects in a lived place and community. Following Elizabeth Grosz28, the photograph of the women can be understood as an affective art form, for it resonates directly in our bodies, much like music. The resonances

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and sensory experiences that the photograph calls forth couple us corporeally and immanently to one another, not only as interpreters of the image but also in relation to the women we are looking at29: the affective state created by the photograph is a cog­ nitive, emotional, and highly sensory one.30 Affects can be placed in the interfaces of experiences, relationships, humans, and objects. Affectivity is experientiality, the intensity between artworks and the impression of something. At the heart of the vision is the idea of the relationship of all things and artworks related to each other and to their environment.31 Affectivity can also be an encounter and the formation of meaning.32 We embrace Sihvonen and Stepanova’s33 idea of the affective circle, a concept describing the various phenomena of movement, emotional upliftment, emotional transmissions, and sensitive influence that arise in different art forms and artwork. We engage in a polyphonic dialogue with a photograph in which all the voices par­ ticipate in the construction of meaning. Empathy, imagination, and bodily resonance play a central role in this dialogue. When we look at the photograph, the women leaning on one another gently and the expressions on their faces and slightly bent arms, we can see that their body language conveys not only pride and seriousness, but melancholy as well. Their closeness to one another strikes the viewer as a touching gesture. It seems that they are weighed down by their shared history, shared life as refugees, and the uncer­ tainty that goes with building a new life in a foreign country. Looking at them prompts a number of questions: How did they feel when they had to leave their homes? Is it homesickness that has them leaning on one another? What role do Western countries play, and what responsibilities do they have where refugee issues are concerned? What kinds of historical, economic, and political crises have forced refugees and asylum seekers to flee their native lands34? When we sense in the image of the women a longing for something lost and left behind, we realize that we are making assumptions that one’s ‘home’ is relatively fixed and unchanging. Making a home is arguably one of the most universal and, at the same time, social, cultural, and place-specific processes that characterize human life. The latent tension therein between the universal and the particular, or between the general and the contextual, becomes all the more evident when home is made under conditions of dis­ placement, whether this be forced, chosen, or the result of changing climates, landscapes, global geopolitical, and economic conditions or population demographics35. Visual artist and researcher Minna Rainio36 has pointed out that the relationship that migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees have with the concept of home does not necessarily entail the elements of belonging there and longing for it when it is gone. In other words, home need not be understood as an immutable, primary, and permanent state of affairs or as a place that an asylum-seeker has left behind and where he or she automatically belongs. Rather, home and a desire to find a home elsewhere, such as a small northern Finnish town, can be seen as a goal and part of what a person thinks of when they speak of ‘home.’ Seen in this light, the mood in the photograph changes. The expressions and gestures of the women begin to suggest a determination: they are standing in the middle of a road, as if saying, ‘We are going to make this space our home.’ Rainio describes this state of desires and wants as a performance of nationality. The women in the picture can be seen both as Finns and as outsiders who have had many homes and have been attached to a range of different places. At the same time, the photograph reminds us that immigrants and refugees are hardly a new phenom­ enon historically. The mass migration of entire nations has been part of human history

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throughout the globe and for centuries. In fact, Finland has seen extensive internal migration ever since the wars; it continues to this day, encompassing evacuees, urbanization, and pressures on people to settle in other parts of the country. Moreover, in the last hundred years, many Finns have left their homes and emigrated to Sweden and North America, among other places. Finding a place in the northern landscape Northernness has a special place of its own in Finnish national imaginary, where it typi­ cally evokes the peace and quiet to be found in nature as well as remoteness.37 In the photograph northern Finland and Pudasjärvi find a place in the centre and in the periphery of the national landscape. In such a location, where most of the people are White, dif­ ference is marginalized as well as foregrounded.38 Hasn’t our reading done just that – marginalized and foregrounded the women in the picture? Haven’t we, in the process, reinforced the meanings portraying the North as an exotic periphery? Do the women bear a multiple burden of marginalities in being from an African country, living in northern Finland, being refugees and non-White, and exemplifying the immigrant woman? In Finland, the ‘immigrant woman’ is praised for her being different, yet she is also a figure whose gender, ‘African culture,’ and refugee background are deprecated.39 It is likely that in adjusting to life in northern Finland the women have encountered othering and racism, with people failing to identify them as Finns, discriminating against them, and labelling them.40 In finding a place for themselves in the northern Finnish landscape, the women pose as objects of our gaze, a gaze marked by curiosity, sympathy, uncertainty, and guilt. When we look at the image, we must let the women look back at us, let them cross the boundary between self and other, north and south, and subject and object. Their stance, their frontal pose, and the expressions on their faces are deliberate acts on their part: they know that in agreeing to be photographed they will be placing themselves under an other’s gaze and power to define. In the photograph, it is the women who determine how they wish to appear in the picture, the culture, and the ‘Finnish’ landscape. Perhaps, in taking the picture Böök, too, is trying to challenge the subject-object and centre-periphery dichotomies. The production of the image establishes a critical distance from an individual-centred interpretation. Böök’s approach to observing the environ­ ment where the women live – what we term here an ethnographic and documentarian approach – also sets her apart from those who would observe the power relations from afar. When the photographer was creating her images, she worked among the women materially and physically in the very location – Pudasjärvi – where the women live their lives day in and day out. Böök adjusted to their worlds and was present as a corporeal subject when they were photographed; she produced images and meanings relating to ‘Finnishness’ in the relationships and communities of both the people of Pudasjärvi and the women who had moved there. Towards the affective reading method and challenging assumptions The photograph of the women has challenged our assumptions, rooted in ‘Finnishness,’ regarding the connection between people and nature, the quiet and monotony of little towns, and who is presented as being part of daily life in northern Finland. The image has also broadened our understanding of nationality and how people are included in and excluded from this category. In examining the photograph, we have become conscious of

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the entrenched and marginalizing ways in which Finnish culture would have us look at ‘the immigrant woman’ and ‘Finnishness in the North.’ The photograph has also told us a story that we are very rarely party to. The women have become visible in the northern Finnish landscape. In the process they have enabled us to articulate our thoughts. Perhaps more than telling us about ‘foreign ways’ the photograph has revealed to us our conventional and emotional conceptions of nationality, landscape, and those who occupy that landscape. We must ask ourselves time and again what right we have to put forward interpretations of this photograph. Have we ultimately succeeded in reaching the point where we can see the women as citizens who have the same needs as we have to belong, participate, and decide their own course? Can we imagine a ‘Finnishness’ with a diversity of places, landscapes, and homes bridging national borders? Or is it the case that our nationality and that of the women in the photograph is being constantly re­ shaped, and we think about ourselves and others in many different landscapes and interactive relationships? Nationalities, places, and landscapes in the picture – and in us – are in constant motion, in flux. The contours of nationality have shifted as we have applied senses in turn; the boundaries are never quite the same, as we borrow from the familiar and unfamiliar, imagining and interpreting. In this light, we can no longer see ‘Finnishness’ as confined to a particular place, landscape, or culture. Rather, it is attached to a wide variety of material, discursive, and sensory realities. The image of the women proffers a ‘Finnishness’ that embraces different cultures and seeks to divorce itself from an othering gaze. The image also represents a step forward towards changing ways of discussing and interpreting nationality, landscape, and peripheries. When we look at the photograph in front of us, we are inviting the women to become part of the constantly shifting northern Finnish land­ scape. Asking what meanings, we associate with the women in the photograph gives us pause – or should – to consider how they see us and how they wish to be seen. Our affective reading method has four stages: first, we analyse the photograph in the framework of photographic art; second, we pay attention to power positions and aspects of gender, ethnicity, race, and cultural background, both represented in the photograph and in us as interpretants. The next step is to read the photograph from a multisensory perspective, considering the senses, experiences, and feelings the photographs evoke. This creates a close relationship and a detailed understanding of the content and the ways of seeing and sensing the photograph. The last aspect of the affective method is to stretch towards the deconstruction of cultural dichotomies and hierarchies. By sensing, feeling, challenging and recognizing our own assumptions and fixed cultural meanings, we may create a new kind of understanding of ‘others’ and self. Through multisensory reading and affective encountering, it is possible to open a multivocal dialogue between the interpretants, photography work, and depicted people and places. The affective method requires possibilities to share experiences, understand others and oneself, and have both a sensitive and critical approach to the cultural differences and dichotomies the photographs carry. Notes 1 2 3 4

Böök 2016. Nisula 2016. Rainio 2015, 19–21; 133–153. https://www.caritas.eu/photo-exhibition-refugees/

