22.-24.9.2023
Seili

Transhemisphérica working group reunited on-site and online to restart the Transhemispheric (residency*) Programme, which aims to explore and challenge modes of “residency” as local and at distance research and collaboration. Since its inception in 2018, the programme is aimed at exploring and fomenting affirmative physical, cultural, and environmental relations across hemispheres.

Taru Elfving and Lotta Petronella (CAA) hosted the Transhemispheric Session at the Archipelago Research Institute with Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Maria Kamilla Larsen and Luis Berríos-Negrón on the island of Seili, while Michy Marxuach and Fernando Lloveras joined virtually across the Atlantic.

The site-visit was supported by Nordic Culture Point.

Read more about Transhemisphérica here.

* ‘r’ initially signified ‘residency’, but we now expand it to resonance, rewilding, remediation, recognition, reconciliation, rebuilding, revolution…

20-22.8.23
Seili

The Aboagora Pre-Symposium, Edges of Knowing, invited doctoral researchers in the arts, humanities and sciences, along with MA arts students, to reflect on what haunts the systems of knowledge and the limits of the thinkable at this time of omnicrisis, uncertainty and change. In anticipation of the Aboagora Void Symposium, a total of eight researchers travelled to the island of Seili on 20-22 August for a two-day retreat. Led by curator Taru Elfving, the group consisted of artists, philosophers and scientists who applied to the retreat via an open call: Ida Grönroos, Aditya Jeevannavar, Sanna Lehtinen, Carlos Lesmes, Saara Mildeberg, Sanna Ryynänen, Alizée Ville and Nina Vurdelja.

The main aim of the Pre-symposium was to delve into the voids hovering at the edges of knowing and to bridge the gaps between disciplinary boundaries. Seili, with its complex history of institutions of care and control – from the leprosy colony and mental asylum for women to the current environmental research, nature conservation, and tourism development – played a key part in choreographing the retreat’s discussions. As well as taking into consideration their own arrivals and landings in a place that is not yet known to them, the participants engaged with a series of questions that called for a range of approaches to voids in the context of the island:

How can we address the hauntings in the landscape, in the archive or data sets, which gesture towards something that has been omitted or gone unnoticed and unnamed?

How do we attune to and approach these signals and signs of “nothingness” with a sense of urgency and curiosity, yet without hastily presuming access and opportunistically extracting from or filling the perceived void in a colonial manner?

What lies beyond the bounds of knowledge(s), the reach of senses, and tools of sensing?

Situated amidst the layered, socio-ecological narratives of Seili and the Archipelago Sea, the Pre-symposium was also anchored by a series of methods and modes of engagement carried out in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute. The group was taken into the archipelago’s underwater world through the care and guidance of Professor Ilppo Vuorinen and the long-term research of the institute. Time was spent observing sea samples through microscopes, which made visible some of the agencies that would otherwise escape human vision.

These practices of observation were accompanied by more embodied activities such as walking and swimming. In meandering through thickets of trees and over lichen-adorned rocks, the participants paid attention to the complex layers and sediments of time, history and ecology. In wading into the sea, attentions turned to the uncertain levels of danger posed to the group by the presence of blue-green algae floating in the warming waters.

As the Pre-Symposium came to an end, new reflections and questions on different types of voids and edges of knowledge emerged. In conversing together in Seili, the participants posed situated queries regarding signs of control and missing knowledges; hidden voices and agencies; and notions of care towards those we cannot see, sense nor wish to capture:

Why are there so many signs to control the movements of visitors in a conservation area and cultural heritage site? What gaps in knowledge does this signal to? What alternative modes of guidance could engage visitors with this place and explain why certain things are prohibited?

Whose names, voices, perspectives and agencies are not present in the historical documents displayed in the old hospital, cemetery and island landscape? How can we approach them and sense their haunting presence without presuming knowledge? What is missing from the maps but can be read in the landscape, and vice versa?

How can we care for and be accountable for that which cannot be captured by our senses or structures of knowledge, yet nevertheless makes our life and work possible?

Following the retreat, the Pre-Symposium group returned to Turku to share their observations and experiences with a live audience at the Aboagora Symposium held on 23-25 August at the Sibelius Museum.

