Bunkers, a series of interviews about care for the environment in the cities and how art and green care psychology combine to create new paths of thinking and forms of public care, is now incorporated as part of the Seinäjoen taidehalli's Senses of Sustenance art event.
SoS - Bunkers
#BURN___ spring programme
14. - 16.5.2020
Live Stream Art Event *
With participating artists Elina Vainio (FI),
Mari Keski-Korsu (FI), Alan Bulfin (IE) and Charli Clark (UK)
The event explores sustenance as a way to expand our social and ecological bonds and interdependencies. Member Alan Bulfin, a Seinäjoki-based Irish artist, is responsible for the event production. SoS - Bunkers features process-based art from the artists Elina Vainio (FI), Mari Keski-Korsu (FI), Alan Bulfin (IE) and Charli Clark (UK). The event explores sustenance as a way to expand our social and ecological bonds and interdependencies.
The event will be broadcasted online over three days, between the 14. and 16. of May, from the Alajoen perinnealue Ilmajoki and Upankatu 3 bunkers in Seinäjoki. The artists will broadcast or make a video from their homes in Helsinki and in Bristol, UK, respectively.
The event will be held in English and partly in Finnish.
* Due to changes as a result of the “COVID-19” outbreak, Seinäjoen taidehalli's Senses of Sustenance event will be co-produced together with Pixelache project Bunkers, facilitated by members Alan Bulfin and Mari Keski-Korsu. The broadcast production is facilitated by Pixelache Helsinki.
Programme
Day One
14.5.2020 12:00 - 14:00 (EEST)
Alan Bulfin presents: Fidelity of Home, a DIY art-making day
Charli Clark presents: Loads of Pollen, a DIY art-making day
Elina Vainio presents: Kaikki, Site-specific work
Day Two
15.5.2020 12:00 - 14:00 (EEST)
Alan Bulfin and Mari Keski-Korsu presents: Bunkers, interview series
Mari Keski-Korsu presents: Akantupakilla / Holding Space with Yarrow,
participatory performance
Day Three
16.5.2020 12:00 - 14:00 (EEST)
Alan Bulfin presents: Fidelity of Home, a DIY art-making day
Charli Clark presents: Loads of Pollen, a DIY art-making day
Elina Vainio presents: Kaikki, Site-specific work
Streaming through
More information
Pii Anttila, Seinäjoen taidehalli, tel. 044 425 5823, pii.anttila@seinajoki.fi
Saša Nemec, Piknik Frequency ry, sasa@pixelache.ac
The event is funded by Taike, Finnish Art Promotion Centre, Seinäjoen taidehalli and Piknik Frequency ry. The event is a sequel to SoS - station event as part of ‘Breaking the Fifth Wall’ Pixelache Festival 2019, which was presented in the old Seinäjoki fire station in May 2019.
Participating artists
Charli Clark (UK)
Loads of Pollen (2020)
Art / Workshop / Film
Through a series of short films artist Charli Clark will share her understanding of pollen and discuss different aspects of her arts practice, inviting those watching to take part and make their own contribution to seeing a landscape through pollen over the course of the weekend. Clark’s work is currently, to a large extent, dictated by bees. She is an artist, beekeeper and gardener, and uses her practice to investigate the microscopic environment that often underpins ecosystems on which many lives depend. Bees and other pollinators in particular provide food for small mammals, birds and reptiles, alongside pollinating a majority of the fresh food humans consume.
