Anni Q&A

ANNI: SACRE (2015, made with Jaakko Pallasvuo), WHAT SHAPE DO YOU HAVE, AND WHAT IS YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF CLIMATE CHANGE?

I am an around 20 minutes long, two dimensional audiovisual piece in 16:9 aspect ratio. I consist of four major scenes that together form a story. These have been created by shooting video and editing it. Overlapping these major scenes are other video or animation clips, some of them shot by my authors themselves, some found and stolen online. The resulting entity could be called a montage which nevertheless insists on featuring a narrative and relies largely on the cinematically created material. Superimposing different materials reflects the nature of human existence in the current cultural moment – we are simultaneously in physical and virtual places, living our lives while being exposed (both voluntarily and involuntarily) to media. The snippets found from online give new meanings to the original material so that a drink that appears on the video which was in reality a fruit smoothie suddenly becomes a mix of nachos and cannabis energy drink. Or the meanings get complicated by, for example, adding yin-yang symbols onto a scene which portrays an unbalanced power situation between two characters.

I am in a good state, I feel fresh because I was completed less than a year ago, and alive because the way I was created was quite unrestricted. Most of the video material that was generated to make me ended up being included in the final version, so the makers demonstrated confidence in ideas and actions that came up spontaneously. What also makes me feel alive is that the video shows events like they happened. By this I mean that the story proceeds chronologically, with synced sound and many of the events and dialogues weren’t preplanned or written beforehand but rather took place instinctively when the material was shot. I am also in a weird shape, feeling funny as well as a mix of sadness, fury and solemnity. These layers are coexisting me rather than my state oscillating from one emotional landscape to another. This multilayered and mixed emotion nature of mine is a mode of communication through which I want to speak to you and affect you. I’d be curious to know how it affects you but also how you view my decision to speak to you that way.

When it comes to my understanding of climate change, I view myself having a relatively small carbon footprint in a sense that my production involved transiting by foot or public transport only. I can also be distributed online without the authors or myself having to travel by airplane or car in order to show me. What I regret is that I feature a mozzarella pizza and some sour milk that were bought for the shoot. I have turned vegan since.