04.10.2023

In what ways are the climate crisis and biodiversity loss reflected in the way live artists work and the aesthetic choices they make? What kind of audience relationships do they set out to engender with their works?

Post-fossil and post-Anthropocene artists are turning to live art to facilitate their search for ecologically and socially sustainable ways for humans to continue to co-exist. In doing so, they are broadening our understanding of who, and what, this shared existence might encompass.

What is apparent is that these artists and artistic collectives have felt compelled to disentangle themselves from the sort of high-pressure, project-centric neoliberal notions of productivity and efficiency that, in the absence of other available alternatives, came to dominate the independent arts sector in Finland from the 1990s onwards. 

The artists are seeking out the ideals from which the genre originally emerged: openness, playfulness, a slow coming together. Their express desire is to let go of imperatives and to break free from the stranglehold of managerial control. They ascribe to the distinction offered by Bojana Kunst between “art work” and “project” and between life’s essential durationality and the brief and ever-accelerating durationality of a project. A short-termist project mindset serves to reduce art to a transactional entity, made visible only by the added value and utility it might be capable of generating. A project that has been carefully planned and mapped out in advance offers little scope for spontaneity or surprises. In fact, Kunst has urged artists to rebel against the oppressive temporality inherent in projects and to demand for that temporality to be framed as duration instead.

The practice of every one of these artists is based on sympoiesis, an ethos of collective creation, rather than autopoiesis, or self-creation. Donna Haraway uses this term to highlight the fact that there can be no self-organisation; everything is interwoven into complex, dynamic, specific and historic systems, where everything comes to bear on the emerging artwork.  All performances are created in collaboration with the world, surrounded by the world. The very act of existing amidst the ruins of capitalism on a damaged planet (Tsing, 2021) is a cry for this type of approach, borne out of the ecological crisis and a new materialism.

Sustained creative processes that encompass elements of both research and performance and series-based works are an opportunity for artists to pursue their chosen themes in the broadest sense and creates times and space for them to develop their own distinctive aesthetic. It is the seriality in itself that facilitates experimentation, exploration, trial and error and allows the artist to remain attentive to contributions from all material agents. The work takes place in an open-ended, processual dimension, allowing the series-in-progress to emerge into being in a gradual, autonomous way.

The fundamental difference between these two approaches is built into the language itself, as most recently pointed out by the artist Saara Hannula.  Esitys, the Finnish word for performance, takes its cue from the word esi, which is used to describe relative location. As a prefix, like in esi-isä (forefather), esirippu (stage curtain) and esiliina (pinafore), it describes a state of temporal or spatial precedence. In the word esitys (performance) the esi- denotes a state of being on display but also hints at previously accrued experience that is now being shared. You could also argue that esitys refers to a state of being seen and observed, while its English equivalent is more functional and suggestive of an action or process.

Live artists linger over their chosen topic, leave it to simmer. They home in and return to a slow way of working, seeking out enduring connections. A creative process like this allows the artists to truly immerse themselves in their work, to engage in contemplation, to the extent that life and art themselves become intertwined. Their works erode the distinctions between performance, artwork and art. So much so that what they produce may not even “look” like art in the traditional sense or like finished works of art. This could be interpreted as fragile or weak agency (Tuija Kokkonen) or as an emptiness that presents opportunities for perceiving and experiencing from a multiplicity of new perspectives that which is in the process emerging.

Contemporary theatre and live art are increasingly preoccupied with duration, a key concept for the philosopher Henri Bergson. Duration means heterogeneity, qualitativity, immeasurability. Duration speaks to the nature of time itself as well as our experience of it. Durational time resists measurement and quantification. It exists beyond the confines of the economy as a qualitative entity that is experiential, sensual and instinctive. Linear time, by contrast, is not an inner experience but an externality.

André Lepecki has offered an insightful critique of the way “duration” is used in the context of performance art to describe works of extended length. This implies a prioritisation of quantity over quality and intensity. Similarly, duration can also lead to a preoccupation with endurance, the performer’s ability to withstand suffering. Replace chrononormative measurement with a lingering experience capable of tapping into the very nature of time itself, however, and duration can come to mean just one fraction of a second. What emerges is not a result-oriented “duration” but a slowly unfolding experience that enhances our ability to observe the world around us with a compassionate eye.