By looking at the landscape through pollen, Clark highlights the hidden and rather colourful world of this food used by insects to feed their brood and thus rear the next generation. The short films will focus on a different aspect of Clarks’s way of working. They will cover: going into an environment looking for pollen, focusing on important plants for insect nourishment; analysing individual pollens from plants and pollen loads under the microscope, to gain greater understanding of how bees use their local environment; examples from her studio of non-human storytelling through pollen collection and painting. She will share information regarding making different pigments and invite those interested to join in using local information to make color ‘maps’, paintings or drawings and share their bee food environments with others taking part. charliclark.co.uk
Alan Bulfin (IR, FI)
Fidelity of Home (2019 - 2020)
DIY Art making
14.5.2020 12:00 - 14:00 and 16.5.2020 12:00 - 14:00
Fidelity of Home is an attempt to create different recipes on how to care for the environment and share our community knowledge. Fidelity of Home can take the form of a utility cupboard that is free to explore as a communal material to try different ecological recipes that are having a conversation with the situation we are having in our home using products we have no awareness of what they are doing to our home, the environment and to our health. All we may need to do is look a little deeper within our own backyards.
Artistic practice uses everyday domestic life and care as testing grounds, to actively test what had the widest ecological care and impact. These practices are shared to a wider community through learning and recipe sharing events. These are all practical things to take on at home.
Bulfin will broadcast a recipe sharing event, how to make vegan leather from scoby-mushroom. Scoby-leather is made with dried scoby that has been grown in a wide glass jar. Adding oil makes it flexible and water repellent. You can grow it at home and replace your leather products. alanbulfin.wordpress.com
Kaikki (2020)
Site-specific work, Alajoen perinnealue
14.5.2020 12:00 - 14:00 and 16.5.2020 12:00 - 14:00
The work Kaikki is a small sculpture made out of dried and ground peat moss (Sphagnum wulfianum, pallorahkasammal), a few drops of pure pine tar and a small amount of makko powder from an evergreen tree (Machilus Thunbergii) growing in East Asia, a common natural binder used in sticks of incense. These ingredients form the individual six letters of the word ‘kaikki’, Finnish for ‘everything’ or ‘all’, which in South Ostrobothnia also carries the meaning of ‘finished’ or ‘gone’.
The work will be installed in one of the remaining barns in the historic Alajoki area, a former peatland drained and burnbeaten for agricultural use, where the river Kyrönjoki has served as an important waterway for transporting pine tar across the region. The letters are ignited to release the faint smells of both the peat moss and tar, slowly burning over time. This slow turning of the letter forms into ash is a nod towards the idiosyncratic truth in the double meaning of the word. elinavainio.com
Mari Keski-Korsu (FI)
Akantupakilla / Holding Space with Yarrow (2020)
Participatory performance, live broadcasted from Helsinki
15.5.2020 12:00 - 14:00
Holding Space with Yarrow is a participatory and performative session that engages with yarrow through hydro bodies, healing and meditation. Yarrow is one of the oldest plant remedies used as a cure for many different ills, as its numerous names remind us. Yet what may this powerful plant, which many consider merely a weed, mean for us today? How could its voice be heard in human communities?
Holding Space with Yarrow is a participatory performance that requires physical presence. This is the first attempt to create the performance trough virtual, broadcasted platform and experiment how empathic inter-species communication can happen without the participants being in the same room. marikeskikorsu.net
Akantupakilla / Holding Space with Yarrow, photo Mari Keski-Korsu
Bunkers
Series of interviews from different specialists (2020)
Facilitated by Alan Bulfin and Mari Keski-Korsu
15.5.2020 12:00 - 14:00
Bunkers is part of the programme during the Senses of Sustenance art event. The project is facilitated by Pixelache Helsinki members artists Mari Keski-Korsu and Alan Bulfin. Bunkers is a series of interviews about care for the environment in the cities and how art and green care psychology combine to create new paths of thinking and forms of public care. This is explored through the concept of embodiment and is also why the bunkers are used. Interviews takes place in Upankatu 3 old bunker in Seinäjoki.
The concept of embodiment can be explained by thinking of how a bunker, in its function, has an unsettling feeling of imminent disaster or impending doom. That is to say, a bunker embodies existential dread and anxiety even if it is never used. Finland has a unique feature of its building regulations. Any newly constructed buildings over a certain size must install a bunker. This means that Finland as a nation has legislated for a worst-case scenario. Bunkers mediate this anxiety through explorative practice within these speculative spaces. pixelache.ac/posts/burn____-spring-programme-announcement
