LEIK

METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

Task 1:

I enjoyed getting time to prepare a presentation to think and play. The hour worked, even though it felt very short and I got a bit stressed about the time limit. It worked because the structure was quite clear but also open. It was easy to have these three points to think about in the process. It felt helpful to start with the facts about the object, because it gave me some distance to this thing that is so emotionally loaded with personal stories. It was hard for me to relate my object to the space, so I felt a bit stuck when I was alone.

What was hard for me is to respond really quickly to tasks involving words, especially when my brain feels so mushy as today which makes it hard to formulate my thoughts in the moment hehhe. I thought the in-depth research-based presentations about others' stories of the evolution of their objects was inspiring, and I wish I had delved into this myself. I also think working within these walls felt somehow limiting, but also challenging in a good way, because the space feels so impersonal but also familiar.

METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

Task 1:

Starting with factual info usually helps when I dont have any other thoughts or ideas and I need a starting point. Sometimes it gives me some key info that i didnt see about the object, because I’m so used to starting with my personal stories and perspectives. So factual info and research about that usually helps to position the work somewhere.
I also like starting by just exploring the space wherever the work is even if its a typical theatre blackbox. I like things to be individually tailored to place, and I like spacial dictatorship - when a space dictates how I should choreograph my stories.
I’m still however trapped in my usual narrative structure, and my usual reliance on personal details. I would like to explore less narrative approaches, and maybe something more visual as well. Not to constantly tell the story about myself. And maybe not constantly tell a story at all. Time limits are useful though. Activate my brain faster. Parameters whatever they are also help.

METHODOLOGICAL REFLECTION

Task 1:

 What worked for me was the freedom to actually use whatever medium/frequency we want yet still having a clear structure to pivot from.

Also the frequency of sharing/talking since it took a natural flow and it felt like we went deep in the conceptual work without any fluffing around.

To echo the above, what worked the most was how specific and pin-pointed the questions were.

 I actually do use very similar methods to produce text with other people so I honestly wouldn’t add anything. Maybe though, what would be interesting is to compartmentalize stuff from each person’s writing and formulate one singular outcome text for each day???

METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

Task 1:

I thought the use of different lenses like relational, historical, and personal to look at the objects we had brought, I think it helps build context and also a critical/self reflective element to how we work.

The mind maps using post-its works well, alternative methods like all writing on one large paper and writing together could be interesting as well so we expand on our ideas together instead of individually.

The free structure also helped, I liked that I didn’t necessarily have to build a presentation or certain type of artwork and that it wasn’t limited to a certain medium. I also liked that there was important interaction between the objects we had brought and the spaces we were in.

I would be interested to see how/if the type of works we produce differ from what we typically produce (is this way of interacting/engaging/creating typical or atypical?).

METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

Task 2:

I was thinking about who I am when I am at home, and what makes that different from when I am out of home, and what is exclusive for these situations, even though out of home is a category that holds a lot of different situations. I was thinking about which actions exist here and there. I tried talking, but I usually don’t talk to myself, so it felt quite stiff. I do and the words follow, which is why I have enjoyed making songs for my performances. The words become clearer this way. It feels so intimate to talk. Sometimes almost too intimate. One thing I exclusively do at home is playing my keyboard. Just playing other artists' songs, not usually composing anything myself. Playing the keyboard is so comforting because when I do it I don’t feel that I have to be good at it. It is the ultimate intimate action for me. I have a hard time doing it even when my partner is at home. I did a course on music theory once, so now I just plink plonk away with my limited skills. When I step out of home I feel that I enter performance mode. Listening to music usually minimizes this feeling, also bicycling or being active in some ways. I listen to music everywhere I go, and with everything I do. Now my headphones are broken and I feel lost without them. My process is a chaos starting from a specific encounter with something that triggers my imagination; an experience that I blow up, scale down, dissect and emphasize. I ask who I am in this place, this context, situation, and how it could be. I was wondering what my “home-self” persona does here. If there was no piano in the space I ended up in, I don’t know what I would have been doing. Laying on the floor listening to music maybe. Watching youtube videos. Wondering what to do with myself.