In a context where resources are limited, artistic endeavours are increasingly defined by an ethos of scarcity, while at the same time artists are deemed to be engaged in “unproductive” consumption and excess (Georges Bataille), specifically in relation to time, duration and agency.  Artistic processes and artworks themselves are often characterised by a Heideggerian Gelassenheit, a “leaving-be” and weak agency (Kokkonen), with a fragility at their core.
 

Duration and weak agency lend focus to the non-human and allow non-human action to emerge into visibility

In her Memoranda, a series of durational works of art titled A Performance with an Ocean View (and a Dog/for a Dog) – II Memo of Time (2008), Chronopolitics – III Memo of Time (2010) and Chronopolitics with Dogs and Trees  (Stanford, 2013 and Helsinki, 2014), Tuija Kokkonen “investigates the distinctions between performance, humans and non-human agents, creating spaces where human beings can enter into interaction with other species”. Her first ever memorandum on time, titled Mr Nilsson (2006/2007), posed the question of what it means to be human during the era of performance, engaging in an attempt to recall lost animal species. Her earlier series of memoranda, dating back to the 1990s, explore the concept of freedom.

Kokkonen is responsible for articulating the concept of weak agency. For her, weak agency and durationality are tools of potentiality: it is through a slow unfolding, in the flow of time, that we have the opportunity to see where the possibilities lie. It is through duration that we can come to recognise agents whose presence is governed by timescales and rhythms entirely distinct from our own.

Kokkonen’s most recent series are titled Kemi – Memo on Trees I and Kemi – Memo on Trees II (2022). The first of these was concerned with the act of remembrance and with roots and denial.  By exploring events and experiences that people would prefer not to recall or which are traumatic for them to relive, it engaged in an act of political counter-remembrance. Kemi – Memo on Trees II gave voice to young Extinction Rebellion activists, framing them as transformational agents and creating a space in which their civil disobedience can be understood and embraced. 

The first, place-specific, part of the series was performed in Kemi, the northern Finnish city from which Kokkonen herself hails. Kemi is a post-neoliberal dystopia which is speculatively framed around a presentation given by the Institute of Remembrance’s Department of Theatre Arts in 2122. It is an exercise in viewing our contemporary moment from a future vantage point, revealing a time when “nature”, “Earth” and “forest” were seen as little more than resources for human exploitation. The roots of this attitude are then traced back to the 1980s, specifically to Margaret Thatcher’s idea of economics as a method the object of which is to change the heart and soul. On stage, the performers portrayed a neoliberal severing of interconnection, a lobotomy of the soul. They had lost the art of acting, or, as one of the characters puts it, “the ability to truly empathise with another person, with another species, or with an event or a phenomenon and the ability to give expression to that empathy using the different actorly methods at their disposal”.  The memorandum also explored how the neoliberal rhetoric insinuates itself into language and, through language, into people’s minds and imaginations, leading to a narrowing of perspectives and a paucity of political alternatives on offer.

Kemi – Memo on Trees is about roots and the search for a “felt sense”. It draws a link between trees and cities, presenting urban environments as living organisms that, like trees, have their own root systems responsible for carrying vital nutrients: “It is the roots that know how to sustain the organism”. A radical ecological sensitivity was invoked in the search for the lost “felt sense”. According to the anthropologist Tim Ingold, felt sense equates to a comprehensive understanding of humanity and nature which science has rejected but which continues to live on in art.

Kemi – Memo on Trees II is about developing a new and compassionate understanding towards the biosphere and explores the vital importance of the kind of resistance currently being practised by Extinction Rebellion. A play reading that took place at and outside Kiasma Theatre in Helsinki, and was preceded by an intention-setting prologue, took its conceptual cue from the acts of forgetting and denial: “left to alter at an ever-faster pace, our environment will rob us of our ability to remember”. The on-stage reading was constituted as an intimate encounter with two environmental activists. Four audience members at a time were invited to take a seat at a table with one of the activists and to listen to them for a period of 15 minutes. The reading, delivered via headphones for a distancing effect, allowed the audience members to gain a momentary insight into the landscape of experience the activists inhabit, their memories of the forest and the practical forms of activism they pursue. The activists’ words were given free and unforced expression within the shared space. The reading concluded after 15 minutes, when the sand in the hourglass placed on the table had run out. “When the sand runs out, our time will be over.” In this setting, the hourglass became a weak agent, giving material expression to how little time remains. 