Taru Elfving (CAA) has been leading the Aboagora Pre-symposium on the islands of Seili and Korpo since 2020. Each year, an open call invites researchers and MA arts students to apply for the retreat. The annual topic was derived from Aboagora’s The Five Rings thematic plan: Earth, Water, Fire, Wind and Void (2019-2023).

For more information on the Aboagora programme, visit: www.aboagora.fi.

5.-6.5.2023
Seili

How to listen to ecosystems in transformation? How to attune to the resonances of distant shores or the frequencies of pasts and futures in the here and now? Can you hear and sense the glaciers moving through time, carving the imaginaries of lands and seas, geological but also political and economic? What does the post-glacial rebound of Earth sound like and who can viscerally hear it? Whose voices are signalling climate emergency? What reverberates through the silences?

Spectral Listening retreat was an invitation to pause and listen to, on and with the island of Seili. The retreat gathered artists and researchers for two days to engage with different methods and modes of listening. The programme was loosely structured around walks, exercises and conversations aimed at tuning in to where and when are we amidst the changing archipelago.

Biologist Jasmin Inkinen of the Archipelago Research Institute guided the group to listen to the island environment, its diverse habitats and inhabitants. The retreat was facilitated by curator Taru Elfving and researcher Anastasia (A) Khodyreva. The participants were all ears on the shifting shorelines and restored meadows, in the nut grove and a tiny swamp hidden high up on the rocks, while sharing their own listening practices and experimenting with others.

Reflections on the retreat  can be read in the essay Attempts in Spectral Listening by Anastasia (A) Khodyreva in conversation with the participants. 

CAA  organised the Spectral Listening retreat in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute and it served as one of the pre-echos to the second edition of the Listening Biennial. The retreat continued the series of events How do you know what you know? Exercises in Attentiveness, produced by CAA as part of the project Spectres in Change, supported by the Kone Foundation, the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland and the Oskar Öflund Foundation.

30.11.-3.12.2021
Seili

CAA hosted the research group Towards Atmospheric Care (Hanna Husberg, Agata Marzecova and Liu Xin) in Seili under the clear sky of the first frosty days of winter. During the retreat the working group was guided on the island by Lotta Petronella and Taru Elfving, while thinking about the potentialities of a field guide on atmospheric concerns.

14.-17.9.2021 & 2.-5.11.2021
Seili

CAA organised two small collective retreats in the autumn 2021 with the aim to acknowledge and share feminist ecological practices that work towards intersectionally addressing the many spectres of reason haunting the present. Invitation to the retreats by Taru Elfving & Lotta Petronella:

We are living under a spell, and this spell is destroying our worlds. It’s time to cast another spell, to call other worlds into being, to conjure other worlds within this world. It is clear that the situation we find ourselves in now leaves us at the limits of language, and grasping at the edges of imagination. We need art, experiment and radical disruption to learn other ways to see, feel and know. (Natasha Myers 2021)

In the face of ecological crisis, it is urgent to reckon with the spectres of reason, to recall what lies hidden in the long shadows cast by the things and traditions considered reasonable and within reason. Knowledges and sensibilities that in the name of reason have been outcast and excluded are calling to be reclaimed. Today tired earthly commons, the gift of billions of years of laborless transformation, meet tired human bodies, drained by relentless and accelerating extraction. (Silvia Federici 2019) It may well be time to be unreasonable.

The Spectres of Reason retreats take place on the island of souls, and of seals, where the first public hospital in Finland treated leprosy with the word of god and later restrained unreasonable, or perhaps too spirited, women in psychiatric care. The retreats set out to think together and with this island that promises isolation yet never fully delivers total detachment, while recognising that its history refuses to lay dormant in the present. Particularities of the here and now are vividly entwined with elsewhere across diverse temporalities and planetary circulations on the island of Seili and the surrounding Archipelago Sea. The island has been guiding our thinking and practices in recent years, with its ghosts of biopolitical institutions and histories of othering, ecological transformations and their research, reproductive labour of care and repair. These myriad spectres do not await explanation or exorcism, but rather call for conjuring and conspiring with them. Haunting is a transformative way of knowing. (Avery Gordon 1997)

We suggest that whatever may or may not be called “ecofeminisms” are elementally plural: embedded and embodied, situated and partial, viscous and porous, vulnerable and fiery – on the frontline of urgent social struggles, in the shadows of ongoing histories of oppression and amnesia, in the small everyday acts of reciprocal care. In the spirit of spectrality, we are not one, nor alone.

