Category Archives: Life

So I’m about to travel to Australia…

 

Hectic weeks and days! I will be in residency in Australia for a month and have so much work and all kinds of stuff to complete before I travel! Starting from various ANTI Festival related things to tax papers, my son’s graduation party, research stuff, grant applications…and what does one need to pack for Melbourne in April-May??? C’mon! I don’t have anything to wear…

So over the Easter, I’ve been working on mine and Live Umbrella’s tax papers, doing laundry, packing winter clothes away and trying to find summer clothes from storage. And since my son’s graduation is in the end of May and I’m going to be away for a month right before (good timing!), we’ve been cleaning the house, planning the party from making guest lists to planning the menu and making checklists of what we need to buy, borrow and rent! Sounds like a huge party but really is not – but still there’s a lot to do.

Our Yorkie Pimu has probably an infection in her eyes so I’m taking her to vet on Wednesday…
pim 13 piPimu photographed by Pekka.

But I’ve enjoyed the days as well; being with the whole family, weather has been really nice & I’ve made some nice kale drinks, smoothies and cocktails…

Johanna

Network meeting in Milan

I’m part of the Space2 Destination project and the last meeting of the current network was last week in Milan. I’ve never visited Milan before so it was really inspiring to get to know the city a little bit, visit different areas and sites and of course to meet with my collegues. The meeting was organized during Uovo performing arts festival so I also saw performances each night.

An afternoon walk in the city centre around Duomo:

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A visit to Museo delle Culture which is still being built and under construction. Can you see the Alvar Aalto shapes or is it just me?

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Near the Liveinslums Headquarters:

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A visit to HangarBicocca:
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HangarBicocca‘s exhibition spaces were just insanely massive… Insane, indescribable…

Milan offered lovely risottos and pastas, amazing ice-cream, good wine and Spritz and of course the weather in Southern Europe is just really nice in the spring… And style… I’m not sure any city in the world can beat Milan!

Johanna

beginning of my PhD

It was such a great experience to visit Zodiak in Helsinki with Map of Scars in February! Four beautiful performances, touching moments, tears, friends, lovely dinners and great talks. I’m always over optimistic about my time and energy and of course, I didn’t manage to do as many things as I had hoped. But I really enjoyed being a visiting artist at Zodiak and being in Helsinki… So thank you to our audience and to the Zodiak crew!

Since the beginning of March, I’m focusing on my PhD for the rest of the spring and working only part time. I’m really excited but also struggling a little bit to find a rhythm between reading, writing, ANTI work and my training. At the moment I’m reading theoretical background including Bruno Latour, Niklas Luhmanna and Nigel Thrift…

Johanna

 

Happy New Year!

So it’s 2014 and I wish you all a happy new year!

As you have noticed, my blogging hasn’t been very active in 2013 and  there are several reasons for it and maybe some excuses as well. One obvious reason is that besides my full time artistic work and part time work at ANTI Festival, I was also studying. I completed an MA in Cultural Policy and begun a course on management and leadership. Basically, this has meant that all the possible time I’ve had at hand, I’ve had to use on my studies and not i.e. on blogging. And believe me, it was a tough year! But for a longer time, I’ve also been suffering from a conflict concerning the content of my blogging. I have so many kind of ‘confidential’ plans, ideas and things going on which I don’t really feel confident sharing which makes me uneasy and hesitant – which is not good for blogging. Anyway… thought I would like to share that, at least. However, things are not looking much easier at the moment. My CEO training course is still going on (should be completed in May!) and after my MA, I’ve also begun a PhD at the University of Jyväskylä. My research plan was accepted by the university and I received a three month kick off grant to begin my thesis. Hurray! This is soooo exciting and terrifying and something I absolutely never thought of in my life before. And that is great! To be doing or to find yourself doing something you never could have imagined before. Because it means that all kinds of things unimaginable NOW might be possible at some point of your life so you really don’t know where life takes you. And I find this thought rather soothing.

2014 marks a new beginning for me also in a way that my 3 year artist grant from the Arts Council of Finland ended in December 2013 and I’ve returned full time to ANTI Festival since January. I feel rather excited about that and want to develop several aspects of the job and the organization itself. One thing I definitely want focus and need to spend time with is networking and seeing more work, especially in Finland. So, besides having some meetings,  last week I spent a few days in Helsinki at the Lux Helsinki Festival that focuses on light art. And I must say that I was… a bit disappointed. I mean my overall experience which consisted of the Invisible Light light art symposium and all the works at the festival experienced during a guided walk provided by the festival (my guide was Kukka-Maaria) was OK but the works themselves I found rather mainstream, commercial, decorative and just too easy, beautiful and colorful. Somehow to me these kinds of works represent something that should always be present in a big city and artistically, there wasn’t really anything that interesting to me about them. So to call Lux Helsinki a festival on light art is a bit confusing to me. Of course, I do think it’s great that Lux Helsinki gets people to walk on the streets, be outdoors, experience works in the beginning of January outdoors – in terms of cultural policy and citizenship this is great and very important. But it doesn’t mean that it’s great art and that is my problem. Probably I enjoyed Jari Haanperä’s Fyr and Philipp Artus’s Snailtrail the most and the symposium was inspiring to further think about issues on light art in general. But would I travel to Helsinki just for Lux Helsinki – no. But if you are there, why not.