The performance presented to the audiences the kind of perhaps fragile transformative agency that is currently manifesting itself through acts of civil disobedience and which seeks to engender political change through an instrumentalisation of the human body. The climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction event have prompted activists to practice direct democratic citizenship and to stand in solidarity with the forest.

Durational collective exercises and social sculptures

First established by performing artist and researcher Esa Kirkkopelto in 2004, the Other Spaces collective has developed a series of collective physical exercises that allow people to create altered and “non-human” experiences for themselves and for others. In the course of these metamorphosising exercises the participants use their own bodies, undergo change as a group and apply a series of collective techniques in their quest to adopt altered states and guises, the scale of which ranges from the microscopic to the cosmic. The exercises are also an invitation for participants to explore the possibilities and limitations inherent in being human. These exercises and the communal settings in which they are performed are designed as an opportunity for dismantling anthropocentric ways of thinking about and experiencing the world and for building a posthumanist and biosphere-centric understanding of our earthly existence. The collective have delivered these place-specific, experiential and participatory events in a variety of urban settings around the world.

Reindeer Safari (2010–) is an urban journey of discovery that is intended to provide insights into how reindeer experience the world. As part of this exercise, the participants come together to form a large herd of reindeer. They are herded by shepherd dogs, portrayed by members of the collective. The herd is invited to wander through the urban setting for a period of several hours. They are free to travel in silence or make noise and to graze as they go. Through their membership of a herd, the audience are able to experience life as a reindeer.

This exercise is always preceded by a training session during which the participants are given information about reindeer, their habits and their relationship with humans. After the walk, the participants undergo a “sorting”. This debriefing session is an opportunity for them to share their experiences of the exercise.

Other Spaces have run the Reindeer Safari in a series of semi-urban and semi-wild environments. Any urban setting automatically becomes rewilded when viewed from the perspective of a herd animal like a reindeer. The flock does not travel in a linear fashion, and there are no rules or prohibitions imposed on their behaviour. What is important to note is that the purpose of the exercise is not to encourage participants to pretend that they are, in fact, actual reindeer. Instead, they are asked to roam collectively as a herd and to remain observant of their own experience of the exercise, paying particular attention to the senses they use to take it in and the way in which their perception of time shifts along the way.

In Wolf Safari (2014–), the participants are invited to experience their urban setting from the perspective of a wolf, a wild, highly sociable and often controversial apex predator. Here, the participants are asked to form a wolf pack that will traverse the city at night. The transformation into wolves is achieved through the participants adopting a series of behaviours the species typically exhibits. The participants will howl, observe and greet one another, form a pack and finally go on a hunt together. The experience concludes with a debriefing session during which the participants are invited to share their experiences with each other.

In communal and participatory artworks of this kind, the individual subject is transformed into a herd animal, momentarily relinquishing its selfhood. It may be that these sorts of moments of collective existence are capable of tapping into precisely what Tuija Kokkonen has termed weak agency. They have the capacity to enhance our sensitivity towards nature and our ability to engage in interaction with other species.

In a further production by Other Spaces titled The Great Barrier Reef, participants are tasked with keeping the titular coral reef system alive. To achieve that aim, the participants, who can be of all ages, take on the role of spectator and performer, responsible for creating both the performance and the underwater ecosystem. The participants are invited to familiarise themselves with the reef’s resident aquatic species, their movements and behavioural patterns.

Our current planetary circumstances, which have been brought about by globalisation, and which are profoundly affecting people’s life circumstances and experiences, are leading to fragmentation, overcrowding and displacement, bodily states in which we all share. What prompts all these restless, rootless bodies to move and what is it that keeps them together? For the Other Spaces collective, the answer lies in the kind of compassion we can only practice and feel once we are sufficiently estranged from our own embodied reality.

Avalokiteshvara Superclusters, the collective’s multi-stage compassion exercise, is designed to take place on the edge of a city, on wasteland or in places where the natural and the artificial come together in random and unmanaged ways. The exercise is intended as a journey towards a first-hand experience of equality between all beings and towards compassion on a cosmic scale. It weaves together Avalokiteshvara, a Buddhist deity and embodiment of the virtue of compassion, and superclusters, the largest known structures in our universe.

Enlightenment Machine is the latest contribution from the Other Spaces collective. Faced with the word enlightenment, I found myself responding with fear and doubt. How could anyone even consider aspiring to such a state of perfection? But I needn’t have worried. And, given that the title combines the word “enlightenment” with the word “machine”, I should have immediately realised what was going on. The participants completing these exercises are not unlike machine operators; our bodies contain all sorts of possibilities, they are capable of more than just ordinary, everyday tasks, we can use them to imagine, to pause, to observe ourselves and others and to enter other spaces.

On the experiences and alternatives available to the precarious subject

Where do the opportunities lie for art to form part of activist movements and social campaigns, and how can it expand beyond its current institutional frameworks and into new settings? Can artworks thrive anywhere, settle, put down roots? And if not anywhere, then where? What sort of evolutionary processes, encounters and interactions can artworks engender? These are some of the questions Finnish performing artist Lauri Antti Mattila has been asking, while working on a poetics of politics or a politics of poetics.

Time is limitless, we can waste it at will. We can only truly connect with another person after we have spent a significant amount of time together. The Ice Trip (Jäämatka, 2017) is a performance centred around a private sensory experience, in which a passenger travels by car to the Arctic Sea accompanied only by the vehicle’s driver. This event-cum-social-encounter was a focused opportunity to connect with another person and to prompt a new exchange of “felt sense”.

H (2019), the story of Horatia, is a companion piece to Hamlet. “This performance is a quest for a soft, sensual, yielding space, a stage for the kind of things and ways of being that Hamlet could not accommodate.” It brought to the stage an alternative materiality based on listening and a connection with another person. Life is hard, gentle, a co-existence and often simply a series of blundering attempts at living. H was accompanied by a study on Pseudo Hamlet authored by Mattila in 2029 (!). The participants were invited to engage in an unforced sharing of space and to enter a landscape shaped by the feelings of grief and longing prompted by the death of a friend, expressed through words chosen with exquisite care.

Are You Searching for a Job? (Etsitkö töitä?), created in collaboration with Juhani Haukka, is a contemporary artwork that invited members of the public to share with the artists a description of what their dream job would look like. A public call for entries attracted a total of 2,574 contributions. A number of people who had written in were then given the opportunity to take on that dream jobs for a period of two months, backed by grant funding. The contributors’ dreams were showcased in an exhibition at the Finnish Labour Museum Werstas in 2021, comprising documentary video clips, written materials and sound recordings charting the process. The exhibition was complemented by a series of workshops organised by the artists and an experimental job centre that invited people to reimagine what work looks like. The responses to the original call were compiled into a book that explored the applicants’ dreams in greater detail.

The key words for Are You Searching for a Job? were love, enjoyment, desire and beautiful work. It succeeded in producing alternatives to our capitalist society’s consumer-centric understanding of what constitutes art and in rethinking our traditional social model based on permanent full-time salaried employment and the way work is valued within it. The approach chosen by the artists offered an encouraging and experimental alternative method for organising our shared existence. The process was an exercise in ordering and analysing existing information, experiences and practices in pursuit of new alternatives. This mirrors the work of economists J K Gibson-Graham (the shared nom de plume of Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson) whose work on postcapitalist political ideas and practices has emerged into great prominence in recent years. 

Woyzeck Game, an experimental play co-authored by Mattila with Klaus Maunuksela was staged by the Helsinki-based Live Art Society and interpreted as a durational performance installation titled Meeting Woyzeck (2022) at Helsinki’s Railway Station Square. Over a period of eleven days, members of the public could join Woyzeck for everyday household jobs inside the “fishbowl” in which he was based. Woyzeck Game explore how bodies and machines, dreams and ghosts intertwine to create the precarious subject. The word “game” can be understood as a power struggle held in suspended animation by a set of invisible rules. Conversely, it can also be viewed as a process that never stops. The act of playing brings things into motion. Those participating were able to influence game play, and the outcome was not predetermined.