We have numerous questions to start with, but hope that you could also bring your own to the island. Our questions, as this very invitation, are not fully formed but rather mere humble attempts to reach out, to begin and to continue. Tentative, respectful, curious questioning – without immediate demand for answers – is our method of retreating, together for a moment, from the exhausting state of emergency. This approach is guided by our sense that there cannot be such thing as an irrelevant background in an ecological worldview. (Maria Puig de la Bellacasa 2016)

How to be attentive to that, which has been left unnamed in the past, as the wave of patriarchal, colonial, industrial, capitalist and anthropocentric modernity has swept forward in its supposedly linear path? How to do so while withholding the urge to name it all as part of the same old trajectory called progress? How to attend also to the limits of what is acknowledged as an ecological worldview, or as feminism? How to notice things previously – and in the present – unnoticed or unnoted, when all that is left are records limited to the questions that were at some point selected as worthy of attention in the institutions of reason and care? What is acknowledged and what remains unrecognised in its contribution and potentially crucial role in knowledge production – or in the reproduction of life? How to pay gratitude to everyone and everything that makes our breath, thought and labour possible?

Paying attention acknowledges that we have something to learn from intelligencies other than our own. Listening, standing witness, creates an openness to the world in which the boundaries between us can dissolve in a raindrop. (Robin Wall Kimmerer 2013)

Thank you to the participants of the retreats:

Spectres of Reason I:
Anastasia Khodyreva, Ayesha Hameed, Elina Suoyrjö, FRAUD (Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo), Saara Hannula, Kati Roover, Johannes Vartola, little Inna and Matleena the dog.

Spectres of Reason II:
Antye Greie, Arja Renell, Giovanna Esposito Yussif, Maija Mustonen, Mari Keski-Korsu, Matterlurgy (Helena Hunter & Mark Peter Wright) and Jackson the cat.

We are grateful for the generosity of professor emeritus Ilppo Vuorinen, professor emerita Marjut Rajasilta and researcher Jasmin Inkinen, who shared their knowledge with us once again at the Archipelago Research Institute.

The Spectres of Reason retreats were organised as part of the project Spectres in Change, supported by Kone Foundation.

References:
Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World, 2019.
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 1997.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013.
Natasha Myers, How to Grow Livable Worlds, 2021.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Ecological Thinking, Material Spirituality and the Poetics of Infrastructure, 2015.

3.-6.9.2019
Seili

The retreat focused attention on the entwined histories and futures of humans, sheep and cows, plankton and herring, ticks and endangered meadow plants in the ecosystems of the archipelago, where the shorelines and salinity of water are in a ceaseless flux, made increasingly unpredictable today by climate change. How do we bring our methodologies – in all their senses and sensibilities – to this island, to the encounters with its ecosystem, history and the various fields of knowledge and ongoing research there?

14.-17.5.2019
Seili

How to arrive somewhere so rich in the sediments of interconnected histories of arrivals, of landings that not only have transformed but keep on affecting the place? Where, like everywhere, all future landings will have impacts, more and less intentional, impossible to forecast in their entanglements with the complex ecosystemic processes of change always already unfolding. Furthermore, how to arrive for a visit at this very point in time, when it is no longer possible to imagine anywhere as an isolated island?

The island of Seili may be approached as a microcosm of exclusion, enclosure and experiments – with its history of institutions, from leprosy colony and women’s psychiatric hospital to contemporary scientific research and nature conservation. Yet here it also becomes tangible how an island is connected through myriad flows with others and with the mainland, and with continents beyond its immediate surroundings – ecologically, socially, culturally, symbolically. What do we bring with us, take away and leave behind? How have our everyday practices already made their mark on this very island? Here and there are interwoven together in their fates, but here matters in all its specificities, nevertheless, even when indistinguishable from the planetary. How to arrive with all of this in mind?

