How To Like Finland and How Finland Can Like Me (too)
is a choreographic project intertwining artistic research and ongoing artistic and daily practices as well as production and performances. The work looks into corporeality and feelings of patriotism from an immigrant’s perspective.
I work with the carnal body of patriotism. Here, I interpret patriotism as an affectual bodily affiliation with one’s place that is shared with a group. I focus on the questions of belonging to a place, leaving a mark of having been in that place and tracing the past marks of others. Patriotic body is constructed through following certain narratives that uphold some marks while disguising others. In this project, I strive to specifically work with marks that are less straightforward or intentionally hidden.
It is important for me to stay with the notion of patriotism – a contested word that carries the traces of its patriarchal etymology (from Greek patrios ‘of one’s fathers’) and points toward national identity, national pride, national belonging, everything that is national, and therefore, filled with tension of in and out, of us and them, of taut, slack and in between. The whole orientation of ‘patriotism’ is challenging for me as an immigrant, an economic migrant, a perpetual foreigner, a queer citizen of the autocratic homophobic Russia, a non-EU student on the EU territory, a former undocumented alien in the United States, a fatherless child. Having lived and being affectually attached to all three places, the US, Finland and Russia, I investigate my corporeal attachment to a place and its ghost fathers, delineated by national borders, policies of exclusion, and sociopolitical climates. My current location compels me to investigate my corporeal relationship with Finland in particular. Through this inquiry into the process of and access to liking Finland, I can begin to unravel my flickering connections to other places that linger behind Finland as shadows.
While this work stems from a very intimate narrative, it tries to transcend the personal story and representation. Hopefully, the work becomes a meeting point for deep and conflictual inquiries into a patriotic carnal body altogether and brings forth alternative relationships with places and its borders.
In the fall 2021 “How to Like Finland and How Finland Can Like Me (too)” developed into three performance works: 41st National Park of Finland in Merihaka (Merihaka, Helsinki), Factory of Patriotic Affects (Theater Academy, Helsinki), and Small and Nice Immigrant Shop (IsoMyyri shopping mall, Vantaa).
More details about the artworks are coming soon!!!
