machine.becoming.body.becoming.labor.becoming.number.becoming.ghost
In May 2021, our performance duo Mean Time Between Failures (Suvi Tuominen and Dash Che) spent three weeks at Old Mine Residency, an art residency in Outokumpu, Finland, about 100 km from the border with Russia. The residency uses the facilities of a former copper mine factory to offer living and work spaces to local and international artists of various disciplines for the time period of up to a month. The factory hasn’t been active since 1989, yet the entire history and identity of Outokumpu town as well as the narratives of some of its residents are connected with the industrial labor or the factory’s service sector labor in one way or another.
For some time before the residency, we have been interested in doing artistic research about industrial labor and its ghosts, for instance, somatically researching how this type of labor leaves imprints on the bodies that are not affected by the work in those industries directly. While both of us had held various working class jobs throughout our lives as cleaners, vendors and servers, still we have been in a more privileged position than some of our ancestors - both of us had only an indirect connection with industrial labor. For example, Dash’s family on their mother's side comes from Magnitogorsk, a city located in the Ural mountains area of Russia, which was built around a large metallurgical plant in the 1930s. Most of Dash’s family worked at the factory, sustained injuries due to harsh working conditions, made circles of close friends among the coworkers, received factory benefits when being sick. While Suvi did not have a family history of factory work, she did have an experience of living in Outokumpu and exploring the factory site for two years. The town houses a vocational dance school, where Suvi studied, artistically interacting with the mine premises through dance practices and performances.
Thus, we chose to enter the contemporary Outokumpu site through fictioning practices of those two personal somatic narratives. As dance artists we worked not only with narrative and concepts, but with the body, exploring the site physically, staying with the site as well as dancing through the experiences that we did not have but embodied through imagining. The process of exploring the emerging fiction led us to finding a common past for these two places, Magnitogorsk and Outokumpu, that pointed toward some unknown future of 2040.
We conducted interviews with several residents of Outokumpu, where we asked them about their memories of the functioning mine and a current mine presence in their lives. At the same time, we did research on the economic impact of the mine on the development of the city of Outokumpu and the metallurgical plant - on the city of Magnitogorsk in Russia. We brought this factual, economic, social and somatic research to both Kino Marita, the Outokumpu theater, that is, on stage and to the streets of the town. For the latter, we organized a little intervention along the main street of the town, during which we held a self-made poster featuring symbols of both Magnitogorsk and Outokumpu. During the intervention we engaged with the passers-by telling them our fictional narrative about the historical connection between the Outokumpu and Magnitogorsk workers.
The story went that Dash’s grandfather Alexander, who worked at the metallurgical factory, suffered a serious work injury (that was a true part of the story) and upon recovery decided to create a secret interspecies union of workers and factory machines, in which workers practiced a more gentle approach to listening to their human bodies and to the bodies of machines. The second part of the story continued that at some point the workers of Magnitogorsk wrote a letter to the workers of Outokumpu, learning that similar practices of caring and tenderness toward the bodies were taking place at the Outokumpu mine. At the end of the story we said that we were in town to study the archives of the international correspondence that took place between the two groups of workers. The told fiction created a curious collective investment into the past - our listeners nodded, tried to recall if they heard this story before, validated our story by affirming with their gestures. We asked each person who we talked to to draw a pathway between Outokumpu and Magnitogorsk as they imagined it, in order to further affirm the connection of those two places. Then we collected and documented the maps.
We continued to work with this fictional study on the stage of Kino Marita theater developing and making a performance work of an unknown future of 2040 in which the first international symposium of two groups of workers would have been planned. Due to the time having passed, the workers gather in some kind of digital form, that is, they themselves become machines in our one-hour performance. In this work, we explore the future through fictioning the past and thinking about the working conditions, both of a factory worker and of a precarious artist but not comparing them. Our work in Outokumpu became a transdisciplinary artistic research: we brought the elements of installation, lecture, theater, contact improvisation, academic research, talk show, contemporary dance and social performance.