When it comes to interrogating personhood within a system of precarious capitalism, it is difficult to imagine any source material of greater relevance than Büchner’s Woyzeck. The game provides an insight into our prevailing notions of efficiency and productivity and the ideal of a human machine that will function perfectly, indefatigably and unceasingly while also being fully adaptable and replaceable. The artists turned to a gamified dramaturgy to explore the violence that arises from the norms that govern the way we work and the experience of being subjected to unfair power dynamics where erroneous assumptions and identity categories are used to construct a subject that is unrecognisable to the self.

Woyzeck Game created an alternative that allows participants to come together in a space of gentleness and healing. But this is no idyll: “we make dissonant noise”.  In an antagonistic space, it is possible to work together and to look for the kind of optimism that emerges through unexpected encounters with others.

Maunuksela’s Antagonist (Antagonisti, 2018), is an overwriting of the Antigone myth, a tragedy about resistance and an unyielding spirit. Antagonist shows Europe as an exclusive fortress with those seeking admittance to it condemned to the mass grave that is now the Mediterranean Sea. Antagonist lends visibility to the fateless and the paperless. UXO (2019) is a blending of sound art, live art, contemporary music and ritual with a dramaturgy and libretto by Klaus Maunuksela. In it, the sound, much like the capitalist machine, continues on its inexorable path. The textual content is classically capitalist, featuring the words of Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher. They are countered by Marx, Engels and Walter Benjamin.

In his Poetics of Ecological Sorrow (Ekologisen surun poetiikka), Maunuksela confronts the fact that everything he writes and everything he does is imbued with a sense of ecological sorrow. The climate crisis as a crisis of thought and action forces us to question the conventions that govern the way we write, think and view the world and to resist instrumentalisation. All writing must stand in defence of the unique value of experience and the multiplicity of ideas. In his Grants and Feelings (Apuraha ja tunteet, 2021), Maunuksela investigated precarity as a common denominator for people from a range of different backgrounds. Maunuksela is also one of the authors of The Work Refuser’s Handbook (Työstäkieltäytyjän käsikirja, 2019). Woyzeck Game picks up where it left off.

Throughout the 2000s, experimental plays and performances have continued to emerge in Finland that seek to erode barriers, discover entirely new forms expression and new aesthetics and interrogate what plays and live art are capable of. They have resisted the logic that leads audiences to being fed oversimplified replicas of reality. In Squid Game, the South Korean television show that first aired in 2021, a group of people who find themselves in financial dire straits are invited to play a series of violent games to win cash prizes and to escape a reality that is even crueller and more violent than the games they are subjected to.

Instead of serving up another helping of brutal gamification, Woyzeck Game was an exercise in reality building, where technology is not used as a tool for isolating the subject and fragmenting communities. Instead, Woyzeck Game reflects Donna Haraway’s idea that technology can be used to radically reconfigure not only gender relations but other social relations too. For Haraway, the cyborg is not a fixed machine but a form of resistance.

Experiments with anonymous encounters, representation and power

 

The Feminist Secret Society of Helsinki has devised a live art concept that brings together two anonymous participants who do not know one another and invites them to communicate through the medium of a “borrowed body”. Encounters (Kohtaamisia, 2021) builds on their earlier dating show-based spectacle First Encounter (Ensikohtaaminen, 2018) that uses performance to investigate what happens during an encounter with someone you know nothing about. Does anonymity facilitate intimacy?

Encounters is preoccupied with power, representation, anonymity and empathy. What if facelessness were a means of achieving meaningful interaction with another person? Is it possible to represent another person? Is representation the same as portrayal?

At the start of these encounters, the audience is invited to watch two performers, known as “borrowed bodies”, who are seated at a table placed on the stage. Via headphones and microphones, a link is established between these on-stage performers and their “invisible partners”, who remain hidden throughout to both the audience and to each other. The borrowed bodies will then repeat, word for word, what their invisible partners tell them.

The invisible partners have power. They are, in effect, the directors, deciding how the physical, face-to-face encounter between the borrowed bodies will unfold, completely in control of what they want to reveal or and what they want to keep hidden. They have control over every inflection and every gesture.  That’s not to say that the borrowed bodies are powerless. They have the option to interrupt the proceedings or withhold their participation at any time. During the encounter I witnessed, there was no confrontation, racist or otherwise, and the participants remained safe at all times. The way in which members of the audience and the borrowed bodies identify with the proceedings depends on the invisible partners and borrowed bodies.

Every new encounter involved a new set of invisible partners and borrowed bodies. In the encounter I personally witnessed, the borrowed bodies were two Black performers: Laura Eklund Nhaga, an actor, writer and spoken word artists, whose practice explores marginalisation from a number of different perspectives and Sophia Wekesa, dancer, DJ, performer and commentator on culturally sensitive and antiracist practices.

Laura Eklund Nhaga and Sophia Wekesa were both astoundingly proficient at representing their anonymous and unknown partners whose voices were conveyed to their earpieces and then simultaneously relayed by them to the audience. Occasionally, as I witnessed Eklund Nhaga and Wekesa’s consummate skill in affectively and ethically surrendering themselves to the moment, I found myself forgetting about this dual communicative aspect.

The Feminist Secret Society of Helsinki’s concept offers an extremely exciting method for asking fundamental questions about performativity and representation, including the racialised body, in a live art context. My own experience prompted me to recall British-Ghanian artist Larry Achiampong’s blackboard with the slogan Our lives are political because our bodies are repeatedly written on it in white chalk.

Who did these borrowed bodies represent and who did they portray? Who was speaking? We cannot escape our skin colour or our assumed gender. There exist in society a range of assumptions and expectations, even normative constraints, that are brought to bear on how people are expected to speak and act depending on their ethnic background and gender. This performance demonstrates the power vested in the body that appears on stage and also clearly illustrates, as noted by Judith Butler, the power of language as a performative act. Linguistic utterances are enactments, they bring a phenomenon into being. The form this particular performance took constitutes an interesting fissure between the utterances and the borrowed bodies speaking them. Who do the words belong to, to this body or the other body? As they watch the dialogue unfold in front of them, the audience’s attention turns to the new landscape opening up between the bodies and the words that are being spoken, to the gestures and micromovements the bodies make and, ultimately, to the question of how we might go about engendering mutual compassion and understanding.

Cosmic energy flows – on building antifascist bodies

 

Teatteri Venus collective’s artistic practice has for some time been preoccupied with the body and with critiques of ideology. They are also continuing to work with masks. Their deconstructive and antifascist approach, as seen in The Re-invention of the Self, draws on the ideas of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. His The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1934) is as relevant today as ever, if not more so. Teatteri Venus’s earlier Wonderland (2016) used performance to explore nationalist and conservative border policies and anti-immigration sentiments. The performers appeared dressed as a gang of children, donning giant masks, and proceeded to terrorise others, drawing arbitrary boundaries to demarcate what they termed “our playground” and exclude others.

The Re-Invention of the Self focuses on constructing an antifascist body, liberating it from body armour and birthing a whole new kind of human. Reich believed that when we open up to the flow of energy within our bodies, we can also open up to the universe. For Reich, this energy was cosmic in scale, representing the body’s profound connection with nature.

In The Re-Invention of the Self, performers become enveloped in an armoured exterior before breaking free from within it. The audience watches as the bodies of two of the performers are wrapped in metallic ribbon, securely fastened with tape. Their arms and legs are then given the same treatment. A series of armoured figures, variously enveloped in cardboard, a tent and iron body armour, then enter the space. The people we see are only recognisable as human because their lower legs and feet remain visible. The range of movement available to these robotic creatures is limited and they are unable to make contact with one another or with themselves. We cannot see their eyes, their ears or even properly make out their heads. We also see a parade of hooded figures, giant children marching to the beat of a drum like soldiers. They move in straight lines, perfectly in step, their faces hidden behind masks. When they appear for the second time, they are clad in identical blue bodysuits, their heads and faces covered but now holding balloons. Things suddenly feel looser, freer. During the performance, a robot has been going around the audience, serving biscuits.

The Re-invention of Self shows us the liberation of armoured minds. It gives us a catwalk on which bodies previously stuck in lockstep with a herd can emerge into the freedom of their own distinctive selfhood, as the restrictive, one-way-only choreography and the range of movements give way to a high-energy, individualistic, multifarious physicality that ultimately takes over the entire space.

The artists’ ongoing intellectual pursuits have subsequently led to A Presentation/Proposal for a Good Life (Esitys hyväksi elämäksi, 2019–ongoing), an attempt at understanding what lies ahead for the welfare state in the context of finite planetary resources. Staged across a number of spaces at Helsinki’s Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, it was a chance for audiences to consider a number of ideas like the UN Declaration of Human Rights and its ongoing relevance at a time when the consensus on issues like democracy, citizenship and humanitarian protection is suddenly under threat. The second part of this work was presented in the form of a 24-part advent calendar in 2022.

Experiments on audience formation

 

A member of the Reality Research Center collective, Tuomas Laitinen’s solo endeavours have focused on audience. In a three-part series, he presents a range of experiments designed to investigate the conditions under which an audience comes together. As a phenomenologist, he asks fundamental questions about what constitutes an audience and explores different ways of understanding the relationship between audience and stage.

Some of the elements repeat throughout the three parts, notably the acts of reading that are delivered in a series of different formats. Laitinen delivers a series of experiments on the ways in which audiences are formed and made meaningful. His work seeks to conceptualise the heightened autonomy and the greater possibility and freedom inherent in what he terms the “audience body”. He also considers the conventions that diminish that freedom. Where do the boundaries of the viewer, the audience body, lie? What invisible boundaries are there, and how are they broken?

For all three parts of the series, the audience were invited to follow a script or set of stage directions. Each part began with a simultaneous gesture of gathering in direct contact with the other audience members but what this involved varied from part to part. The prologue or programme for the final part, perhaps best described as a mental raising of the curtain, provided the audience with the following information: “Written items are provided inside. They will shape your encounter.” There was a ritualistic beginning, not unlike a communion. We were invited to “eat the word”, which in practice meant consuming an edible sheet with writing on it made with starch, water, olive oil and vegan food colouring. We were each invited to consume our own piece before the event proper began, forming a theatrical communitas.

The reading we were asked to do was not of a conventional kind involving screens or sheets of A4 paper. Instead, the participants were exposed to texts in all sorts of formats, including letters written by the artist himself. During the first of three parts we were given clear directions, we acted more or less in unison, seeking our way across the stage as a collective as we moved from text to text. The subsequent parts involved a much greater degree of freedom, with each participant connecting with the texts on display at their own pace. A series of scrolls were placed on the floor, which we could unfurl to see the contents. Eventually, the unfurled scrolls took over much of the floor space, which meant that you could now choose to lie down to read them or even roll around on and amongst them. There were books placed in water which you could read by submerging your hand and turning their pages. The gentle heaviness of the water and the presence of the other people who would randomly gather around the water to read alongside you created a wonderful, shared encounter.

The final part consisted of an invitation to exercise freedom. Here, the focus was on slow, unmanaged, self-directed being. This was a cultural event, yes, but one that was entirely free of any externally imposed constraint. The participants were now free to rest and to be an audience, their actions governed only by their own interests and desires. Time was abundant. 

Audience Body (Yleisöruumis) prompts reflections on the conditionality and performativity that characterise the relationship between audience and artwork. Like the performance itself, the audience too is performatively constructed. Just like gender, sexuality, racialised bodies and ableism are performative, so the audience, a collective group of viewers, participants, witnesses and experiencers, is performatively generated and organised. 

 

Hanna Helavuori

Hanna Helavuori is a freelance writer with a fascination for experimental new forms of performance at the intersection of live art, dance and theatre. Tuntoisia ruumiita – miten ollaan teoksissa maailmassa (Bodies of feeling – on existing within artworks) came out in 2022.