Task 3:

I was starting with music that makes me feel at home.

The arrival. The home as a place to arrive to and depart from. It is easier to arrive home than to depart. I wanted to play the piano again, but it felt like I had already done it, so I wanted to do my other favourite activity which is feeding and observing the birds. Undress - never wear socks at home. Feet to the floor. Have a snus. Stimulate, keep going, keep active. How to rest? The birds are fighting for a spot at the bird feeder. I ask them to calm down, it is enough for everyone. In Bergen I used to feed the birds at the city’s main square. There are so many pigeons there, sometimes they would cover me. In Helsinki I meet pigeons so rarely, but I am so happy when I do. I love pigeons so much. Their trust, their gentleness, their soft bellies on my fingertips. I’m hoping to build trust with the small birds on our balcony. I haven’t managed yet, but I keep trying. Come as you are, anyways. Usually there are sparrows, great tits and blue tits. One time a couple of ring pigeons, and two times even woodpeckers. Our balcony is full of bird shit, but I don’t mind it because feeding them brings me so much joy that I want to cry. I could listen to the chirping of the blue tits forever. The cooing of the pigeons. Blue tits, blue balls. My ex-lover said they didn’t like the idea of feeding pigeons because they carry diseases. Somehow I took it deeply personally. It is not true, it is a misconception that justifies killing them. I miss my lover a lot though, even though we are friends now. Maybe even more because of that. Hope my heart will open again soon. Hope the birds find the food here in the window of 409. Hope they like it. Hope they will thrive. I got scared that they would crash into the window, so I swept it away. One time a juicy cactus fell from a balcony four floors above me. If I had been one second slower it would have fallen onto my head. I wonder if the seeds landed on someone. If so, I hope they liked it. Hope they will thrive.

METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

Task 2:

my body is my home ~ clothes help me to make my body feel like home

higher threshold to wear a floaty dress outside than to be naked

my process ~ water and blue as quick things i can ‘come home’ to to find a starting place whenever i need to do a creative task quickly

precision with colours and themes

side by side ~ my personas

fantasy of inside and outside

fantasy personas

i look out of the window

i do other things

clothes are really important to me

carrying my clothes with me around the world

clothes as home

fabrics, sensory needs around that, this includes colours and smells not only textures

niko

who is the person i want the world to see?

who is the person i would want the world to see if it wasn’t so transphobic?

looking out of the window ~ dreaming ~ what would i like to be on ‘the other side’ of the window

the ocean connecting places

the strangeness of mattolaituri

quick tasks help me to generate material fast that it is often good to dive deeper with and develop more later ~ note to remember this also when approaching my own practice

i also love natural light!

blue

water

water

blue

blue water

water blue

blue blue blue

water water water

the sky makes the water blue

Task 3:

it felt like the rain

i wanted to create a sensory installation filled with things i love

i wanted the sound of the water

the light from the window

and my sensory objects

i wanted to create a space full of all the sensory things i love

water

these tiny plastic eggs

blue

a blue dress

now i want to go to my dance jam in my blue dress

METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTARY 

Task 2:

I usually start with visuals, colors, or costumes. So I threw all the clothes and accessories I brought with me together, and then worked with this arrangement as a whole. Even on flat surface an arrangement of clothes needs to be put into a certain shape, I make a sculpture ot out of forms and clothes. The position is as important as a colorscheme. And then I put them on, and see what comes out - what kind of feeling, what kind of words. So I put on the first persona and wrote from it’s perspective addressing my second persona. What came out was quite a lot of negative from person OUT+OF+HOME towards person IN. The one that was IN didn’t care. So the reflection was more into their projection onto something than some internal qualities.

Task 3:

I started this one with a word map, just tried to build a chain of connection from my object (jasmin handcream) and its sent to how it can be made into a ritual and why would it be a ritual at all. Smells made us distinct. Smells make us like or dislike things in the way we call ‘intuitive’. There are certain smells that i associate with certain places. I do my handcream routine at home. Because I only have time for that there. So my home has those artificial smells of handcreams, and other creams, and perfumes. Everyone who doesn’t smell like that might not fit in? So there is initiation through sharing the smells, through marking someone with your smell or a smell of a place so they can adapt and blend in. The ritual of homing is in smell sharing and scent marking.

METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

Task 2:

I was thinking about these two personas as “unravelled” and “ravelled”, or “put-together” and “unkept”, and how the line between these two can become blurred. One can feel and perform a kept version at home or vice versa, feel and perform or desire to become “unravelled” and “unkept” while not at home. I think the lines between these two further blur when you are in moments of movement between “home” and “not home”, or not having an exact “home” to return to, thereby being “unkept” and unravelled becomes a practice implemented away from home. As you continually or habitually practice being “unkept” and unravelled outside of the home, how you perform “home” becomes mangled.

I created two personas, one ravelled, and one unravlled, one kept and the other unkept, I was working with two similar pair of pants but with completely different functions, one outside and one inside. one home, one non-home. Photographed they looked very similar and indistinguishable from each other, but you can see from the personas, the persona’s and the process of changing pants changed the nature of their person. In one or two photos I also included a bikini top, it’s kind of a similar conversation comparing swimwear to underwear, and this private versus public persona they create. Underwear and pajamas are allowed to be stained or unkept or wrinkled or fragmented and weird while the outdoor and public clothes are not. I think the color of the pants also added to the work as it then emphasizes more on the persona and how they are understood as ravelled or unravelled with or without outside pants.

Task 3:

I was reflecting on processes no one else sees inside the home. I mostly do this when I’m home, and whenever I’m not at home, like at public sauna or swimhall or at another persons’ place, it’s not something typically I want to show. It feels like deodorant is maybe more discreet or hidden than perfume and we maybe don’t want to think about it as much as perfume. I think it maybe goes back to masking your body and your bodily functions, as well as performing gender, warding your home - your body, performing an image of kept-ness as well as how that contributes to an imagined persona/person/identity that we present when we go outside the home. I was reminded of my dad and my brother who can sometimes have a bit stronger body odor, as well as my mom and sister sometimes, as well as myself too, especially if you’re on your period and have more testosterone in your body.

METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

Task 2:

What was challenging for me here was making the distinction between being at home and being outside and avoiding the stereotypical distinction between alone-behaviour and social-behaviour. That mostly had to do with me wanting to avoid the “cliches” of how you act alone and the presupposition that that is an opportunity people have , and how you act in front of others, assuming you actually care about codes-of-conduct and “manners”. Of course, there’s a lot of things I do alone that I wouldn’t do in front of others, yet what was important for me was to think of how you really curate yourself in both. A lot of times we just try to “make home work for us” by proclaiming that today we’re resting, or now I have to work and stuff like that; then thinking of how many people do not feel comfortable even within their own homes. Ultimately thinking of the power-play between these two and trying to somehow blur the lines since your cognition is what follows you everywhere anyway. Ultimately then, I
“settled” for inwardness and outwardness instead of home and outside.

Task 3:

I truly just tried to be as direct with this as possible. I feel like a lot of the times with the senses, we try to overanalyze what it is we’re really feeling since society favours rationality over emotion. Hence, with this one I truly just thought intuitively about what makes me feel good from home and what I “always” need to have with me in order to feel at home. Also, carrying with me the concept of hospitality I miss so dearly from Cyprus, sharing a cup of tea or a cup of coffee is the most direct and basic ritual I resonate with.

METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

Task 4 + 5:

It was difficult to work against the weather and personal circumstances, I felt distracted all the time. However, my choice of a place - an isolated cave, helped me to focus a bit more. The thing I found was that, knowing the task beforehand, I already came with certain ideas that I wanted to try. I didn’t know what space I would find, but I had my objects, and I was going to work around those objects. I don’t think it’s the best way to go about it - I think place should dictate the form and the approach. As a result, whatever I did (working with buckwheat seeds to mark presence) could have been done anywhere, and the cave didn’t matter that much.

