Covered in note stands struggling to unfold them and fold them again, being stuck in them, trying to get out, on the move with all those not stand on my body.

Forged Eden
The most essential thing for me in art is direct contact with people and involving the audience in my actions. Meeting people is more important to me than the great need to be understood. This is quite an original approach in the world of performance art, which is, as it were, by definition, the art of the individual. Perhaps that is why I am often invited to represent Finland internationally. Over the past decade I have performed 150 unique actions around the world. I have completely dedicated myself to this practice.

Unfortunately, I have the impression that, apart from a small group of fellow performers, Finland is not particularly proud of me and it was all a pointless sacrifice of a meaningless man. That’s why as a ‘milestone’ of my 30 years living and working in Finland, I would like to prepare a demanding performance ‘Forged Eden’. I intend to make a ten-day journey on foot, pulling my portable, mobile forest behind me, i.e. a cart full of exotic potted plants. I plan to explore bike paths and forest trails from Helsinki to Vaasa. Walking through cities, perhaps I will try to establish contact with passers-by and convince them to accompany me for some time on this journey with their favourite plants, but I don’t care if I won’t succeed. I’m stepping ‘offside’, away from the people, the urban hustle and the art institutions to walk 420 km, in the company of plants that, like me, don’t fit into the landscape.

Liina Kuittinen (b.1983)

As an artist I am on my all fours. I am next to the ground. I see the surface from a very short distance, the small particles and the space between them. As an artist I have to move my whole body closer to the object if I want to see it more clearly. I am on my four so my hands are not swinging freely. I am not able to take the object in my hand and bring it closer to my eye. I have to take my eye closer to the object.

The main materials in my practice are body and performance. Performance is for me about going on in the world. It is about happening, taking place, about moving and changing.

Sub Astra
Sub Astra is a meditative experience of video, images, sound, live music, text and interactive parts.

Madelaine Sillfors (b. 1982, Kiruna), Kenneth Hansson-Tornéus (b. 1978, Jukkasjärvi) and Daniel Westman (b. 1986, Långshyttan) are based in Umeå. Madelaine and Kenneth grew up in Kiruna and have been working together with Daniel to develop the piece Sub Astra (2023), in an open call for Bildmuseet, Umeå. Last year they went on a research trip together to record sound in the old and the new parts of Kiruna, a town in the very north of Sweden, currently being torn down and moved due to the mining of iron ore in the city.

The soundscapes are a mixture of sounds recorded with various microphones in the new and the old city, from parts that meant a lot for us growing up. Houses and whole parts of the city are being torn down, erased, and what will be left is a ‘nature’, fenced off, forbidden to enter. There is a sadness hard to gather. We are trying to understand the consequences of these changes, places will cease to exist, other than in our body memories. The sound of the explosions in the mine as heard from different parts of the city is also recorded, also there are sounds from the mountain village of Abisko, the lake Torneträsk and the lake Rissájávri/Trollsjön. 

The work reflects complex emotions connected to the profound transformation that their home town Kiruna is undergoing. The expansion of the Kiruna iron ore mine is making the land unstable and so the whole town is being relocated to allow further exploitation of the precious natural resources that lie below its’ old streets.

Special thanks to Bildmuseet Umeå who supported the original development of the piece

Performance art is my main discipline since action, process, intuition and reaction are at the core of my interests. I see performance art as a possibility to experiment and learn something new of who we are as humans, beyond representation. The performance art I am interested in unfolds beyond mediating through decorations and production values. I believe in art in a way of what is held in the undefined, what cannot be grasped through exact words. I want to create an art that flows in the undefined and can hold open interpretations, revealing who we are.

At some point I fell into the world of performance art. Great people, nice festivals and wonderful places were waiting for me. Mostly I presented solo actions, leading to an impressive website that is too full to read anyway (so I stopped updating). Since a few years I focus more on collaborations, finding various ways to work and create together. I will send a mail to the other invited artists with a proposal to develop something together. Let’s see what comes out of it.

The white figure

I have a white dressed figure who comment on various social phenomena. It engage itself in both personal and more common issues. It is a shy character who do not hesitate to be loud if it feels it is the right thing to do. This time I`m thinking that the theme might be about death.

I am knee-deep, and hands-full in photo-sensitive film and expanded print-making adventure!

The core of my expression became the fusion of film and print, often oscillating between different scales from large canvases to 16mm films, space projections and live-cinema performances.

As an visual artists I work with lens-based media and expanded printmaking. I am exploring the substance of print by analogue machinery and alchemy of film processes to aim to uncover how traditional film projecting can be reinvented to show more than a straightforward depiction of reality.

Polish original, living, working, creating and having fun in Helsinki, heading for the moon.

WARM DATA

Step into the bustling streets of Toronto through the small-scale project designed as live expanded cinema, where the visual narrative unfolds in layers of urban information captured entirely on 16mm black and white film to tell the story about city symphony. Here the landscape meet the choreography of paper folds created with an overhead projector, guided by the music of Kuupuu.

Entitled “Warm Data,” it shows deep into the fabric of the metropolis, where every frame pulses with the city dynamics and offers another dimension of understanding to what is typically learned only through quantitative data, (cold data).

Mathematician Irma Optimist started doing performance art in 1989. Since then she has performed at dozens of festivals, museums and galleries all over the world.

In most of her work, Irma Optimist has been very personal, discussing the conditions of identity, femininity, death. Gender, locality and nature have been her themes. The works themselves are transformations, in which the existence of the artist is connected to ritual and live installation.