Upon arrival, “how to inherit the layers upon layers of living and dying that infuse every place and every corridor”, as Donna Haraway asks? This calls for sensitivity and responsiveness to the rich inheritances in a place, so as to be able to respectfully adjust our practices in relation to it. If there is no practice independent of its surroundings, as Isabelle Stengers argues, how do we take practices to new environments – into contact with different ecosystems as well as other fields of knowledge?

The retreat Spectres of Landings set out to address these questions upon our arrival to the island, as collaborations are about to start taking shape and forming their future trajectories. The participants were invited to share their thoughts as well as various methods, protocols, and rituals of landing – inherited, invented, borrowed, emergent – relevant for their artistic and/or scientific practices. The programme of the retreat gave insight into the long-term scientific research at the Archipelago Research Institute and field work methodologies as well as their changes, and introduced the current artistic enquiries of the participants. The travel days as well as the two full days on the island were also focused on attentive embodied immersion and observation of the archipelago environment, its present and the past.

Retreats act in the project Spectres in Change as methodological temporary withdrawals from the state of emergency in order to take time to collectively reflect on the shared urgencies and resonant individual enquiries in the project Spectres in Change. Retreat is reclaimed as a momentary pause in habitual patterns and processes of practice, which activates other modes of engagement and sensibilities critically situated in relation to the specific ecosystem and history of Seili. Furthermore, it implies retreat from the conventions of boundary-making between disciplines and epistemologies, nurturing an ecology of practices.

Spectres in Change is a multidisciplinary research platform initiated and directed by CAA in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute of Turku University on the island of Seili, Finland, with core funding from Kone Foundation (2017-2022).

Thank you Ilppo Vuorinen, Jari Hänninen, Katja Mäkinen, Jasmin Inkinen and Johannes Sahlsten of the Archipelago Research Institute, Katja Bonnevier of the Archipelago Sea Biosphere reserve, and the guest artists FoAM (Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney), Matterlurgy (Helena Hunter and Mark Peter Wright), Saara Hannula and Kati Roover.

References:
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016.
Isabelle Stengers, Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices, 2005.

18.-20.6.2017
Seili

In June 2017 CAA invited a small group of artists, curators and researchers to the island of Seili for a pilot retreat of the project Spectres in Change.

The aim of the retreat was to gain insight into the archipelago context in question and to identify points of intersection between these local specificities and the ongoing interests of the participants, which could form a base for future research collaborations. We also set out to think together about relevant models for potential long-term support structures that could be developed for the exchanges between artists and scientists on the island.

The retreat gathered around questions arising, first of all, from the work at the Archipelago Research Institute, but also from the complex histories and ecologies, economies and epistemologies that are interwoven in the very fabric of the island. Furthermore, we reflected on the very notion of “an island” – and in this case an island within an extensive archipelago – in its particular potential for fostering site-sensitive and situated practices in response to the urgency of ecological crisis:

What is the potential of strategic temporary retreats or voluntary exiles? How does the intensity of isolation draw into focus not only specificities of the site in question, but also their far-reaching entanglements and reverberations with elsewhere? How may island and archipelago logics offer methods for thinking across disciplinary, spatiotemporal, and subjective boundaries? How may an island context heighten acute ecological and social concerns of today – in terms of practices of knowledge, hospitality, and codependence, amongst others?

Invited artists and curators:

Autogena Projects (Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway), Ayesha Hameed, FoAM (Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney), Pablo Jose Ramirez, Joanna Sandell & Steuart Wright.

Scientists and researchers with local expertise:

Jari Hänninen, Katja Mäkinen, Ilppo Vuorinen, and Outi Vesakoski from the Archipelago Research Institute of Turku University, Katja Bonnevier of The Archipelago Biosphere Reserve, and Laura Hollsten of Åbo Akademi University.

Further notes and documentation by FoAM can be found here.

Spectres in Change is initiated and coordinated by CAA (Taru Elfving and Lotta Petronella) in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute of Turku University. It is funded by Kone Foundation, Arts Council of Finland, Konstsamfundet and Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland.