Becoming a Goddess in a Music Video Trilogy
Applying Intersectional Feminism in a Transnational Folk Singing Collaboration in Finland and Bulgaria


By Emmi Kujanpää

Introduction

This exposition presents my artistic work, focused on folk singing in Finland and Bulgaria, from 2018 to 2022. The exposition examines the application of feminist strategies to enhance female agency, transgenerationality and the creation of counter-mythologies within the field of transnational folk singing. The introduction presents a description of my artistic practice within the framework of feminist art-based research. 

The second section discusses intersectional feminist pedagogy (Elonheimo and others 2022) and its application to artistic practice. This exposition focuses on the differences and intersections between gender, age, and economic inequality within the frame of my artistic work. By analysing power relations from autoethnographic (Chang and others 2013) and ethnographic perspectives in transnational collaborations (Vertovec 2009) and in the process of composing new folk music (Hill 2005, 2007; Haapoja-Mäkelä 2020), this text applies intersectional theories to the analysis of artistic practice. It also examines representations of gender (Ahmed 2017, 2021) in feminist folk music composing and explores the feminist new-materialist concept of becoming, in relation to the processual and constant state of change in the making of art (Tiainen 2012; Moisala and others 2014). The artistic material of the exposition is presented in its second half, which consists of three music videos and their analysis from the perspectives of gender representation, transgenerationalism and transnational power relations. 

The conclusion presents summarising remarks on intersectional feminist art-based research and its potential for developing feminist strategies, and creating more socially sustainable methods of transnational artistic collaboration. By applying intersectional feminist pedagogy to my art and art-based research, my exposition is placed at the intersection of feminist folk music studies and ethnomusicology (Koskoff 2014), transnational folk music studies (Hämäläinen and others 2023) and activist feminist research on the work of women composers (Välimäki & Koivisto-Kaasik 2023) in a contemporary context. My research seeks to determine how the application of feminist strategies in the field of transnational folk music strengthens female agency as well as how this agency is supported by creating counter-myths and aspiring to equality in transgenerational relationships.  

Photo: Vilma Metteri (2019). Photo taken during the filming of Ogrejalo slantse – Vuota vuota, Lauttasaari, Helsinki, Finland.

My artistic practice is situated at the intersection of feminist research and folk music composing. By combining feminist theories with the composition of new music from a feminist perspective, this article presents a concept of feminist composition in folk music (Ingleton 2015; Partti & Devaney 2023). This concept is closely related to the traditions of écriture féminine (Cixous 1976) and feminist writing, which explore issues of gender, power, race and equality in fiction, non-fiction and academic writing, from personal, social, and global perspectives (see, e.g., Dawson 2023). This exposition features the artistic work and production related to my solo album Nani (2020a, Nordic Notes and Sibelius Academy), which was recorded in Bulgaria and Finland between 2018 and 2019. The album consists of my compositions, lyrics and arrangements and is based on the folk music traditions of Bulgaria, Finland and Karelia, the latter being an area located in both Finland and Russia (for additional information on Karelia and Karelian music, see, e.g., Suutari 2020). The key topics addressed by the album include motherhood, motherlessness, daughterhood and sisterhood. Nani is named after the Armenian mother goddess, who was also a goddess of war and wisdom (Ananikian 2010). The content of the album was formulated in 2017, which coincided with the intensification of the #metoo debate and movement in society.

The musical essence of the album is derived from the interplay between solo voices, the kantele (Finno-Karelian zither) and the Bulgarian female folk choir. The choral parts of the album were recorded by the 11-member choir, The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices Vocal Academy (also known as Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares Vocal Academy), which consisted of the younger generation of the well-known ensemble. The lyrics of the songs were written predominantly by me, and they were partly multilingual: I combined Finnish, Karelian and Bulgarian in the lyrics (on multilingualism in art, see, e.g., Hamidi Isacson 2022). For example, in Kuutar – Goddess of the Moon, I combined the lyrics of a girls' warning song about sexual violence from both Karelian and Bulgarian folklore, using Bulgarian and Nordic ornamentation and shouting vocal techniques.  

Three songs from the Nani album were released as music videos (2019–2022), and thus the artistic material of this exposition consists of the music video trilogy: Ogrejalo slantse – Vuota vuota (2019), Celestia (2021), and Nani (2022). The music video trilogy was filmed in Finland and Bulgaria in 2019–2022, and it was directed by Vilma Metteri. Antti Kujanpää was responsible for filming and editing in Finland, and Svilen Boianov was responsible for filming in Bulgaria in 2021. For all three music videos, I co-wrote the script with Vilma Metteri. All music videos and compositions in this exposition include detailed information on the performers, collaborators, and members of the working group. The process of filming the music videos was photographed at various stages, and these photographs by Alexandra Boianova, Antti Kujanpää and Vilma Metteri are displayed in the different sections of the exposition. 

Alongside the artistic work, I conducted three ethnographic group interviews with Bulgarian singers. These interviews focused on the singers' experiences of corporeality, affects, nationalism, and gender in Bulgarian singing. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the interviews were primarily conducted as video interviews. From these collected ethnographic interview data, I highlight interviews with six Bulgarian female musicians and interweave them with the analysis of gender and power relations in the analysis of artistic practice. By including ethnographic interviews with Bulgarian female musicians involved in the Nani album and music video trilogy, I aim to renegotiate the conventional power relations in transnational artistic work.  

My research is therefore a combination of ethnographic and autoethnographic (on collaborative autoethnography, see Chang and others 2013) as well as feminist activist methods (hooks 2003; Ahmed 2017, 2021). The main argument presented in this exposition is that by applying the theories of intersectional feminist pedagogy, it is possible to create more sustainable artistic practices and develop women's agency in international and transgenerational artistic collaborations. This argument is particularly relevant in contemporary Europe, where artistic collaboration has been hampered by the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine (2022–) and by growing neo-nationalism (see, e.g., Stanchev 2023). Intersectional feminism also helps identify the silenced voices in both contemporary and music-historical archival material (Välimäki & Koivisto-Kaasik 2023). It also supports giving voice to the silenced issues in intertwined personal life stories and making these silences visible and audible through artistic practice. 

Photo: Vilma Metteri (2020). Photo taken during the filming of Celestia, Arabianranta, Helsinki, Finland.

During the release of the Nani album in 2020 and the music video trilogy spanning from 2019 to 2022, two global social crises occurred: the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, which escalated in 2022. Both my transnational artistic collaborations and my artistic practice were affected by these crises. The Nani album was released in January 2020, and the concerts for the album project were interrupted. In September 2021, I was able to travel to Bulgaria, and the Nani music video was filmed with the members of The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices Vocal Academy choir outside Borisova Park in Sofia. The other part of the Nani music video was filmed in Finland from 2021 to 2022. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the original female warrior theme of this video (2022) was changed to a theme concerned with a farewell to the mother goddess. 

In this exposition, I aim to articulate how my artistic practice of composing the songs for the Nani album and creating the related music video trilogy gave rise to some new theoretical concepts, such as feminist folk music composition during the artistic research process. At the same time, I will discuss how the values of my artistic practice – advancing equality in transnational collaborative work and giving space to often-silenced subject matters such as violence in my art – became clearer during the processes of my artistic research and were intertwined with existing feminist theories, such as Sara Ahmed's (2017, 2021) concept of feminist listening as well as intersectional pedagogical approaches (Laukkanen and others 2018; Elonheimo and others 2022). My decision to focus on artistic work in Finland and Bulgaria is based on my long-term involvement in both countries. As their histories, democracies and economies differ, it was important to analyse power relationships as part of the collaborative artistic process. In this exposition, there is constant mutually affective interaction and overlap between my artistic practice and the feminist theories applied, with both elements influencing and being influenced by each other.

The Kokoshnik Swallow Crown (later the Bird Crown), which appears throughout the music video trilogy, was initially intended to symbolise the various roles associated with womanhood. However, eventually its role turned out to be in a constant state of flux during the artistic process, intertwining with the changes in European societies caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war. A feminist theory of becoming (see, e.g., Tiainen 2012; Moisala and others 2014) helped me accept these changes, giving me an understanding of how the Bird Crown also symbolises the constant change we are experiencing.

Photo: Alexandra Boianova (2022). Photo taken during the filming of Nani, Borisova Park, Sofia, Bulgaria.

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