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5 https://migrants-refugees.va/2021/11/12/the-dreams-we-carry-photo-exhibition-caritasalbania/ 6 https://global.upenn.edu/perryworldhouse/event/healing-power-self-expression-photographyfemale-refugee-artists 7 Rauhala 2016. 8 Seppälä 2017. 9 See, Mulinari et al. 2009, 3–4. 10 Isotalo 2016, 8. 11 Lundström & Teitelbaum 2017. 12 Puuronen 2011. 13 Lundström & Teitelbaum 2017, 151. 14 See, Irni & Kyrölä 2016, 5–7; Kontturi 2012, 13–31. 15 See, Lehtonen 2004, 9–15. 16 See, Ahmed 2004, 2008; Guttorm 2014; Hongisto 2015; Kontturi 2012. 17 Mäkiranta & Timonen 2017. In our earlier research we have analysed the same artwork from a multisensory perspective. The research was published in Finnish in Kalevala Society’s Yearbook for Finland’s 100 years of independence. However, in this chapter we aim at shifting our perspective more on affective and ‘new’ materialist thinking and emphasizing the meth­ odological development of reading images. 18 See e.g., Groz 2006. 19 Ahmed 2018. 20 Kalla 2014, 145; Shotter 2013, 33. 21 See, Lefebvre 2004, 8. 22 See, Lehtinen 2015, 132. 23 Kajander & Koskinen-Koivisto 2021, 354–355. 24 Hoskins 2006; Robb 2010. 25 Pink 2014, 353–354. 26 Ahmed 2004. 27 Ahmed 2004, 2008; Probyn 2005; Sobchack 2004. 28 Grosz 2006. 29 See, Kontturi & Taira 2007, 45. 30 Marks 2000, xiv–xvi. 31 Deleuze & Guattari 1987. 32 Wetherell 2012, 4. 33 Sihvonen & Stepanova 2020. 34 Massey 2008, 24. 35 Beeckmans, Singh & Gola 2022, 11. 36 Rainio 2015, 128–131. 37 Häyrynen 2005. 38 Ahmed 2007, 159. 39 Isotalo 2016, 17. 40 See, Ahmed 2000, 30.

References Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters. Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge, 2000. Ahmed, Sara. Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. London: Routledge, 2004/2018. Ahmed, Sara. ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’. Feminist Theory 8(2), 149–168, 2007. Ahmed, Sara. ’Imaginary prohibitions. Some preliminary remarks on the founding gestures of the “new materialism”’. European Journal of Women’s Studies 15(1), 23–39, 2008. Beeckmans, Luce, Singh, Ashika & Gola, Alessandra. ‘Introduction. Rethinking the Intersection of Home and Displacement from a Spatial Perspective’ In Making Home(s) in Displacement Critical Reflections on a Spatial Practice, edited by Beeckmans, Luce, Singh, Ashika & Gola, Alessandra, 11–42. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022.

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Böök, Laura. Walking on Rivers. URL http://cargocollective.com/laurabook/Walking-on-Rivers, 2016. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1987. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels. Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Guttorm, Hanna. Sommitelmia ja kiepsahduksia: Nomadisia kirjoituksia tutkimuksen tulemisesta (ja käsityön sukupuolisopimuksesta). Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2014. Hongisto, Ilona. Soul of the Documentary. Framing, Expression, Ethics. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Hoskins, Janet. Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives. New York: Routledge, 1998/2006. Häyrynen, Maunu. Kuvitettu maa: Suomen kansallisten maisemakuvastojen rakentuminen. Helsinki: SKS, 2005. Irni, Sari & Kyrölä, Katariina.‘Feministiset sommitelmat, uusmaterialistiset politiikat ja äärimmäisyyksien materiat’. Sukupuolentutkimus – Genusforskning, 29(3), 3–9, 2016. Isotalo, Anu. ‘Rasismi kaupunkitilassa. Tilallinen valkoisuusnormi ja somaliataustaisten naisten vastarinta’. Sukupuolentutkimus – Genusforskning, 29(4), 7–21, 2016. Kajander, Anna & Koskinen-Koivisto, Eerika. ‘Aistikokemukset ja affektiivisuus arjen materi­ aalisen kulttuurin tutkimuksessa’. In Paradigma, edited by Hämäläinen, Niina. & Kauppi, Petja., 350–365. Helsinki: SKS, 2021. Kalla, Marjaana. Käännöksiä Maisema, kasvot ja esittäminen valokuvassa. Helsinki: Aalto Photo Books Musta Taide, 2014. Kontturi, Katve-Kaisa. Following the Flows of Process: A New Materialist Account of Comtemporary Art. Turku: University of Turku, 2012. Kontturi, Katve-Kaisa & Taira, Teemu. ‘Affekti. Käsitteen säikeet, keskustelun lonkerot’. Tampere: Niin & Näin 2, pp. 43–45, 2007. Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Translated by Elden, Stuart & Moore, Gerald, London & New York: Continuum, 2004. Lehtinen, Sanna. Excursions into Everyday Spaces: Mapping Aesthetic Potentiality of Urban Environments through Preanesthetic Sensitivities. Aesthetics. Department of Philosophy, History, Culture, and Art Studies. Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2015. Lehtonen, Mikko. ‘Johdanto: Säiliöstä suhdekimppuun’, In Suomi toisin sanoin, edited by Lehtonen, Mikko, Löytty, Olli & Ruuska, Petri, 9–27. Tampere: Vastapaino, 2004. Lundström, Catrin & Teitelbaum, Benjamin Raphael. Nordic Whiteness: An Introduction. Scandinavian Studies 89(2), 151−158, 2017. Marks, Laura U. Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2000. Massey, Doreen. For Space. Milton Keynes: The Open University, 2008. Mulinari, Diana, Keskinen, Suvi, Irni, Sari & Tuori, Salla. ‘Introduction. Postcolonialism and the Nordic Models of Welfare and Gender’ In Complying with Colonialism. Gender, Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region, edited by Keskinen, Suvi, Tuori, Salla, Irni, Sari & Mulinari, Diana, 1–18. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Mäkiranta, Mari & Timonen, Eija. ‘Kongolais-suomalaiset naiset ja me. Laura Böökin valokuvan moniaistinen ja affektiivinen luenta’ In Näkyväksi sepitetty maa: näkökulmia Suomen visuali­ sointiin, edited by Mäkiranta, Mari, Piela, Ulla & Timonen, Eija, 186–106. Helsinki: SKS, 2017. Nisula, Katri. Kuvat kertovat pakolaisuuden historian Suomessa. URL http://sverigesradio.se/sida/ artikel.aspx?programid=185&artikel=6337698, 2016. Pink, Sarah. Doing Sensory Ethnography. Second Edition. London: Sage, 2014. Probyn, Elspeth. Blush. Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Puuronen, Vesa. Rasistinen Suomi. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2011. Rainio, Minna. Globalisaation varjoisat huoneet. Kuulumisen ja ulossulkemisen tilat rajanylityksiä käsittelevissä liikkuvan kuvan installaatioissa. Rovaniemi: Lapin yliopistopaino, 2015.

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Rauhala, Tiina. ‘Laura Böök: Walking on the Rivers’. In Pvf. Poliittisen valokuvan festivaalilehti. https://pvf.fi/pvf-lehti-2016/laura-book-walking-on-rivers/, 2016. Robb, John. ‘Beyond Agency’. World Archaeology 42(4), pp. 493–520, 2010. Seppälä, Tiina. ‘Naiset, aktivismi ja feministinen solidaarisuus’. Politiikasta. Ajankohtainen ja ajaton tiedeverkkolehti. https://politiikasta.fi/naiset-aktivismi-ja-feministinen-solidaarisuus/, 2017. Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Shotter, John. ‘Reflections on Sociomateriality and Dialogicality in Organisation Studies: From “Inter-” to “Intra-Thinking” … in Performing Practices’ In How Matter Matters. Objects, Artifacts and Materiality in Organizational Studies, edited by Carlile, P.R., Nicoline, D., Langley, A. & Tsoukas, H., 32–58. Oxford University Press, 2013. Sihvonen, Viliina & Stepanova, Eila. ‘Language, Music and Emotion in Lament Poetry: The Embodiment and Performativity of Emotions in Karelian Laments’ In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion, edited by Pritzker, Sonya E., Fenigsen, Janina & Wilce, James M., 203–222. London & New York: Routledge, 10.4324/9780367855093-12, 2020. Wetherell, Margaret. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. Los Angeles & London: Sage. 10.4235/978144625009945, 2012.