Another thing that stood out for me during not just the task but that whole workshop day, was how I was approaching spaces on the island. When I was choosing a space I’d like to work with, I was considering everything I saw as a potential stage. I was thinking of everything as a backdrop, a set piece. How will I look with this in the background? From which point should the audience observe me? I didn’t think relationally, I didn’t think of the qualities and meanings of places, just of the way the looked, and where the performance would look more interesting. I would like to get rid of this approach at least for some time, to free myself from considering everything as scenography, purely in practical terms. I think I am missing on important things with an approach like that.

METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

Task 4 + 5:

absence of attention/ presence of attention

feeling at home/ not at home in my body

ocean as home/ ocean as not home

the ocean is terrifying and so is my body

absence

who/ what is not here

people looking out of the window

i want to be inside

i want to be in my bed

i want to rest

i don’t want to tell an unambivalent story about joy

on being trans and feeling bad

i mostly feel bad

i mostly feel bad

presence

what it means to be here

islands

islandness

island dreams

colonial gestures

other-than-human

consent

making a mark on a place

felting

irrevocably changed by being here

this is a nice place

middle class day out

blue

                     blue 

                                              blue

i would want something blue here

i want to curl up and rest, listening to

         the ocean

my body (louder than the ocean)

listening sensing

an accessible deep listening practice

tired of my body being in pain

tired of my body limiting what i can do

tired of responding to the material conditions always

‘use that’

the queer colonial dream of an island with only trans peple

Israel - a dream of an island with only ‘people like us’ on it

METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

Task 4 + 5

I was reminded of spaces found within absences. We imagine another space, another memory through an absence. I used the circle to remind myself of portals, windows, doorways, ears, eyes, mouths, belly buttons; circles that take us to another place, and our memories are absent as we imagine. The circle is present, and yet the space it can take us to is absent, only present through verbal description, visualizing, imagination. I was also thinking about absences and presence in terms of our space, how do I make myself present? Why do I want to make myself present here? Why do I want to belong here? The portal then imagines another space within a space to belong, I do not need to belong here, the rock where we sit, but moreover, the space through the portal. An affective realm of belonging. I do not need to assert my presence, and yet that may be what I had done through scribbling portals on bricks, walls, the ground, and the rocks. I used clay, found from the site. It left marks on my fingers and blended in with the site, one can only notice when going up close. Presence and the proximity to absence was only met through sitting with it, visiting.

METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

Task 4 + 5

I felt a pull to the part of the island I have never been to before. Just after a few minutes walking I stumbled upon “Suomenlinna beach”. I don’t know why but it caught me by surprise, amidst all of “this”. So small, but so official, so formal. It felt kind of like a nest, laying so deep in the landscape, protected, but also exposed. The landscape were like hands holding the sand and whoever is down there. Holding and exposing, like an amfi theatre. So many ways to arrive and depart. The narrow bay, the stairs coming from both sides of the beach. A shower on a platform, two changing rooms. I don’t know what it is with man-made constructions that attract me. Maybe there is something about someone else making a suggestion, and the suggestion is physical, so I don’t feel like I am that invasive, even though I do feel invasive. I don’t belong. Maybe because I know and sense that the island has this friction between the ones who live here and the ones who visit, which are so intensely many people, it is after all Helsinki’s top 1 attraction. The infinite walking passing passing running moving stopping looking through the landscape that is so rigid and controlled, an Unesco world heritage site, memorials and remnants of war. Who am I in this place? The swans are annoyed when I move, but seem to relax eventually. I try my best not to disturb them. Everyone wants to take photos of them. No one wanted to take photos of the sparrows earlier. I imagine arriving on a UFO raft. I dance for myself. I draw a picture of Vicky in the sand. I kiss the map and leave.

METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTARY

Task 4 + 5

No comments.