12.8.2022 at 9:30-18:30
Seili Island

How do you know what you know? How to pay gratitude to all that makes our thought and labour possible? How to attend to that, which has been left unnamed and unnoted? How to withhold from the urge to name?

For the past four years, CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago has been nurturing the sharing of methods, protocols and rituals – some inherited or borrowed, others invented or emergent – between artists visiting the island Seili and scientists with decades-long embedded practice in Turku Archipelago. We invite the audience now to take part in this ongoing experimentation with exercises in attentiveness.

On Friday 12th August, a programme of performances, walks, sittings and other exercises will present new site-specific works commissioned by CAA for the island of Seili in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute. The participating artists include Band of Weeds, Foam Earth (Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney), Fraud (Audrey Samson and Francisco Gallardo), Kalle Hamm, Lotta Petronella, and Matterlurgy (Helena Hunter and Mark Peter Wright).

Seili and its myriad spectres have been guiding the work of CAA together with artists and scientists. The ghosts of environmental transformation, histories of othering, and reproductive labour of care have not called for explanation or exorcism, but rather invited acts of conjuring and conspiring with them. They have demanded a reckoning in the face of the abundant inheritances, so as to recall knowledges and sensibilities that lie hidden in the long shadows cast by traditions considered reasonable.

How do you know what you know? Exercises in Attentiveness events are organised collaboratively by CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago and New Performance Turku. The programme and the presented art works are produced as part of CAA’s project Spectres in Change and have been supported by Kone Foundation and the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland.

For more information, visit the Facebook event.

Limited spaces. Book your ticket directly via Holvi.

Art Works & Exercises

Band of Weeds
The New Pangaea

An interspecies cantata performed in the museum church of Seili. The cantata reflects the complex entanglement of human and plant life on the island. It introduces twenty plants, which represent diverse modes of migration to and disappearance from the island. The cantata has been composed of field recordings of plants translated into sounds audible to the human ear.

FoAM Earth
Post Glacial Rebound

A soundwalk to encourage intimate connections with the island. Subtle resonances and disturbances, ecological transformations hovering on the edge of perception. The many sounds of flight. The signalling of plants and plankton. Listening as the biological time of generations intersects with the slow time of tectonic forces.

Matterlurgy with Katja Mäkinen
Otolith Reading

A conversation and practical demonstration about how scientists read climate data from the non-human world. Matterlurgy in collaboration with scientist Katja Mäkinen will share methods across art and science for listening with and reading information in the ear bone (otolith) of the Baltic Herring – a fish whose changing physiology has been linked to climate change and the shifting conditions of the Baltic Sea.

Fraud
Fields of May

An infrastructure converging practices and historical-material specificity which create the conditions of possibility to conjure worlds attuned to non-extractive rhythms. The salvaged masts, which compose the seating area, bear witness to colonialism and timber trade as much as to the changing nature of Finnish forests. Together with the herring windsock, they act as a structure to chair multidisciplinary events to discuss the potentiality of more-than-human legal ecologies.

Lotta Petronella
with Jasmin Inkinen, Lau Nau, Anna Karhu-Cormier, Cecilia Westerberg, Seppo Parkkinen
Själö Poeisis

Lament to Pine Trees is a polyphonic, collective gesture towards the girdled pine trees in the south forest of Seili performed by a small choir. A scent altar guides us back to the island. The Apothecary is an installation of medicine, environmental essences, scent archives and plant colours. Botanical Session with Henbane is a reading and observations with henbane on the grounds of the old hospital.

Archipelago Research Institute, Seili
2.6.2022, 10.00–16.30

Stressed Herring (Stressaantunut silakka), a day-long workshop at the Archipelago Research Institute, opens up the world of researchers and the changing realities occurring under the surface of the Archipelago Sea. Docent Marjut Rajasilta, research doctor Katja Mäkinen and artist Arja Renell will guide you through multi-generational herring research from the perspectives of both science and art.

Read the field notes for Stressed Herring

Since the 1980s, research related to the growth and reproduction of herring has been conducted at the Archipelago Research Institute in Seili. The research shows how the species adapts to a changing environment across a period of 40 years. One of the many trends that the data indicates is that the herring’s habits and characteristics have altered in response to changes in the Baltic Sea ecosystem.

The artistic starting point of following herring research has been to document and raise questions about the meaning of long-term scientific research. The real value of long-term research can sometimes only be determined decades later, and it is not possible to determine all of its benefits in advance. For example, the data collected on herring decades ago can be used to retrospectively map the development of climate change and its effects on the Baltic Sea.

Long-term research also reveals how prevailing trends in science at certain periods determine the importance of the research. An understanding of the context that determines one’s own choices and the limitations of the information that supports decision-making helps the researcher to understand broader entities and to be aware of making quick conclusions. The notion that an individual is part of a continuum of researchers is meaningful in itself.