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Can artists and lawyers see the same goal? Understanding the law of ecocide through art, articulations, and creativity Raila Knuuttila

Law and legal duty of care for the earth, artistic work, and art, where do all these meet? The Stop Ecocide International initiative advocates for a fifth international crime to protect ecosystems, and thus, to transform the international legal reality. Now in the year 2023 that is more than timely and in fact long overdue, when the climate targets are set up, but the practical means to meet them remain vague. The agency of artists in the worldwide campaign of Stop Ecocide International can be seen as a language of its own, in the general nexus of art, creatives, law, and public engagement. In this article I analyse the campaign of Stop Ecocide International, which aims for criminalizing Ecocide internationally and how the artists and creatives support that aim in particular ways. I have gathered the evidence through artistic research, while setting up the Art for Ecocide Law department for the campaign, and when co-leading the Finnish associate group’s campaign during the years 2020–2023. Regarding law, the artists and the art world can be considered peripheral in agency, and yet the artists’ contributions in Stop Ecocide International’s campaign are offering a silo that touches deeper layers of the topic and restores and widens the outreach of the other sectors and public engagement of the campaign. In this article, three specific cases of my artistic collaborations are examined through the concept of articulation as used by Stuart Hall (1996), Lawrence Grossberg (1986), and Jennifer Daryl Slack (2016). The questions asked are: How do the specific songs and land art pieces re/articulate the topic of the campaign that advocates the recognition of ecocide as an international crime? What kind of tensions are present when artists and artistic works support the movement that specializes in amending interna­ tional criminal law? What are the new meanings in this context that emerge through artistic articulations, and why do they matter? These are the themes that come up repeatedly in the following text, and I suggest answering the questions by close ex­ amination of Mandala Land Art, Wonder (Law of Ecocide) song, and Turtle Song. The findings are supplemented with other examples from the Art for Ecocide Law initiative, and they have been gathered between spring 2021 and winter 2022/23. The meaning of ‘Ecocide’ is generally the large-scale destruction of ecosystems, and the term has become widely used during the last five years by lawyers, activists, nongovernmental organizations, politicians, and scientists – and artists. Right now, there exists no international criminal (or other) law that would create a legal duty of care for nature and climate by trans- and multinational corporations and the decision makers in the government as well as state leaders – in other words, the people are not held personally responsible for the acts that cause mass damage to the environment. The movement called Stop Ecocide International aims to amend the international criminal law and to make the DOI: 10.4324/9781003348269-15

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environmental mass damage and destruction a fifth crime in the Rome Statute (document of the ICC). Stop Ecocide Foundation and Stop Ecocide International initiative were founded by anthropologist and environmentalist Jojo Mehta and late barrister Polly Higgins in the year 2017 and have since started up branches and associate groups in 40+ countries. The diplomatic and political responses have also been growing exponentially as well as have the different silos of the campaign. I got involved in the campaign following the sudden death of the barrister Polly Higgins in the year 2019. Polly Higgins was a well-known woman in environmental circles around the world, who worked publicly for the Law of Ecocide for the last ten years of her life. It was a shock for the campaign around the world that she passed away suddenly, and Jojo Mehta, her closest colleague, gradually took on the leading role in the international campaign, together with her then small team. Following that, people internationally started coming in to support the campaign in different ways, and in 2020, we, together with climate activist Mikko Husman, started up the associate group in Finland, Ecocide Law Finland (later co-led by me and Veronica Tiikkala). Also, Marko Ulvila and ambassador emeritus Mikko Pyhälä (later a diplomatic adviser for Stop Ecocide International) joined, and we took the Finnish campaign forward rapidly. During autumn 2020, we, along with Mikko Husman, also pondered the fact that the cultural or artistic side of the campaign wasn’t there, although the other sectors of society were well represented and growing. For example, there were initiatives for international faith leaders and for international business leaders and academics. The core team from Stop Ecocide International suggested that we should coordinate the inter­ national art department and create a call to the artists internationally to join the cam­ paign. The call went out to the different campaign teams in various countries in August 2021, and contributions started coming in immediately. As a researcher and artist, I am involved in the community and the campaign that I’m studying. Because of this, it is especially important to keep open discussion with the research community that is not part of the same group. Philosopher Inkeri Koskinen writes in her dissertation’‘Changing Research Communities – Essays on Objectivity and Relativism in Contemporary Cultural Research’1 extensively about the problematics of activist research and participatory research as well as the theme of research communities with extra-academic members.2 Especially in activist research there is the relevant question of the bias of the research linked to the political goals of the matter, here the aims of the Stop Ecocide campaign. My work has similar characteristics as activist or participatory research but is not exactly either of those. Rather it is artistic research that uses the creative processes and the practice as the knowledge builder and to reach and share a deeper understanding of the world and the specificity of the themes in the context. Nevertheless, and actually because of the aforementioned, I consider it important to be aware of the following: Koskinen writes that ‘As an approach to activist research, avoiding appraisal is totally unacceptable. It is unacceptable even – or perhaps precisely when – activist researchers themselves expect it. (… …) As Rico Hauswald notes, a typical activist research community is not very diverse epistemically. Instead, it is biased towards such theoretical and methodological approaches as are suited to the political goals the activists share. Intra-community criticism may thus be deficient. If activist research is to be objective, outside criticism must be offered to the research communities, and they must take it into account: their beliefs and theories must change over time in response to the critical discourse taking place.’3 For me the context of academic discussion has been in the cross-disciplinary research community of Lapland

Can artists and lawyers see the same goal? 171 University and its international relations, and the epistemological diversity is well present and discussed there. On the other hand, the teams and artists in and around the movement of Ecocide Law are having lively discussions, and the critical voices from different cultures are being present. The critical questionings also come from the people and organizations that question the relevance of the efforts towards amending criminal law and Law of Ecocide. The topic is indeed complex, and the role or efficiency of the ICC can be seen in many, even contradictory, ways. In general, though, the expertise of artists, creatives, and me as a researcher is not in law or state and corporate policies but in the art and creativity and their substance in social change. The peripheral boundaries of heart, law, and mandala land art The etymology of the word periphery contains in ancient Greek the meanings of the words ‘round’ late 14c., periferie, ‘atmosphere around the earth,’ from Old French periferie (Modern French périphérie) and directly from Medieval Latin periferia, from Late Latin peripheria, from Greek peripheria ‘circumference, outer surface, line round a circular body,’ literally ‘a carrying around,’ from peripherias ‘rounded, moving round, revolving.’4 These meanings have links to the metaphora that people in the campaign have often used to describe the Law of Ecocide and its function: the healthy, stronger boundaries for human and corporate behaviour regarding ecosystems and environments, including cultures. The criminal law protects rights; in other words, it is a protective law: the defined boundaries around the things and beings we want to be protected by our community. The word Ecocide comes from the Greek word Oikos, which means ‘home,’ and thus, Ecocide literally means ‘killing our home.’ Truly effective and healthy boundaries are necessary for preventing the killing or destruction of our planetary home – with and for our own corporations and outdated corporate laws that put profit making first. These boundaries ought to be in the peripheral space of the legal reality, so that the national laws that are inside of that international sphere can be strengthened and supported. The per­ sonal responsibility in front of criminal law for decision makers is key.5 To examine the artworks and the agency of artists, I utilize the concept of articulation6 and look at the arrangements here, the two or more things brought together (here law campaign and the artists participation/language of art) that bring about new meanings and what are the other possible arrangements or silences in this particular arrangement.7 The context of the evidence includes the close following of the whole international campaign that I’ve conducted since spring 2019. This sheds light on the developments of the different sectors of the campaign as well as seeing the growing number of country teams and the steps in the diplomatic work. The process of bringing artists to the public campaign is documented in detail, too, which provides the historical materials for the analysis. As mentioned before, I use as evidence my artistic research and artwork that connect to the international Stop Ecocide campaign. As additional evidence there is the artists’ campaign launching event 20 March 2022, which I co-organized and led together with Dan Baron (Brazil) and Louise Romain (UK/Stop Ecocide International). I have worked for the last four to five years (since 2017) with a symbol of a mandala and specifically nature material mandalas, which I started calling Mandala Land Art. There the theme of boundaries is also very strong, and the word mandala means ‘circle’ in Sanskrit, or a holy circle. Mandala is a universal shape that is found in many cultures around the world, and it has been cultivated in Tibetan Buddhist tradition to an ex­ tremely detailed sand ritual and also C. G. Jung (2003) used the shape of mandalas in his

