Ensimäinen rakenus (2024)
Situated by Alstadløkka in Bodø, Ensimäinen Rakenus is an installation which name means “the first building”. The sauna is the first building the Kvääni create upon arrival at a new site. Thus, the shapes are here drawn from sauna benches merged with ocean waves. It is covered in tar burned together with my father, and painted with sentences in Kvääni. Burning tar is like working with secrets revealed. It follows a cycle from solid to liquid, from veins of resin hiding inside ancient pine roots, to black gold spread on the surface of new wood. In this sense, an almost magical protection against the ravages of time is conjured up through fire and water. Kiitos paljon to Bodø European Capital of Culture 2024, and my father who also sang at the opening.
LÖYLY (2024)
Sound piece presented in installation. The sauna is where we are born and give birth, treated when ill and where our corpses are cleaned before we are buried. It is a cycle of life, which evaporates and transforms through sounds of steam – löyly – poured onto the oven. By visiting various saunas, young Kvääni sauna stories where shared and recorded, together with song, sounds of steam and the hits of vasta (birchrise).
MINUN VANHIIN MAITO (2023)
Kvääni parent milk can originate from whatever body that belongs to a person who identifies as a Kvääni parent. Kvääni parent milk can be milk from a breast. Kvääni parent milk can be semen. Kvääni parent milk can also be Kvääni parent milk without any human bodily fluids being involved. It can have a metaphorical and yet literal meaning. Following on up on the latter interpretation, this performance addresses the accessibility of knowledge to the public eye with an emphasis on the given relation between inside vs. outside, gender identity, and cultural identity. In the background, the line ‘Asusin jo jäämeren takana’, which translates to ‘I already lived beyond the ice-ocean’, from the song ‘Hyvän illan’, is written in kefir and water.
Sirens (2016-2022)
‘Sirens’ is an elaborate and ephemeral work encompassing performances, happenings, an audio piece, and a booklet soaked in saltwater – all unleashed from a red suitcase in- and outside of a floating sauna. The memories of the work (smell, sound, objects) are presented in the very same red suitcase with a sauna-inspired bench and platform and a slide show. The work touches upon an array of thematics: Sirens from Greek mythology, the lifeboats on Titanic, AI and Leadership theory, the global politics of governing Antarctica, and the Safety of Life at Sea Convention. The work grew into four chapters.
Sliding walls falling ceilings (2021)
At 23:40 (ship’s time) on Sunday, 14. April 1912, the MSR Titanic hit an iceberg 600 km south-southeast of Newfoundland, North Atlantic Ocean. The ship was said to be unsinkable. It sunk the following morning. In ‘Sliding Walls Falling Ceilings’, a scouter for icebergs is flashing the flashlights from under the iceberg instead of from the ship itself. They travel in time. They are not there at the shipwreck, but at the launching hour of the ship back in 1911. On that very day, one of the workers died during the process of manually removing wooden blocks on the slipway. Was this tragedy an open of the future events to come? Perhaps astrology or algorithms could have predicted the tragedy.
This work speculates on such possibilities by painting mirrored symbols in kefir and water on a rooftop window. The astrological symbols are drawn from the birth chart of the ship based on its launch hour and location. The algorithm is built and trained to predict the likelihood of survival, trained with data such as gender, color, class, education, and age.
from sock import Sock (2021)
‘from sock import Sock’ combines notes on disintegrating data programming language with a memory of Kvääni culture. Kefir is painted on the outside of a window as a way to mimic the long-lost Kvääni microbiome culture of ‘tette’ (commonly used to ferment milk to make the kefir like ‘rømmekolle’), with a programming code written in water. If run through a computer terminal, the code generates a virtual sock drawer with a random number of left and right socks. It then checks whether the number of left socks matches the number of right socks, before providing feedback on the status of the order. Being written on the window outside, the kefir is in touch with the weather. The rain washes it away and disintegrates the programming language. The text is thus written mirrored on the outside to be readable from the inside.
Ovary Oprea House (2021)
‘Ovary Opera House’ is a series of drawings made as a meditation on medically induced artificial menopause as a treatment for the chronic and unpredictable illness of endometriosis. The illness can occur in every human with a womb. It is invisible to the outer world, but looks grotesque on the inside: inflamed tissue growing around the uterus, abdomen, lungs, behind the eyes, and/or brain. It causes adhesions to other organs and cysts on the ovaries amongst other things. In this work, the tissue and cysts are imagined as burls on birches, planets in outer space, and root vegetables, simultaneously integrating notes on architecture.
I Conceived a pussy bread (2017)
“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood, resides in me and I in them”, a man once said. Bacteria culture is collected from the vagina of the artist and cultivated over eight days. Poems are written to the bacteria culture for each day as though it is a growing fetus. The culture is then made to create sourdough bread.
The poems, the bread, and the recipe were finally presented as a ceremony. The audience and the artist read the poems in a circle before eating the bread. The poem and bread were later installed and photographed to create a souvenir.
Oslo-Lofoten (2016-)
Middelalderparken is the area of the first permanent settlement in Oslo. It is situated by the fjord, full of ruins from the past, and yet surrounded by urban settlements of our time, such as the building complex ‘Barcode’ in the background. An artificial pond has been made to showcase the ‘original’ sea level of the Oslo fjord when the first settlers arrived. The water is trapped and lacks circulation. This story departs from Middelalderparken as one carved stone of 47,8 kg from the ruins is placed in a red suitcase.
The stone is brought to Kvalvika in Lofoten. It is placed in the ebb and flow under the mountain of Vågakallen. Incidents in everyday life that occur on the journey between the sites determine how the story unfolds. The length of the story will be measured in the movements of the ebb and flow, as it shapes the stone’s edges.