Anni draft 1 - October 6th 2016

What are you working on now?

Video:

– Sacre 1–3 (part 1 is finished and the other parts are in progress) in collaboration with my friend Jaakko Pallasvuo – The Host (in the process of editing material, possibly more shooting needed) – A video based on the text I wrote for Connie’s publication (needs to be shot and edited) – A video in collaboration with Erika portraying local teenagers and the end of humankind on Earth

Performance:

– Suckling Strange: A performance where the audience is invited to reflect on ideas such as erotic lactation, the long-drawn stigma around female nipples and public breastfeeding, as well as relations between humans and non-humans that are intimate or in which human is primarily the giver instead or taker. – Amor Fati performance in collaboration with my friend, a theater director/dramaturge Anna-Mari Karvonen. The piece looks at us, humans, as species who continuously form composites with other beings, materials and technology – for example, bacteria, the internet, clay, hard drives and fungi. We melt and morph with these and in these processes, figuring out the relations, there is language. The core of the performance is formed by writing, reading and reciting. It attempts to open up to those online/offline surroundings that are already operating and writing within us. The performance springs from the idea that by unsettling usual ways of writing and reading, we also unsettle our identities; what we consider ourselves to be. Through this, we might also be able to ask what we meant or could mean by ‘us’. – The (insert the name of a place here) Trip. Psychedelic (either with or without actual hallucinogens) trips that attempt to open up reflection on what psychedelia means today when we are in desperate need of new form of collectivity, both amongst humans as well as amongst all species on the planet. The project was started in Finland where I made a piece called The Paimio Trip. It took place in a currently unused hospital building that the architect, Alvar Aalto, had designed as a medicinal instrument, and dealt with the relationship between psychedelia and healing. I made acid yellow (the same colour as the staircases and corridors in the hospital) patient costumes that the audience/participants wore while exploring their surroundings and each other under the influence of chosen texts on psychedelia and multisensorial excercises.

Other:

– Alive – series of works that I make everytime I feel like I need to remind myself of being alive. One piece, a wall cloth made by using computerised embroidery and bleach on black fabric, exists so far.

What are you thinking of making?

– I would like to write and put on stage a science/social fiction play at the end of the year. How do you plan to make it? – I plan to first write a script for a play and then put it on stage with the help of other people, such as performers/actors, as well as dramaturgical and technical support. When I write my approach is usually semi-autobiographical and I wish to continue using this way of writing. – I want to study scriptwriting and dramaturgy, for example through books. – The play would deal with topics and questions that feel urgent to me. For example, how to address the intersectional ecological crises in the age of the Capitalocene as well as the likely possibility of the near future death/extinction of the humankind and many other species through performance making? Research would concern thanatology, psyche-/sociodelia, sexuality and love.

Why do you want to make it?

–I’m interested in play/performance making as a form where different disciplines merge and I can process questions through different methods and materials such as writing, costume and prop making, dramaturgy, directing and performance.

Who can help you and how?

–People who can support me in scriptwriting and dramaturgy as well as sound and light design –Performers –People who can help me with research and critical reflection, peers Relation to previous practice –I have experience in performance making and exploration of the themes I’ve mentioned. Relation to a larger context –I didn’t have time to do this part properly yet, but some quick things to mention: Lars Johannesson (artist who considered himself artistic material for hallucinogens)/psychedelia, artists in Lars Bang Larssen’s exhibition (as well as texts by him), Rosi Braidotti/posthumanism, Karen Barad/intra-actions, Lygia Clark/artist, Clarice Lispektor/artist etc...

References

Preliminary: –Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) Karen Barad uses the term ‘intraaction’ to queer the familiar understanding of relations as ‘interactions’ in which individually constituted and preexisting entities act upon each other. Instead, she proposes, the entities or things (including us humans) are constituted and exist as results of specific intraactions. In other words, we are materialised relations. –Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (London and NYC: Verso, 2015) – the text deals with the idea of Capitalocene in the place of Anthropocene. –Salikoko Mufwene describes language as a natural collective technology in his text Language as Technology, published in In search of universal grammar : from Old Norse to Zoque, edited by Lohndal, Terje et al. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013), pp. 327. –Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013) –In her article Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin, Donna Haraway refers to Anna Tsing’s paper Feral Biologies (published in Anthropological Visions of Sustainable Futures, University College London, 2015), which suggests that the inflection point between the Holocene and the Anthropocene might be the wiping out of most of the refugia. Haraway writes that “the way to live and die well as mortal critters […] is to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and recomposition, which must include mourning irreversible losses”. Published in Environmental Humanities, vol. 6 (Durham, MC: Duke University Press, 2015), pp. 159–160. In the same article, Haraway urges us to, instead of making more babies, make kin: to “unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species” by “the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds as assemblages (not species one at a time)”. Pp. 161–162.