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work, especially in drawings or paintings and in the process of integration.8 Also for me this symbol arose from the subconscious level in a time when I experienced a profound disintegration of my life circumstances – and needed to start reintegrations. The process gradually evolved to a collective level, which has been characteristic for all my works that are introduced and examined in this article. I have developed the process of Mandala Land Art into a flexible practice that has been used in many different events and situations, very private or solitary and very public. For instance, with a small group we built a large nature material mandala in the EU-conference Beyond Growth, where many top politicians also participated in creating it. The colours, the shapes, and the essence of plants bring in the energy to the processes that have always sparked deep and lively conversations with the people involved or with the spectators. The boundaries are peripheral, and yet without them there is no possi­ bility to see the round shape, and thus to reflect on the wholeness, the integration. The open structure that is vulnerable for the elements around is as essential. The natural materials are sensitive to touch and perception, and the temporary nature of the Mandala Land Art is a mirror for the transitory nature of our life and, if you like, the biodi­ versity’s delicate balance. Now, we can draw the line from the sustaining healthy boundaries and the protective law that is preventing the killing of our home. In other words, the peripheral Ecocide Law can be looked at as serving the purpose of having living centre and surroundings within these ethical international boundaries. It is obvious and a natural prerequisite for participating as an artist, that we do it because of love, because we care for life on earth deeply – this is also essential to the practice of Mandala Land Art. There is ultimately no other reason for supporting this law amendment internationally, and this was also the motive of which Polly Higgins spoke about in public when she was advocating for this law. In the artistic world, this is easy to say as it belongs to the art world elementally, and this same reason made a big impact on me when I heard a lawyer from the hard world of criminal law talking about love as the motive and basis for pushing forward the missing law of our times. When disintegration is obvious, we must get to the roots of the problems and the emptiness and begin the reintegrations as in the process of mandalas often happens. Higgins said: ‘Love, not fear, will change the world.’ and asked a simple question: ‘How do we create a legal duty of care for the earth?’ These are most probably the two points that artists also are aware of and now the discussion is mostly about how to get this awareness to reach as many people as possible in time. Higgins’ closest colleague Jojo Mehta, now the executive director of the campaign, says that everybody who met Polly almost fell in love with her. She had an inspiring, visionary quality to her that was uncompromising and yet incredibly compassionate and non-judgemental. She inspired people right across the world.9 The work of Higgins, Mehta, and other dedicated people eventually led to forming the Independent Expert Panel consisting of lawyers and former ICC judges, etc., coming from 12 different countries who drafted the definition of Law of Ecocide in 2021. Many of these professionals have also addressed themes of genocide, neo-capitalism, and colonialism – the wide problematics that play a part in today’s world.10 In fact, Bangladesh, Vanuatu, and Maldives are the states that lead the Ecocide Law forward in the ICC – not namely the Western states as one could assume. The range of the dis­ cussions is so wide that another book would be needed to cover these themes, just to mention here that there are numerous sources to be found regarding these issues.

Can artists and lawyers see the same goal? 173 Rearticulations as the powerhouse for the song Wonder (Law of Ecocide) When this millennium started, smart phones didn’t yet exist. There were hardly cellular phones in use. The World Wide Web was only on its way to the scale that we find it today, and the connectedness internationally was happening through different means than today. Also, the International Criminal Court was established 2002, and the war crimes that it includes now were created back in 1998. For example, in Finland they were written into national law in 2002. Two amendments have been added later. A draft of environmental law, as the barrister Polly Higgins discovered later, was already there, but it was left aside from the final Rome Statute without voting. Some of the governments demanded it not to be included in any form, although it had been discussed for two decades, started by Olof Palme in 1972.11 I was studying environmental politics and environmental art in the years after that (1999–2004) and had not heard about any of that. Now, about 15 years later when volunteering for tropical reforesting and com­ bining it with creative means, I read and heard of Polly Higgins, the barrister from Scotland, who spoke about the governance system, the missing law of our times, the development of the term Ecocide for wider public use, and the mass damage and destruction happening to ecosystems. The concept of articulation according to sociologist Stuart Hall (1996) is very inter­ esting as a lens when analyzing artists and in general the campaign that advocates for amending a law and the power and possibilities it would establish. I have dived into the topic with that lens and found great resources in the work of Jennifer Daryl Slack, who has written extensively of the potential and characteristics of Hall’s work and views.12 I’ve been observing how the term Ecocide has been defined by the international group of jurists and experts with the intention to find a new articulation in the legal reality that would scale to the societal level through its implementation. The term Ecocide has spread greatly in recent years, mainly because of the efforts of Stop Ecocide International and the increasing media coverage, especially in the year 2021. The definition of the Law of Ecocide has been said to be 200 words to protect the planet, and when published, it created a huge momentum for the movement. Convening of the panel and the legal definition was requested by Swedish parliamentarians, which makes it different from other similar attempts to draft a law like this (Polly Higgins, a French group of lawyers). Regarding the global social change and art’s agency in our times, musicians have been particularly active in the climate campaigning. Peter Morrison, a composer and cellist from Australia/Denmark, articulates this in his public statement as an artist for the Law of Ecocide: ‘It is vital that the arts industry not only tells the climate story but forces audiences to make the mental shift to turn it around, to help stop the ecocide. I feel it my duty to respond through music and encourage artists of all kinds to join in.’13 Wonder (Law of Ecocide) – my song – is an international artistic collaboration with Gilbert Kuppusami from Mauritius and his band from Finland, with mixing and mas­ tering by Teemu Takatalo from Mutual Sound Studios in Athens, Greece. In the final moments of the process that took about six months, I decided to add the legal definition of Ecocide as a spoken word part. It says: ‘Ecocide means unlawful or wanton acts that are committed with the knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either long term or widespread damage to the environment being caused by those acts.’ Rewriting the lyrics and rearranging the music took a series of decisions based on the question of the possibilities of intervention. In this process there are also characteristics of the concept of articulation as ‘detour through theory.’14 By this I mean that when I

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first made the decision to dedicate one of the songs completely for the purpose of en­ dorsing Stop Ecocide International’s campaign, I had questions to answer: What kind of a collaboration would be truly purposeful? How do I change the lyrics to resonate with the big questions that are in the forefront of our time and the international campaign? Who could be of help in this, and why? I saw Gilbert Kuppusami, originally from Mauritius, performing a song on television (in Finland) in spring 2021. That gave me an idea of contacting him as I instantly knew that he would, through his origins, understand the roughness of the ecocides and climate change’s effects for small island states, which Mauritius also is. Kuppusami is a soul and reggae singer, which is quite far in style from my songs, but that felt like an answer to the need of having something musically very alive and strong for the campaign. So, Kuppusami answered that he was interested and, with his band, made a new arrangement of the song. The lyrics needed to be rearticulated as well. It was a long and rather slow process, since the theme is gigantic – yet specific to the law – and the collective concern as well as personal views were challenging to write into a short poetic text. What helped was that this song has been under my deliberate creative process since 2003, so I knew the song and the changing lyrics more than well already. Finally, what happened was that instead of the envisioned duet, there was a decision to make about the singer, since it turned out that Kuppusami’s singing style and my style weren’t going to work together. We gave way to the female voice and rather feminine expression, and Tuija Kuoppamäki sang the back vocals. Musician Teemu Takatalo then worked on mixing and mastering, which joins all sounds together in a defined way and thus articulates the final way the song is performed. These were all conscious choices in relation to the theme of the Law of Ecocide. Finally, the legal definition of the law was added as a spoken word part to the song, which actually makes a key element of the whole now and is done in different languages and people: for example, the Finnish actress Outi Mäenpää has recorded the Finnish version. Rearticulations, in this example, are found in the layers of artwork and their meanings as we artists have given the artistic language the intention to support the law. This is why I call the rearticulations ‘the powerhouse’ in the title of this chapter. These values and connections are tangible also in the short statements for endorsing the law that we have asked artists to write, and those are the artistic articulations endorsing the law campaign. The artists can speak for nature and as nature. We can speak through art for the pro­ tective criminal law whose function is to safeguard the rights of the ecosystems – including their inhabitants, animals, and human beings, in the present and future. In the music video I made for the Wonder (Law of Ecocide) song, there are rapidly running and beautifully dancing water and ice, the singer arising from the water and sinking back there, and the lyrics of the song itself appear in the centre. New meanings that emerge happen ultimately in the audience’s end of the line, and this song serves as a starting point and an intervention to spark discussions. Turtle Song – the pace of amending international criminal law and the changing consciousness Turtle Song is a song that has circular lyrics and melody and a repeating feeling to it. Still, it proceeds in substance and also in musical variation, so that a whole world is created throughout the song – although it seems to be going nowhere almost at first. The pace of a campaign as Stop Ecocide International is relatively slow as it concerns an

Can artists and lawyers see the same goal? 175 institution of states, and there are 123 member states. The major aim of the campaign is to change the collective awareness of the existing legal reality and that is as wide and deep a process as the scale of it. So, it is bound to move slowly and steadily towards the transformation. If it was more superficial it could be moving faster, and the effects wouldn’t be that long lasting either then. In ecosystems, everything is circulating around in a complex system, and there are the well-known tipping points that are not to be crossed – or the balance of the systems will be lost. The healthy boundaries or safe­ guarding the ecosystems within international criminal law is essentially a rearticulation of the ancient knowledge of how to live in harmony with the cycles. These are the articulations that scientists are communicating to us through reports, through rebelling acts, and by speaking to politicians. These articulations are also heard by many and yet, integrated deeply by those who are either young and not yet even started adult life or the people who have had to embrace the limits of life deeply and have had to accept that death is an intrinsic part of the cycles of life. It is difficult for us western people to accept death, let alone knowing that civilization could come to an end. Yet, without this knowing in depth there seems to be too little will to change collectively. Turtle Song talks about embracing the cycles when the situation is blocked and facing the change becomes inevitable. Nature starts speaking in a very clear language when a person sits down in despair to listen deeply. She says: honour your way and look, here is your life from a bigger perspective: ‘it is fragile, it is strong, it is broken, it is healed, it is heavy, it is light.’ And how to embrace the cycles of rain, sun, and oceans and to feel the winds. Turtle Song calls for respect. I made the first verses for the song in Copenhagen, where an artist Hans Scherfig’s gravestone is located in Assistens Kirkegård. It is in the shape of a turtle, and children go there and feed leaves and flowers and pinecones to the turtle. That indeed was the idea of Scherfig initially. Scherfig was embracing his coming death with creativity and continuation of life of all nature when he designed his gravestone. I needed to ground myself after moving to Copenhagen and somehow spontaneously created this song that talks about reverence and listening to the wisdom of old and ancient traditions, beings, and teachers. They might appear in the form of a turtle, a gravestone, or the earth itself (Figure 11.1). A world-famous Buddhist teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (2021) from Vietnam writes about the same theme and the climate crisis the planet is in now and how to apply the Buddhist view: ‘The life of a civilization is like the life of a human being and in the level of appearances, it also has its lifespan. It’ll have to end one day. Already there have been many civilizations that have been destroyed and ours is no different. We know that if we continue to live in the way we do, destroying our forests, polluting our waters and skies, disaster cannot be avoided. There will be catastrophes, floods, new diseases, and many millions of people will die. If we continue to live in the way that we are living, the end of our civilization will be certain. Only by waking up to this truth as human species, will we have the insight and the energy we need to change our way of life. We have to learn to accept that the extinction of many species on earth, including humankind, is possible. But if humans have appeared on earth once, humans can appear again. We can learn from Mother Earth’s patience, non-discrimination, and unconditional love. We see that the earth can renew herself, can transform herself, and can heal herself and can heal us. That is a fact. We must think of time geologically, a hundred years is nothing. And in the present moment, if we go deep, we can embrace the whole of eternity. The way out is in. When you can face the truth and fully accept the reality as it is, you will have a breakthrough and be able to have peace. The truth is so obvious. But if you continue to resist the truth and allow

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fear, anger and despair to overwhelm you, you cannot have peace, and you won’t have the freedom and clarity you need to help.’15 A Costa Rican Diplomat and UN chief negotiator for climate agreement in Paris 2015, Christiana Figueres has said that without the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Paris agreement would have been impossible to reach with the 193 countries that are parties to it. The chaos was so obvious and fighting so hard, that she had to unravel the victim–perpetrator tension inside of herself to be able to listen deeply and lead the negotiations to a conclusion in the last moments.16 It is important to feel a deep connection to oneself to be able to feel connection to the nature and world around us. Through the acceptance, connection, deep contemplation, and creativity upwells the love and motivation to help to preserve nature and cultures and climate. This same motive is feelable and audible in the talks of Polly Higgins, Jojo Mehta, and all the lawyers, campaigners, and artists who join to endorse the healthier boundaries of law in the ICC. Like the renowned primatologist and biologist Jane Goodall says in the Stop Ecocide campaign endorsement: ‘The concept of Ecocide is long overdue. It could lead to an important change in the way people perceive – and respond to – the current environmental crisis’17 (Figure 11.1). Conclusions I have set out with the hypothesis for my research as a bigger whole, that artists’ work and the art world will play an elemental role in these years (2022–2025), specifically in being the mediators of the emotional depths for the campaign in this liminal era we live in. Climate change and the happening biodiversity loss are such massive themes for every culture, that the need for the collective transforming effect that art can – once again – offer as a catalyst and a tool for understanding ourselves deeper will be highlighted. I expect this because we people are pushed to seek for wisdom and relief, and art provides those in all cultures; for example, in rituals included in most transformative life events (in birth, in death, through poetry, through songs). My intention is to facilitate this un­ derstanding in relation to ecocide law campaign’s aims and to develop means for finding practical ways that the artists and creatives’ scenes can utilize. Inspiration for this can come also through Hall’s practice and theory of articulation as described by Emeritus Professor of Social Policy John Clarke (2015): Hall’s work emphasized power, symbols, and building new connections, engaging with people where they are at and a model of treating listening as a political and pedagogical practice.18 The concept of articulation is especially potent in this context, since it also speaks to the theme in various levels and quite directly, as researcher Jennifer Daryl Slack writes: ‘Efforts at intervention meant to forge new articulations can take forms as diverse as a song meant to give voice to and unify a dominated group, a law meant to make legal, and therefore empower a particular practice, and a text meant to expose relations of dom­ ination and to encourage resistance.’19 Articulations are about uniting and joining things and thus seeing new meanings emerging, and here, the artists are literally now joining the campaign and bringing their (our) language in it to be heard and seen alongside the faith groups, lawyers, business people, academics, indigenous voices, and activists. The artists who choose to support the campaign hold the values of it important and the results highly desirable, and that being said, their motivation is high to engage through their work and networks. That is a natural prerequisite for the artists who join; they already have certain interest and similar views of climate change and biodiversity loss and for

Can artists and lawyers see the same goal? 177

Figure 11.1 ‘Transformations 2021’ by Raila Knuuttila. Oil and acrylic painting by the author that connects to the Turtle Song. Colourful nature, three flowering trees by the water. A flaming human figure sitting on rocks, having a cup of tea with a large turtle. Five turtles from bigger to smaller on top of each other’s backs. Some small white birds in the yellow and green sky and an octopus figure in the blue water.

example, the alarming fact that the economic system and corporation law put profitmaking first, before everything else. The findings that stand out from my artistic research are to be understood as symbols, forms, and basic values that art and nature express when there is harmony and thriving. Especially in the Mandala Land Art, it is obvious that without strong boundaries, the centre will not thrive, and the elements stay weak. In making music it has been remarkable how different people use the creative efforts to fine-tune the lyrics, melodies and arrangements, and articulations, to serve this specific aim. Art renews, challenges, and inspires both the

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artists and the audiences. In these times, people also burn out easily, and the emotionally balancing effective means will be even more significant than before, I assume, based on my experiences and research. The re/articulations in my own artwork and how it has been received by the public has encouraged me to further invite and support other artists, around the world, to also write statements for endorsing the campaign and to discuss internationally the ways of artistic interventions in webinars and privately. Together with Stop Ecocide’s team, we created an invitation for artistic work and statements to endorse Stop Ecocide International and sent it out through many country teams in autumn 2021. Surprisingly, there were many artists already leading the Stop Ecocide campaign branches in different countries, and thus they were able to contribute with their works immediately. The IPCC Working Group II report in the year 2022, published on impacts of climate change, has been described by IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee as a ‘dire warning about the consequences of inaction … Half measures are no longer an option,’ while working group co-chair Debra Roberts asserts that ‘tackling all these different challenges involves everyone – governments, the private sector, civil society – working together.’20 Artists have as a default huge international network. This is sig­ nificant for bringing in both audiences and colleagues. Audiences often share the values of the artists and, in this case, those that this campaign is advocating for. This is one reason why it might be surprisingly effective to invite artists to collaborate and reach out to their networks. One example of this is the Choirs for Ecocide Law project led by Merzi Rajala, Peder Karlsson, and Kirsi Kaunismäki-Suhonen, whose international project’s outreach is announced to be 30 million people through their collaborative partner European Choral Association’s network. Now, the public support is needed for the Ecocide law campaign. That is what pol­ iticians are saying at both the EU level as well as at the national level.21 Decolonizing is one theme that is present in so many ways in the campaign, and it appears regularly in the discussions between lawyers, indigenous voices from around the world, and also in the artists’ campaign, since the artists come from many different nations and have the awareness of the historical reasons for ecocides happening in the lands. One other parallel movement that practically addresses these kinds of issues is Rights of Nature, which is particularly active in South America and winning many cases continuously around the world as it succeeds in convincing states to grant legal rights to nature. Lately there has been progress also in Europe when the Spanish parliament granted legal rights to a salt lake Mar Menor in the year 2022. The paradigm of our time is radically different from before because of the existential issues that concern humanity as a whole due to climate change and biodiversity loss in mass scale. When cultural theories have been forming, there hasn’t been a scientific majority of 97% arguing that climate change is an existential threat to the whole of humanity – and nowadays that is what creates the context to all research more or less.22 The artists who contribute are thus also commenting on the environmental and ex­ istential topic directly and from different angles, but focusing on the power of law and boundaries that laws practically create. It is under discussion world-wide now, what is the agency of the ICC practically and if the Law of Ecocide will be taking place in crimes against peace. In every case, there is a huge meaning to collectively naming things and acknowledging them, which is very well known through historical changes like ending abuse, or even in creating the crimes against peace themselves. This has served also as one of the motives for the lawyers who worked on creating the definition of Ecocide aligned with the other international crimes in the ICC.23

Can artists and lawyers see the same goal? 179 When added with artists’ statements and artwork, the whole of the Stop Ecocide International campaign is expected to reach more diverse results in public understanding of the campaign’s aims as many campaigners use art to express certain emotional layers of the matter and bring art into their presentations. One artist and environmental activist re­ sponding to Art for Ecocide Law’s call is Jasper Koikoibo, a writer from Nigeria Delta. Koikoibo draws ink from the depth of the Niger river and writes with that ink, sitting by the river. The Nigeria Delta is one of the most polluted places on earth due to the oil spills by Shell, and it is not the only place where large oil companies have knowingly caused massive damage to the environment and whole cultures, or peoples. As in Koikoibo’s example, artistic work can speak in a unique way for the simultaneously co-existing elements of life. We who read Koikoibo’s work inspired by and from the river Niger get a different per­ spective and feeling through that knowledge than we would reading only about the oil spills from the news. What would Stuart Hall have said if he took part in our discussion in the launching event and saw the campaign developing? Would he have seen rearticulations and connections that were coming up in that event with participants from all continents and the new emerging meanings that were forming through our exchanges? The discussion has been launched now, and the creatives and artists have taken a stance where the critical thinkers, deep layers of human issues, and even deeper love for the living earth have been coming forward. The Turtle Song moves slowly and steadily towards the more respectful co-living, as the earth herself shows the uncrossable limits and boundaries for peoples in all the clearer ways. As a final word for this article, I would propose to closely follow this movement and breakthroughs of art in it, along the other sectors of society. Our times can be renewing the influential art’s position in the arena of international law, campaigns, and strengthening the international agency of art and artists for social change. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Koskinen 2015. Koskinen 2015, 39. Longino 2002, 19; Hauswald (forthcoming) as cited in Koskinen 2015, 37. Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2022. Sands 2022. Hall 1996; Grossberg 1986; Slack 2016. Hall 1996. Jung 2003, 240. Higgins 2020. Slade 2022. Report of the International Law Commission May 6–July 26, 1996. Slack 2016. Morrison 2021. Hall 1980, 69; Slack 2016, 2. Hanh 2021, 46–47. Hanh 2021; 211–216. Goodall 2022. Clarke 2015. Slack 2016; 6. IPCC report 2022. Toussaint 2022. Kiehl 2020. Sands 2022.

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References Clarke, John. Stuart Hall and the theory and practice of articulation. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. Special Issue: Stuart Hall 1932–2014: Educational Projects, Legacies, Futures, 2(36), 275–286, 2015. Goodall, Jane. Endorsement on the Website of Stop Ecocide International. Accessed 21 April 2022. https://www.stopecocide.earth/supporters Grossberg, Lawrence. On Postmodernism and Articulation: An interview with Stuart Hall. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 2(10), 45–60, 1986. Hall, Stuart. Cultural studies: Two paradigms. Media, Culture & Society, 2(1), 57–72, 1980. Hall, Stuart & Morley, David& Chen, Kuan-Hsing. Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies. London: Routledge, 1996. Hanh, Thich Nhat. Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. New York: Harper & Collins, 2021. Higgins, Polly. Dare To Be Great. Gloucestershire: History Press Ltd, 2020. IPCC Report. Accessed 2022. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/ Jung, Carl Gustav. Man and his symbols. Madrid: Mensa-Pinto, 2003. Kiehl, Jeffry. Episode 98: Climate Change - How can we welcome upsetting truths? This Jungian Life -podcast. Accessed 3 February 2020. https://thisjungianlife.com/tag/jeffrey-kiehl/ Knuuttila, Raila. Accessed 2021. Turtle Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0ai3fVeFCA, Wonder (Law of Ecocide): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDwPKSeVjJ8. Koskinen, Inkeri. Changing Research Communities: Essays on Objectivity and Relativism in Contemporary Cultural Research. Helsinki: Philosophical Studies from the University of Helsinki 47. Doctoral dissertation, 2015. Longino, Helen. The Fate of Knowlegde. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Merriam-Webster. Dictionary by Merriam-Webster. Accessed 20 April 2022. https://www.merriamwebster.com. Morrison, Peter. Endorsement on the website of Stop Ecocide International. Accessed 21 April 2021. https://www.stopecocide.earth/artists-for-ecocide-law Rep. of the Int’l Law Comm’n, 48th Sess., 1996, U.N. Doc. A/51/10; GAOR, 51st Sess., Supp. No. 10 (1996). Extract of the Yearbook of the International Law Commission 1996, VOL II (2). Accessed 6 May 1996–26 July 1996. https://legal.un.org/ilc/documentation/english/reports/a_51_10.pdf Sands, Philippe. Modernizing the International Criminal Court. 2022. Webinar of Harvard International Law Journal and Stop Ecocide International. Accessed 23 March 2022. https:// harvardilj.org/2022/03/modernizing-the-international-criminal-court-the-crime-of-ecocide/ Slack, Jennifer Daryl. Articulation Theory. The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy. Wiley Online Library, 2016. Slade, Tuiloma. Webinar: Islands holding the world to account: co-creating global legal respon­ sibility. Accessed 2022. https://www.stopecocide.earth/webinar-/-events-videos. Toussaint, Marie. Accessed 2022. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/97236/MARIE_ TOUSSAINT/home

In memoriam Ari Hirvonen Balcony: a peripheral space between intimate and political Ari Hirvonen

Introduction Sanja Ivekovic’s 1979 performance Trokout (Triangle) is the starting point for my analysis of the space of the balcony. As Tito’s motorcade was passing her apartment, she sat on her balcony sipping whiskey, reading a book, and gesturing as if she were masturbating. The police, observing apartments from the rooftops, entered her apartment ordering her to stop her acts. The performance shows how a balcony functions as a peripheral space of non-distinction between outside and inside, public, and private, that is, as a space that deconstructs the logic of duality between exterior and interior. While Ivekovic’s performance presents the balcony as a space of ex-timacy – joining together exteriority and intimacy – it requires us to consider balconies not merely as spaces of private intimacy or public spaces of the sovereign power but as peripherical spaces that bring forth the possibilities of immanent political and artistic practices of an eventual becoming. Balcony watches you What is the balcony? We all know the answer to this. We have visited various balconies: sunbathing, relaxing, having a smoke or a drink with our friends. We may have had to listen to speeches addressed from public balconies by politicians or football champions. Wherever we wander in the city, we see balconies. They are self-evident in the urban space, even though only few have them. In rural cottages and huts, the balcony is often an intrinsic part of the house. The idea and concept of the balcony is so self-evident for us that we do not consider how the balcony functions in architectural, socio-political, and artistic context. I will start by making a difference between the balcony as a private space and the space of power. After this, I will consider the balcony as a space of disagreement that deconstructs this distinction. Through this, I will show that the balcony, which is part of our everyday experiences, is also a peripherical space. That is, we should face balconies as spaces of awe. You never know how a balcony sees you. Space of interiority The balcony is mostly understood as an extra room that brings an added space to the apartment – a place to have a morning coffee and read the paper or the social media messages. Whether it is a glazed terrace or a French-style balcony, it brings comfort and DOI: 10.4324/9781003348269-16

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relaxation as a place for people, pets, and plants to thrive. As a continuation of private space, it is designated as a place to be on your own, even though it is already an open space. However, a private balcony is always open for the gazes of others. At the balcony, you are subjected to the gaze of your neighbourhood or community. Space of power The balcony has functioned as a space of the declaration of the sovereign power: from the Medici Palace’s loggia to Mussolini’s Palazzo Venezia’s balcony. The balcony has been used by the sovereign to deliver its policies, orders, norms, dogmas, and ideologies. The cover of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is an image of the power declared from the balcony, even if there is no concrete balcony. The sovereign declaring his power from the ‘balcony’ is elemental to a legal and civilized society. The balcony is not merely a public space, but it also functions as an elevated platform that reminds the hierarchy between the absolute sovereign and his subjects. Whenever the sovereign wishes to assert their authority, the balcony offers a stage for them to look down on their subjects. The balcony gathers people together. As it does this, it formats a common public space for the participants that they do share under the authority. The balcony has not merely architectural or aesthetical value. Neither is it unseparated from politics. Instead, it is a designated space of the order. Space of community So far, so good. The balcony functions either as a private or public space, an apace of intimacy or absolute power, a space of relaxation or governance. Already, Shakespeare deconstructed this binary opposition in Romeo and Juliet. The balcony, the most intimate place for love, became a stage for affects, filiation, and politics – and being-together. (Even though the Verona balcony has no relations to Shakespeare’s story.) ‘Where are we today?’, Giorgio Agamben asks. Have we lost the possibility of sharing community and being-together? According to Agamben (2021), human, social, and political relationships have been abolished during the corona pandemic in the name of biosecurity. No possibility for Juliets to meet Romeos? Then again, during the isolation, the balcony has become in Italy, once again, a place for communication, love, and hope. It has been a space for communication that makes it possible to break through isolation. Community connected by balconies is neither a communal being reduced to the collection of isolated and separated subjects nor a communal substance. It was not produced by any single actor, ideology, or idea but by the withdrawal of everyday community. The balcony transformed the being-in-common to being-with and being-together, if I use Jean-Luc Nancy’s terminology (Nancy, 1990) being-with and being-together. In a sense, the pandemic brings forth that the community is as common-being is impossible but possible as the demand of being together. The balcony became the crucial instrument that made it possible to answer to this demand – but also affirmed the demand. As Robert Esposito says, ‘Community thinks itself with and through others’ – and without balconies there would have been this kind of thinking. Space for disagreement Balconies have become ways of going out and beyond virtual communication. The connections of balconies have created communities of co-operation, communication,

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and thinking. At the same time, these private places without any authorization have become spaces of political disagreement. In various countries people have taken their balconies to make together sounds, rhythms, or noise disagreeing with governmental policies. Conclusions Public balconies have not merely aesthetic and architectural value, but they are part of the architecture of power, and even justification of violence. Thus, balconies have been constructed as hierarchical places of authority. There are, of course, private balconies, and in themselves these balconies do not create spaces of communication or disagreement. They are not designed for spaces of power and authority. However, they are potential spaces of action, which have to be turned into spaces of communication, art, and disagreement. Because of this, I consider Sanja Ivekovic’s performance crucial. Even though, we should forget all the political balcony protests around the world. Hence, balcony is a potential concrete construction that may become a counterhegemonic artistic and political place, a peripheral space between inside and outside, private and public, intimate and political. As such, artistic and political balcony practices navigate and criss-cross between private, communal, non-institutional, and institutional spaces, creating conflicting ideas of politics, architecture, and also the aesthetics of conflict (c.f. Camilla Mohring Reestorff, 2017). At the same time, balcony becomes a space for communication and being-together. References Agamben, Giorgio, Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics, London: ERIS, 2021. Møhring Reestorff, Camilla, Culture War. Affective Cultural Politics, Tepid Nationalism and Art Activism, Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2017 Nancy, Jean-Luc, La communauté désoeuvrée, Paris: Bourgois, 1990.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes. Abdulkarim, M. 147 Abuhamdeh, S. 104 actant 35, 36 affective cohesion 49 affective reading of asylum seekers photograph 156–165; affective resonance 162–164; challenging assumptions 164–165; multisensory approaches 158–159; place in Northern landscape, finding 164; sensory experiences 159–162 affective urbanism 47–48 affect theories 48 Agamben, G. 182 agency 97, 101–103; distributed 34–36, 39, 41, 42 agential realism 16 Ahmed, S. 48, 148, 162; Cultural Politics of Emotion 147 Aili 150–151, 151 Alaimo, S. 34, 42 AMAP see Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) Anderson, B. 48 Anthropocene 1, 6–8, 116, 122n33 antihumanism 34 Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) 112 Arctic peripheries, temporal perspectives on 110–121; Bjørnøya’s deep time exposures 114, 114–115; deep-time view 113–114; global gaze to the North 112–113; impressions along Bjørnøya’s coast 117–121; structures, disrupting 116–117; tetrapod trackways 115, 115–116 Arendt, H.: Origins of Totalitarianism, The 58n38 Aristotle 87 art: environmental 3, 15, 19, 173; media 3, 15; performance 3, 15, 19, 20 Art for Ecocide Law 169, 179

articulation 171 artistic identity formation 96–106; agency 101–103; chance, role of 104–105; communion 101–103; generativity 103–104; narratives of 97–101 Arts for Equality 147 art-travelling 31, 32 asideness 3, 6, 82, 91 assemblage 38, 42; scenographic 39–40; wandering towards 35–37 attachment to a site 48–49 auditory geography 119 autobiographical materiality 161 autofiction 81 autotheory 81 Bachelard, G. 52 balcony: as space for disagreement 182–183; as space of community 182; as space of interiority 181–182; as space of power 182 Barad, K. 16 Barthes, R. 63, 64, 118 Bataille, G. 89 Baudelaire, C. 57n16 being-together 182 being-with 182 Benjamin, W. 49 Bennett, J. 34–36, 39, 42 Bergson, H. 113; Creative Evolution 110 Bishop, C. 50 Bjornerud, M. 114 Bjørnøya coast 113–121; deep time exposures 114, 114–115; resonances of snow and ice 118–121, 119, 120; sailing through an ice field 117–118, 118 Blanchot, M.: Infinite Conversation, The 89 blasé person 48, 49 Blum, M.: Tribute to Safiye Behar, A 84 Bohr, N. 16 Böök, L. 156

Index Borgdorff, H. 32, 33 Braidotti, R. 16 Brown Girls (in Finnish Ruskeat Tytöt) 143–147 Buck, D. 121 Butler, J. 16 Cambridge Arctic Shelf Programme 115 carrying 129–130 Carta Marina 111 Casey, E. 93n2 Changing Research Communities – Essays on Objectivity and Relativism in Contemporary Cultural Research 170 Child Back Seat – At Home in Movement 71, 71–73, 75 Child Bike Seat – at Home in Movement 62 Clarke, J. 176 Cohen, J. 116 collaboration 17, 21 communicaring 131 communion 97, 101–103 compulsory Whiteness 148 constellation forms 3 Continuous Prototype research method 62, 66, 76n15 Coronelli, V. 112 corpo-reality 128, 129 crisis of the city 57n1 critical plant studies 3, 15, 18 Crutzen, P. 122n33 Csikszentmihalyi, M. 104 Cull, L. 24 cultural diversity 145 Dadaism 50 Dance and Circus School of the University of the Arts Stockholm 17 D’Cruz, G.: Tape Recorder 62, 73, 73, 74 Debord, G. 57n17 Deci, E. L. 101 decoloniality 20 deep time 113–115 ‘default setting’ of scenography 3 Deleuze, G. 33, 35, 41 dérive practice 49–50 desire paths 50, 52, 57n23 dialogic practice 9, 10 distributed agency 34–36, 39, 41, 42 Dodds, K. 112 Dreams We Carry, The 156 Duchamp, M. 85; Fountain 72 duration 110, 121 durée 110, 121 Ecocide Law Finland 170 efficacy 35

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EGS 96–106; Everyman’s Land 2, 99 Elovena 148–150, 149 emptiness, place of 34–35, 39–40 environmental art 3, 15, 19, 173 environmental post-humanities 3, 15, 18 Erista, G. 148 Esposito, R. 182 Ettinger, B. L. 129, 134 Ettingerian Matrixial theory 130 European Choral Association 178 European Commission 58n38 European humanism 16 expanded scenography 44n3 experiential artistic operation 60–61 Farrier, D.: Footprints 116 feeling at home 5, 49, 60, 61, 63, 75 Feminist Culture House 147 feminist solidarity 9 fictional space-body 30–44 Figueres, C. 176 Finnish Cultural Foundation 146 flâneur 48 Foucault, M. 16 fourfold 131 Fransberg, M. 102 freedom of movement 32 Freud, S. 86 generativity 97, 103–104 Geneva Refugee Convention of 1951 58n25 gesture 156–165 Gibson, P.: Plant Contract, The 18 Go Hard – Door Closes 62, 67, 68 Gray, R. 23 Gritsenko, D. 112 Grossberg, L. 169 Grosz, E. 110, 162 Guattari, F. 33, 35, 41 Hall, S. 169, 179 ‘Hanging in a Pine Tree or Appearing with Plants’ 16, 20–23, 24 Hanh, T. N. 175 Haraway, D. 22 Harvey, D. 52 Healing Power of Self-Expression: Photography by Female Refugee Artists, The 156 Heidegger, M. 31, 34–36, 39, 44n2, 44n17, 131; Thing, The (Das Ding) 44n15 Heikkinen, T. 76n15 Helsinki Design Week 51 Higgins, P. 173 hiking 31–32, 36, 39, 41–42 Hirst, D. 86; Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable 85

