OPENING SEMINAR :

FLOATING PERIPHERIES – MEDIATING THE SENSE OF PLACE, funded by the Academy of Finland (2017–2021)

O H J E L M A // P R O G R A M
Tuesday 7.11.17 at 10–17
at Magito Studio, Suvilahti
Address: Kaasutehtaankatu 1, Helsinki

10:00 Susanna Helke, head of ELO research: welcoming words
10:15 Liisa Ikonen and Mari Mäkiranta: 2 x opening words

10:30 MARI MÄKIRANTA explores women’s experiences of violence in intimate partnerships in Arctic communities and northern peripheries. Her study focuses on marginalized, hidden and silent elements of violence and asks, how the gendered violence is experienced by women and responded to by others, and whether the empowerment can be obtained. Mäkiranta draws inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s notions on embodied, multisensory and affective encounters on understanding and visualizing women’s experiences. She will organize three Hearing the Silence workshops and produce two to three experimental short films in order to give voice and visibility to women. She aims to provide new repertoires in understanding the phenomena; Hearing the Silence short films generate different kinds of voices, including the silent and hidden ones, to specify affects and emotions related on women’s experiences. By an unfolding and expanding orientation to hidden and taboo issue, the purpose is to re-frame the peripheries and Arctic communities with imaginary, multisensory and affective layers, and provide the standpoints in the lives of others.
10:50 DORITA HANNAH‘s research examines the landscapes through material and technological interventions and will engage with the Floating Peripheries project through constant cross-continental collaboration. Hannah is an architect and a performance designer, and a Professor of Interdisciplinary Architecture, Art and Design. She is located in the island of Tasmania (Australia) and based in the University of Tasmania’s (UTAS) Creative Exchange Institute (CxI).

11:10 Discussion
11:30 Coffee

11:50 EIJA TIMONEN surveys the ice and the cultural meanings connected to it in her perennial project of photographing ice. Her focus is on how the perceptions and interpretations are related to the multisensory and bodily experiences. Timonen has two major lines how to approach the ice. The first explores ice in natural context, like on the frozen lake, the other utilizes ice in still-life installations. She draws inspiration from Elizabeth Grosz’s and Katve-Kaisa Kontturi’s notions about materiality and sensous proximity. The experience of the place is a combination of material flow and sensuous presence. By the art projects, called ICEPHERY, Timonen studies how the momentuous and firm, local and universal interwine. By this process the peripherical place generates expanding interpretation circles about the near, near-by and cosmic places. The understanding of periphery floats along this process, too.
12:10 PIA EURO: Rather than a general introduction to a research topic “Art ± School, Part 1” is the first part of a collaborative presentation. It is a demonstration of an idea, a simulation of a fantasy, at the same time a physical construction and a theoretical installation. The presentation imagines the possibility of a new beginning for a productively peripheral “art school”. It is a fiction that nevertheless relates to a particular geographical location in Portugal (and beyond.)

12:30 Discussion
12:50 – 14:00 Lunch

14:00 HARRI LAAKSO: “Art ± School, Part 2” is the second part of a collaborative presentation.
14:20 MAIJU LOUKOLA examines the spatial, temporal and narrative layers of sites defined as peripheral, while contesting the oxymoronic paradoxes related to any periphery (samples of oxymorons: a definite maybe, vegetarian meatball). She weighs the sensuous effects of mixing “familiarity” with “radical strangeness”, and draws inspiration from Lefebvre’s thematisations of the citizens’ right to the city; by taking the city into our own use we challenge the existing spatial definitions and uses and keep producing new ones. Loukola works with a series of installations in which she maps “sites of desire” within city centers. Mixing fiction-driven means with spatial and temporal narratives related to physical sites and people’s stories, memories, dreams, she develops a kitchen-psychoanalytic approach (working title). She creates pseudo-dramaturgies of existing and non-existing places and rebuilds an installation series called “my/our beloved ones”.
14:40 LIISA IKONEN: My research focuses on the space of the abnormal, the care institutions and the spatial peripheries occupied by marginalized groups such as the ill, the excluded and abnormal. I am interested in the physical environments, but also in the spirit of places, which makes them meaningful or unapproachable to their users. I am interested in the spirit engendered by this special estate, which is of a living and changing nature, and realized as a network of interrelated activities and images. My interest in the abnormal means an interest in the whole of this network, the relationship between the abnormal and normal and the way in which their status could be rebuilt and inspired by each other. I ask, as a phenomenologist: What is a space of the abnormal and what is that surrounding network, and how does it manifest itself? As an artist I ask: How can I make these phenomena visible and to be experienced? As a phenomenologically excited artist-researcher my question is: Can new, mutually modifying or boundaries-shifting interaction arise between abnormal and normal spaces? Being naïve and ignorant, I am free to ask anything: Can caring building enable a space that heals, or can a space itself recover like a patient or become medicated, operated or even rescued?
15:00 Discussion

15:30 ESTHIR LEMI presents the Greek Annexes / future residencies

ALSO MEMBERS OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT – this time attending in spirit in Spain and Sipoo, are:

JONNA TOLONEN, whose research “Taking Part in Democratic Dialogue – Street Artists as Voices of Inequality and Repression” examines one periphery of the street art, unauthorized political street art. By painting illegal political street art, the artists put the income, popularity and sometimes even their liberty at risk. Jonna’s research includes three aspects of art research: 1) approaching street art as an art form, 2) re-raising the authorship to the centre of research, and 3) defining illegal political street art as political participation. Jonna will also produce a series of political street art projects. In these artistic projects she approaches street as a periphery for womanhood.

ELINA LIFLÄNDER connects the methods of scenographic activity analysis and cultural geography. She explores how the scenographic activities influence the identity formation of the city, her case study being Finland’s southernmost city Hanko. In addition to the its peripheral location, Lifländer is interested in the city’s cyclically changing identity, that transforms according to the effects of local industries, harbour life, cultural events, and seasonal changes. She connects her work to the cultural geographer Edward W. Soja’s notion of a ‘third space’.