How to Like Finland and How Finland Can Like Me (too)
This triptych performance work was made as an artistic part of MA thesis in Live Art and Performance Studies. The work dealt with the questions of patriotism, estrangement, foreignness, and institutional power through the means of fictioning, institutional critique, working with ready-mades, dance and conceptual art.
The work consisted of three consecutive parts staged in various locations significant in my life in Finland. 41st National Park of Finland opened in an abandoned playground in Merihaka apartment complex where I lived for several years. Factory of Patriotic Affects took place in one of the black box stages of Theater Academy in Helsinki - a place where I spent most of the time since I moved to the country to study. Small and Nice Immigrant Shop was installed in the old shopping center in Vantaa where I went for Eastern European food shopping.
Each fragment of the triptych bled into another, extended beyond its borders, left marks in each other’s territories just like a body of a foreign artist not contained in one place but spread and flickering in many simultaneously. Each artwork could be viewed as a beginning of a bigger artistic process where I commenced to explore my relationship with patriotism deeper through the modes of clashing various artistic registers together, examining bodily postures and intersecting references.
41st National Park of Finland in Merihaka (Part I)
41st National Park of Finland in Merihaka was a one-day fictioned national park in the abandoned playground. It simultaneously performed as a community participatory artwork, an installation, a contemporary theater piece, and a conceptual art gesture. All 215 residents of my apartment building received a personal letter of invitation to the opening of the 41st National Park of Finland in Merihaka. I learned the residents’ names from the public list posted downstairs in each staircase and delivered the letters personally dropping them through each door slit. Each letter was stamped with a fictional metsähallitus (’forest administration’ in Finnish) stamp that I designed and ordered.
The idea of fictioning a national park specifically came from thinking about the national politics that construct “moral landscapes” of a country and facilitate patriotic feelings toward a place. I encountered this idea in Petri J. Raivo’s research on Finnish landscape and its meanings. For me, to access the lineage of forty Finnish National Parks, by constructing the 41st National Park of Finland in Merihaka, meant to access the lineage of corporeal relationship with patriotism. The 41st National Park of Finland latched onto the well-prepared soil of patriotic sentiments that had been here since the process of constructing the land as belonging to a nation.
Factory of Patriotic Affects (Part II)
Factory of Patriotic Affects was a collaborative choreographic installation dance piece and fictioned Factory that produced patriotism from art stuff on the premises of Theater Academy. The work was realized together with Oula Rytkönen, Ilja Pippa, and Suvi Tuominen as performers and Olga Spyropoulou as a dramaturg. The work attempted to conjure, organize and twist patriotic feelings by bringing in the concept of a factory to the premises of the art academy.
The work was an excessive and messy performance of multiplicities that consisted of many beginnings that possibly could become future performances. As one of my supervisors Simo Kellokumpu commented in our email correspondence after watching the work: “I was invited to the mesh of bodyart, dance, choreography, object theatre, living sculptures, relational aesthetics and participatory elements.”
The performance ran for three days for an hour and a half each day.
Small and Nice Immigrant Shop (Part III)
Photos by Anti Ahonen. IsoMyyri Mall, Vantaa, FI. November 2021.