During the day, participants will familiarise themselves with the institution’s herring research and its different phases, as well as the relationship between the researcher and the researched. How has a species or group of species been selected as the subject of research? How does the relationship with the research object develop in long-term research work? What information is left out of scientific research?  The topic will be approached through a variety of presentations, discussions and exercises.

The purpose of the workshop is to open up different approaches to both scientific research and being with another species.  A series of discussions will be held in response to the following questions: What can we learn from another species? How can we practice approaching otherness and being with it so that we give our senses space to observe and find connections? How can we learn to be a more equal part of this multiplicity of organisms, plants and minerals? How can we respect it as an independent value and not just as commodities intended for humans?

The event will be held in Finnish, with English used as a second, intermediary language. Participants are welcome to use either Finnish and English for the discursive components of the workshop.

Registration for the event and optional overnight stay on the island, 2-3 June, is required as places are limited. Accommodation and meals are at your own expense (for pricing information, Visit Seili).

For the full itinerary (in Finnish), visit our Facebook event. Alternatively, for more details or to register, email info@contemporaryartarchipelago.org.

Stressed herring is organised in cooperation with the Archipelago Research Institute (University of Turku) and CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago. It is part of the event series, How do you know what you know? Exercises in Attentiveness, which brings together and publicly shares a multi-year collaboration between artists and researchers at the Archipelago Research Institute on the island of Seili. The series is part of the CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago’s project Spectres in Change and it is supported by the Kone Foundation and the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland.

Archipelago Centre Korpoström
21.5.2022 at 13.00-16.00

The short film Archipelago Science Fiction was realised in collaboration with the islanders in Turku Archipelago in 2011. Their fears and dreams for the future come together in four different visions of what the archipelago might be like in 2111.

The screening of the film will be followed by an open discussion with the artists Tellervo Kalleinen, Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and Antonia Ringbom: How did the future look like in the archipelago ten years ago? What has changed since then? Does anything seem even more timely today?

Archipelago Science Fiction was commissioned for the exhibition Contemporary Art Archipelago, as part of Turku 2011 European Capital of Culture programme. Artists Tellervo Kalleinen, Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and Henrik Andersson did numerous interviews in the archipelago, wrote scripts in workshops together with the islanders, and realised the film with more than a hundred locals as actors. Artist Antonia Ringbom created animations for the short film.

The film screening and discussion is organised by CAA in collaboration with the Archipelago Centre Korpoström. The event is part of the programme Ecology of Change, supported by Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland.

13.00-14.00 film screening
14.00-16.00 discussion (in Finnish and Swedish)

The film is 25 minutes long, in Finnish and Swedish with English subtitles. The event is free.

Turku to Seili
6.7.2021

The Midsummer Mast was disassembled on the Varvintori square in Turku and floated from the river Aura to the island of Seili by boat in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute of Turku University. Once on the island, together with local carpenters and boat builders, the museum ship Sigyn’s old masts and deck planks will be refashioned by FRAUD into an outdoor public sculpture Fields of May.

Warmest thanks to Jari Hänninen and Petri Kinnunen of the Archipelago Research Institute of Turku University for making this last maritime journey of the masts possible, to Lotta Petronella for the environmental essence created for the journey, and to Tuomo Rinne and Atte Pylvänäinen for the expert assistance on the floating of the masts.

Midsummer Mast and Fields of May by FRAUD are commissioned by CAA as part of Spectres in Change, funded by Kone Foundation. Fields of May will be inaugurated in the spring 2022 in Seili as part of an exhibition and a public programme in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute.

Midsummer Mast has been presented in Turku in co-operation with Forum Marinum and supported by the City of Turku. The mast was first hoisted in Fiskars as part of the exhibition Meadow during summer 2020 in collaboration with ONOMA. The work has been realised in collaboration with Entisöinti Rinne Oy.

Read more on the Midsummer Mast here.

4.9.2020
New Performance Turku

In collaboration with the New Performance Turku Festival, CAA invited festival audiences to travel to the island of Seili from the city of Turku on a day trip, 4 September 2020. The aim of the day’s programme was to share the ongoing processes of working with artists and scientists on the island. The talks, walks and performances were loosely framed by the idea of caring knowledge, with an emphasis on practices of observation as sticky entanglement. With a focus on diverse artistic and scientific methodologies, CAA invited the visitors to follow their own traces among the entwined sediments of natural and cultural histories on the island and the surrounding archipelago: how do we know what we know? How to situate our practices in the midst of ceaseless change?

The group of thirty visitors from Turku were guided on the island by filmmaker Lotta Petronella and professor emeritus Ilppo Vuorinen. Artist Saara Hannula’s tea ceremony drew attention to perennial plants on the island and the experiential knowledge stored in them. At the Archipelago Research Institute biologist Jasmin Inkinen introduced the lively microscopic underwater community of plankton.

Lotta Petronella drew from her four years of immersed study of the historical hospital archives of Seili and the women’s stories buried in there, while she also followed closely the ongoing scientific environmental research on the island for her recently premiered documentary film Själö – The Island of Souls. Petronella also shared her current research that recalls the multilayered narratives of the island through the spirit of the plants.

