RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research

Artivism

Artivism

CRITICAL PLAYGROUND AS PLAY-CE UTOPIA. (MANIFESTO FOR A DIFFERENCE IN ITSELF.) (2023) Anartist
City of Panic is an urban intervention, which has been realized by The Anartist (Gian Luigi Biagini and John Dunn). It happened in 2019 in the central train-station square of Helsinki. The installation-performance is a "caged mini-golf", which catches and elicits many disruptive resonances. The intervention challenges, contests and makes visible the "iron cage of rationality" that organizes the capitalist urban space through an ordoliberal trans-institutional consensus that does not leave space for the expression of Difference. The intervention puts in "play-ce" a critical and mystic playground of Difference in Itself that breaks the cage of assimilation to a functional hierarchical identity. The article describes this complex experience of rupture and cata-comic rapture by a phenomenology of the process in becoming. A phenomenology and an ethnography of difference, with theory references "in flight", that cannot be completely grasped by a homogenous and unified signifier, narrative, representation. Even the style of the graphic tries to evoke this "virtual heterogeneity of intertwined planes and becomings" that are sutured and re-composed by creative writing.
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The Unbody of Construction and the Memory of Placeness (2023) Marija Griniuk
The study explores the connectedness of the narrative of the artwork to the sociopolitical contexts of the public space in change. Through the reflexive artistic research within the project “Construction” I aim to discuss how Memory is bound to the Body. I investigate how Constructs of the public space embody the Memory and how demolishing of those constructs impact the narrative of the presence within absence.
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Stitching for Material Sensitivity: From Traditional to Activist Embroidery (2023) Fabiola Hernandez Cervantes, Maria Huhmarniemi
Cochineal is an insect that has been used for textile dyeing since pre-Hispanic cultures in Mexico. This exposition discusses the use of the cochineal insect as a natural dye for wool and the bridge between ancient indigenous knowledge and contemporary artistic research. A transatlantic connection is created between the Mexican plateau and the Arctic region, merging traditional knowledge, contemporary art, crafting and conceptualisation through an artistic embroidery initiative involving researchers, craft artists and human rights activists living in the province of Lapland in Finland. Documentary photos of artistic practice and research diaries enhance discussion on sustainability, tradition, craftivism, decolonisation and indigenous knowledge. This exposition embraces collaborative craftivism through a group initiative called Embroidered Stances, discussions about material interconnectedness in a web-of-life conceptual structure that includes sheep wool, cactus, cochineal and ancestral knowledge. The endorsement of material sensitivity is narrated into embroideries by the first author Cervantes and discussed, acknowledging complexities within issues of cultural and ecological sustainability.
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Three gardens as places of performative resistance and resilience (2023) Pekka Ilmari Niskanen
This research paper focuses on three different gardens located far away from one another. The common nominator of these gardens is to bring the community together for sharing vegetables, herbs, and discussions. Two of them are united by a new innovation, combination of sand and water in lieu of traditional soil. These are the Sahrawi sandoponic garden in the refugee camps in southwestern Algeria and a Helsinki Sandoponic Garden in Helsinki Biennial 2023. The Helsinki Sandoponic Garden is a project by an artistic research group called PHOSfate formed by Pekka Niskanen and Mohamed Sleiman Labat in 2018. Our PHOSfate garden emphasizes the injustices the Sahrawi population and the Baltic Sea have faced. Becoming a refugee is the utmost injustice that can happen to an individual. Eutrophication is causing a trauma for the Baltic Sea and for the inhabitants living on its shores. Sahrawis are refugees because of phosphate mining, and phosphate fertilizers are the reason for the eutrophication in the Baltic Sea. Coping with the trauma and healing from it is an aspect shared by the community garden in Paris and the Helsinki PHOSfate Garden. The community garden of Jardin Truillot in Paris was created after the Bataclan terrorist attack 2015 to help those living near the theater to heal from trauma. When focusing on the importance of gardens, I will engage with some of the discourses around environmental justice and ecological justice. In my text, I will show that the recognition of injustice is the central activism in these three gardens and in my garden practices.
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Life Between Art and Blood (2023) Heidi Pietarinen, Amna Qureshi
Artist-researchers Heidi Pietarinen and Amna Qureshi from the University of Lapland have conducted in-depth work on the innovative BioARTech laboratory environment and utilisation of available resources for a bioart project called Life Between Art and (Reindeer) Blood. The aim and focus of the project were to utilise reindeer blood as a reindeer herding by-material instead of treating it as waste material. Both artist-researchers were curious to see how nature as a living design medium becomes perceptible to humans. In this study, a living design medium refers to material production that incorporates simple living organisms such as reindeer blood, material-driven design and co-designing, with an entity having its own agency. Bioart can be used to develop innovative design and art practice to work with nature (biology) and the non-human, such as live tissues (i.e. materials engineered by nature itself), microbes or living organisms (birds, insects, trees and blood), to bring about new design solutions and life processes. Through the arts-based research (ABR) approach, this ground-breaking research aims to develop activities that integrate environmental biotechnology, bioart, surface pattern design, and science.
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Challenging animal-based food systems: Citizen Surgery on vegan body simulators (2023) Kaisu Koski
This article discusses the voices of resistance emerging in the work of the Citizen Surgery Collective, an interdisciplinary practice-based research group I initiated in 2020. The collective consists of artists, critical posthumanists, anthropologists, and activists in the UK and the Netherlands. The collaborative work included in this exposition concerns the relationship between (non)human animal bodies and food, specifically through surgical simulation and sensory skills acquisition. These practices are geared toward multispecies justice, and they form a serial inquiry into ways of challenging animal-based food systems and meat-related cognitive dissonance. Reversely, they investigate ways to train surgical skills with food and by eating instead of using live or dead animal models. Our collective practices re-enact surgical choreographies and dialogue to analyze both the materiality and connotations of the food/body intersection and the process of dissolving interspecies boundaries by eating.
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Terrania (2023) Nat Grant, Nicky Stott
Terrania is a gothic eco-drama podcast project exploring gender-queer and disability themes in the face of climate catastrophe. This project draws on contemporary environmental realities to explore how (dis)abled, genderqueer bodies might be reimagined in dystopian and utopian futurity narratives.
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