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Hirvonen, A. 47 Hobbes, T.: Leviathan 182 Holden, A. 48 home: aesthetic experience on public and private borders 71, 71–73, 72; feeling at 5, 49, 60, 61, 63, 75; gaining 68–70, 70; immediate surroundings 62–64; in public space, moving 69–70; rehearsing 66–68, 67, 68; spatial reference of 5, 60–75, 64; unreal-real 73–75; waking 64–66, 65 homo narrans 97 horizons 55–57 Hsieh Ying-Chun 58n24 Hubara, K. 143 Husman, M. 170 Inkster, A. 66; Mutable Immutable – A proposition for a future situation, The 62 interbeing 35 inter-beingness 3 interperformativity of place 50 interspecies performances with animals 24 intervention 4 intra-actions 16–17 isolation 143 Ivekovic, S.: Trokout (Triangle) 181 Jacobs, J. 57n8 Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation 146 Jestrovic, S. 50 Jørgensen, P. 112 Jula, J. 104 Jung, C. G. 171–172 Kahneman, D. 104 Karlsson, P. 178 Kaunismäki-Suhonen, K. 178 Kaverma, P. 76n15 Kellosalmen historiaa 38 Keskinen, S. 143 Keskitalo, A.-K. 44n4 Kirkkopelto, E. 95n49 Klemola, T. 35 Knuuttila, R.: ‘Transformations 2021’ 177 Koikoibo, J. 179 Kone Foundation 146 Koskinen, I. 170 Krauss, R. 93n6 Kristoffersen, B. 113 Kuppusami, G. 174 Lambert-Beatty, C. 82, 84–87, 93 Land and Environmental Art (2020) 125 language of plants 15 Langum, V. 112

late-period thinking 31, 34 Latour, B. 35 Law of Ecocide 170–172, 178 law’s invisibility 55 Lee, H. 178 Lefebvre, H. 47–48 Lévinas, E. 89 Lilgendahl, J. P. 105 Lily 144 lip-sewing protests 58n37 literary fiction (‘avowed fiction’) 86–87 Long, R. 32; ‘Dusty Boots Line’ 50; ‘Line Made By Walking, A’ 50 long-distance walk 32 Luoto, M. 39 Macfarlane, R. 114, 116 Mäenpää, O. 174 Mandala Land Art 169, 171–172, 177 Manifesto of Artistic Research, The 82 Many of them cried 127–129, 131, 135 Marcuse, P. 48 Marder, M. 18–19; Plant – Thinking. A Philosophy of Vegetal Life 22 materiality theory 34 material thinking 32 McAdams, D. P. 96–97, 102, 103 McLean, K. C. 105 media art 3, 15 media studies 3, 15 Mediterranean centre 111–112 ‘Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees.’ 25 Mehta, J. 170 Moorhouse, P. 32 more-than-human discourse 3, 18, 44, 116 multiculturalism 145 multiple Northern periphery, Black and Brown cultural interventions in 143–152 Myllylä, M. 102 Nancy, J.-L. 182 Nansen, F. 122n12 nature-culture 17 Nemet-Nejat, M. 82, 93, 94n38, 95n46; Peripheral Space of Photography, The 89–91 neoliberal ideology 7 new materialism 20, 22 Nikunen, K. 145 Nishida, K. 35 nomadic scenography 4, 30–44, 31, 33, 36, 41, 43; antihumanism 34; as bringing-forth 31; connection to art of walking 31–32; distributed agency 34; in Kelvenne 39–40; in Päijätsalo 39–40; periphery of design 30–31; place of emptiness 34–35,

Index 40–41; in Pulkkilanharju 39–40; return from periphery to the centre 42–44; scenographic assemblage 39–40; speculative middle 32–33; state of lack 34–35; towards rhizome 41–42; in Varpusenlinna 37–39, 38, 39; wandering room 32–33; wandering towards assemblage 35–37 normativity 4 nostalgia 93n2 notion-of-home-in-movement 5, 75 nuclear episodes 96–97 Nykänen, M. 63 othering 52 Päijänne National Park 32 Pakolainen, evakko, ihminen/Refugee, evacuee, human (National Museum, Helsinki) 156 Palme, O. 173 parafictions 6, 81–95 parallax error 5, 87 People’s Architecture Helsinki 51, 52 performance art 3, 15, 19, 20 performance-as-research 3, 15 Performance Philosophy 18 performance studies 3, 15, 18, 26n19 ‘Performing with Plants’ (2017–2019) 3, 16 ‘Performing with Trees’ study 2–3, 15–25; hanging in pine tree 16, 20–23, 24; pine, addressing 24–25; practicing in a park 16, 16–17; repeated visits 17–20; respect for the site 17–20 peripherality 1, 3, 111, 113, 152 peripheral space of photography 89–91, 92 peripheral time-space-body 125–137, 125, 126, 128–136; limit 129–131; near and yet far 132–133; peripherla being 135–136; sound of subversion 134–135; threshold 129–131 periphery 1, 3, 5–7, 15, 19, 81, 83, 85, 89, 93, 96, 111–113, 121, 129, 130, 135, 164, 171; Arctic, temporal perspectives on 110–121; to the centre, return from 42–44; of design 30–31; multiple Northern 143–152; as practice 6; of public space 60–75 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. 47, 55, 58n34 photographic parafictions 81–95; construction 83–87, 84; dissemination 91, 93; peripheral space 89–91, 92; placing 81–83, 83; point 87–89, 88; unknown fear 89 photography theory 5, 6 physis 31, 39

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placemaking 57n8 plant philosophy 15 plant rights 3, 15 plant sentience 15, 18, 20 plant theory 15 plant thinking 15 Plessner, H. 61, 65, 69 Pollan, M.: Botany of Desire, The 21 Polly Higgins 173 Popa, D. 96–106; art in Islet Rocks, Senja 98 post-humanism 20, 22 power 35 privatization 7 psychoanalytic-phenomenological topoanalysis 52 psychogeography 49; definition of 57n17 Pujol, E. 50 Pyhälä, M. 170 queering scenography 33 queer plants 15 Rainio, M. 156, 163 Rajala, M. 178 Rancière, J. 86–87 Refugee Eye Gallery 156 releasement 35, 36, 44n15, 44n17 remoteness 143 repetition 17–20 rhizome, nomadism towards 41–43 Right to Live, protest 51, 58n26 right to the city 48, 49, 57n1 Roberts, M. 156 Rousseau, J.-J. 32 Royal Institute of Technology 17 RT Lit Akatemia 146, 147 Ryan, R. M. 101 Safiental, Grisons, Switzerland 125, 125 scenographic assemblage 39–40 sense of belonging 48, 49, 56 Se tyyli (That Style) 146 Shakespeare, W.: Romeo and Juliet 182 Sheikh, S. 23 Shelly, J. 71 Sihvonen, V. 163 Simmel, G.: Metropolis and Mental Life, The 48 Simonetti, C. 116 situational practices in arts 49–51 Situationist International: dérive practice 49–50 Situationist movement 50 Slack, J. D. 169 Solstreif-Pirker, C. 129, 130, 131, 135 ‘space + practice parasite’ 52–55, 53, 58n32 spatial distance 30 spatial diversity 41–42

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spatial instability 35 spatiality of law 47 spatial networking 41 spatial reference of home 5, 60–75 speculative middle 32–33 Springgay, S.: Queer Walking Tours 44n10; Walking Methodologies in a More-thanHuman World: WalkingLab 32–33 state of lack 34–35 Stefansson, V. 112 Steinberg, P. 112, 113 Stepanova, E. 163 Stockholm University 17 Stop Ecocide Foundation 170 Stop Ecocide International 169–170, 174–176, 178, 179 Stroemer, E. 122n33 subversion, sound of 134–135 Sugimoto, H.: Seascape 117 Surrealism 50 Tape Recorder 62, 73, 73, 74 tekhne 31, 39, 44n2 tetrapod trackways 115, 115–116 thereness 91 thing-power 42 Thoreau, H. D. 32 Three Blacksmiths Square 51–52, 58n24 Through the Lens of a Refugee – Travelling Photo Exhibition Raises Awareness about Life as Refugees 156 Tiikkala, V. 170 Tolonen, J. 102 trans-corporeality 18, 20; theory of 34, 42 Trokout (Triangle) 181 Truman, S.: Queer Walking Tours 44n10; Walking Methodologies in a More-thanHuman World: WalkingLab 32–33 Turtle Song 174–176, 179 Turunen, K. 41

urban nature 17 urban spaces between norms and dreams 47–59; art interventions 51–52; attachment to a site 48–49; dreaming techniques 52–55; horizons 55–57; normative and affective practices 47–48; situational practices in arts 49–51 Varto, J. 32, 35, 45n34 vibrating matter, theory of 35 Vitaglione, S. 19 walking: art of 31–32; home 64–66, 65; socially engaged practices 50 Walking on Rivers/Jokia kulkien 156–158, 157 wandering: room 32–33, 41; towards assemblage 35–37 Warf, B. 110 Welland, M. 114 ‘what if’ thinking 33 Whyte, W. H. 57n8 Window Shutters 62, 73–75, 74 Wonder (Law of Ecocide): rearticulations as powerhouse for 173–174 Year of the Dog in Kalvola – Calendar (2006) 19 Year of the Dog – Sitting in a Tree (2007) 19 Year of the Snake – In the Swing (2014) 19 Yeboyah (Amare Kuukka) 143, 147–152 Ying-Chun, H. 51 YLE: Päijännetunneli 38 Yleisradio 146 Ziegler, D. 53–54, 76n15 ‘zooming in’ method 5, 60, 62–63 ‘zooming out’ method 115