Ilppo Vuorinen worked as the director of the Archipelago Research Institute of Turku University in Seili between 1992 and 2016, but he first came to the island as a biology student already in the 1970s. Vuorinen recently published a book on the history of the island and the scientific research carried out there over the decades, such as the time series documenting the changes in the Archipelago Sea ecosystem.

Saara Hannula’s Matara introduced perennial plants growing on the meadows of Seili, such as lady’s bedstraw, St. John’s wort, yarrow, meadowsweet and red clover. Most of these are archaeophytes that have arrived in the Turku Archipelago as a side effect of seafaring and agriculture. They may also have been used as medicinal plants at the hospital in Seili. Matara is part of Hannula’s perennial artistic research into the traces of cultural and scientific practices performed on the island over centuries.

The day-trip was organised in collaboration with New Performance Turku as part of the 2020 festival Mobilities. The programme in Seili was coordinated by curator Taru Elfving, with the assistance of Saskia Suominen, as part of the Spectres in Change project by CAA and funded by Kone Foundation.

29.-30.8.2020
Fiskars

Installation I, a Bat invited the audience to pause for a moment and draw close to a bat in the old threshing barn Puimala in Fiskars, where several colonies of different bat species live. The bats move in here for the summer to give birth and to take care of their young. During the day, they rest hidden inside the barn, while at night they go out to hunt for insects along the stream that runs past the building. The sound installation by Leena Kela encouraged the visitors to try and observe the space like the bats who inhabit the barn. Would it be possible for us to understand the experience of a bat and to experience empathy towards it?

Performance artist and doctoral candidate Leena Kela (University of the Arts Helsinki) has been working with bat researchers for the past couple of years on a performance series dealing with bats and empathy. Alongside the installation, a discussion event took place on Sunday 30 August, with the members of the research group BatLab Finland (Finnish Museum of Natural History) Piia Lundberg and Katarina Meramo in conversation with Leena Kela and curator Taru Elfving.

The installation and discussion were part of the public programme of the exhibition Meadow in collaboration with ONOMA cooperative and CAA.

I, a Bat production included: Art installation by Leena Kela, sound design Marko Hietala, echolocating device Roope Pellinen and Matti Husu, and the bat sounds by Harry Lehto. Bat experts for the Fiskars installation were Thomas Lilley (BatLab Finland) and Jarmo Markkanen. The work has been supported by The Arts Promotion Centre Finland.

2.2.2019
Turku

“calling for the invention of modes of gathering that complicate politics by introducing hesitation”
(Stengers, 2018)

CAA co-organised a day of events at the inaugural exhibition of Kunsthalle Turku, Maan Oikeus / Earth Rights, in February 2019. “Maan oikeus” in Finnish opens up a plethora of possible meanings that reveal the deep entanglement of cultural and social structures with their material groundings. “Maa” refers not only to land, nation, and ground, but also to Earth. Distinctions drawn between specific sites and the planetary waver. The narratives of origin, identity and property are written in words that refuse to erect fixed boundaries.

The word “oikeus”, then again, stands for the court of law as well as for rights. Individual rights and the institutions of law appear codependent. If rights to the land are inseparable from the rights of the land, how to access laws of the land that are not merely laws applied to the land? Who and how to speak for the earth? Where and how to speak with it? What does the earth oblige those who claim rights to it? Rights, after all, come with obligations.

The events gathered a range of artistic practices around the shared sense of urgency posed by these ecological concerns. What the discussed practices all share is a deep commitment to take time, even while urged on by a growing sense of emergency, and be attentive to that which remains in the silences and shadows of the apparent order of things. In the face of the unknown, they may not provide answers but rather reckon with the complexities and specificities of the challenges haunting the present.

The day’s programme began with two workshops encouraging the audience to tune in with their senses to the questions resonant with the exhibition: through listening exercises, Sonic Commons led by Tuike and Simo Alitalo in the surrounding environment, and immersion in communication with one of our age-old companion plant species, Holding Space with Yarrow led by Mari Keski-Korsu. An afternoon of screenings followed with works by Arja Renell, Lasse Lecklin, Kati Roover, Niillas Holmberg/Outi Pieski/Jenni Laiti, and IC-98. Other artists of the exhibition also participated in the discussion: Saara Ekström, Liinu Grönlund, Harrieliveart, Saara- Maria Kariranta, Sari Palosaari, Leena Valkeapää.

The questions examined ranged from the escalating socio-ecological destruction caused by extractive industries, a case in point being the Talvivaara mine in Finland, and the fast unfolding changes brought by climate breakdown on the ecosystem and modes of life in the Arctic, to the legal im/possibility of land belonging to no-one. Beyond providing evidence on the not-seen, or giving voice to the otherwise unheard in the cacophony of the attention economy, the afternoon focused on situated and accountable practices of care.

The exhibition and the events were curated by Taru Elfving / CAA. More information:

www.turuntaidehalli.fi

References:
Isabelle Stengers, Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science, 2018.