This January I will be in Helsinki every week attending meetings, events and networking. Feels great! During my Helsinki days I’m also looking forward to have a dinner at Boulevard Social and Patrona.

Will keep you posted!

Johanna

focus on home

Since I’ve been performing at home, I’ve also had some time to think about the small needs I have on home decoration and things I’ve been dreaming of for a long time… This package arrived today with Muuto Dots and Hay tea towels… Such beautiful colours, materials and design. Bliss! It’s amazing how happy one can be about tea towels and hooks to hang one’s bags in the home office! There’s a Muuto Dots campaign at the moment in  the Finnish Design Shop, so have a look if you like them!




I love the colours and the details of the tea towels! Sometimes I really do think that winter is such a beautiful time of year; time to turn inwards, to home and candles, warmth, cozyness, sauna, wool, intimacy…

Johanna

IETM in Athens

I just arrived yesterday in Athens to participate in the IETM meeting. I’m really looking forward to all the events and talks but also to get to know this city that I haven’t visited before!
Yesterday happened to be my birthday as well and I had a great walk around Plaka and Psyrri, gorgeous dinner on Iron Square and fun with my collegue Maija.



See you in Athens!

Johanna

update

I have been so inactive with my blog because I’ve been so busy otherwise. I’ve had so many things going on that posting short notes here hasn’t felt right nor that important. And then as time goes by, it becomes more and more difficult to write anything…

I have been involved and will be sharing my experience at the Writing Movement project which is an exciting initiative to consider writing practices around contemporary dance. I was part of the seminar in Kuopio in June and will continue now in  the end of September in Helsinki.

In June I attended the amazing Performance Studies International conference at Stanford University and was one of the panelist in ‘Eco Art Performance: Deep Time and the Now of Environmental Performance‘ panel with just an amazing group of women! I talked about my performance work along with our chair Jennie Klein, Natalie Loveless, Dee Heddon and Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens… The whole PSI#19 experience was incredible and I heard so many exciting panels and lectures and met inspiring friends and collegues. Here I am with Jennie:


After the PSI#19 in Stanford, I got to spend a couple of days in the Redwoods with Annie & Beth and then almost a week In San Francisco. I was feeling incredibly lucky but also very guilty of not working on my thesis when I was in California. So I actually spent some time reading and I guess having had that time to think and reflect my thesis and its problems helped me to gather the energy and direction I desperately needed to carry on.

In the Redwoods:

In SF:

So when I came back home, I continued my thesis and spent my entire summer holiday working on it, 7 days a week as many hours per day that I possibly could think straight. But it is done and I have completed my studies, hurray! So I’m a very proud holder of MA in Cultural Policy. If you are interested, here’s the link to my thesis “Vedet seisahtuu, liikenteet pysähtyy”: kokemuksia uuden julkisen taiteen kohtaamisesta ANTI – Contemporary Art Festivalilla. It’s in Finnish.


I felt so bad spending the entire summer at my desk that after the final version of the thesis was sent off, I went to Helsinki with the kids for a couple of days. And we had such a wonderful time! I haven’t been ‘on holiday’ in Helsinki for ages so it was just so great hang around with the kids, eat in nice restaurants, swim in the sea in Mustikkamaa, visit Korkeasaari, Heureka, Linnanmäki, URB Festival and Flow Festival…




Last week I was in Brussels where we had a first meeting of Destinations project. Destinations is a project for curators who curate works in and for public spaces. So we had inspiring but intensive days sharing our practices and presenting our festivals or organizations, discussing public space, art & activism and audience participation. And I got to meet some friends like Rebecca French! Lovely.

Since spring I’ve been working on my new work which is going to premiere in Kuopio in November. It’s an exciting project but also very complicated in new and different ways for me so I’m not yet talking about it very much… But I will soon, I promise!

And the 12th ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival starts next week! Have a look at the programme and get ready for unexpected encounters in the city centre of Kuopio!!! And don’t forget the Exploring the city and the everyday life International seminar on Thursday the 26th of  September. I’m so much looking forward to it.

Anyhow, sorry for not having been active here. But as you can see, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been active elsewhere. You can also follow me on Twitter and Facebook…

Johanna

Spaces, places and journeys

Insanely busy days filled with thinking and writing about place, space and urban planning (finally sent off the essay!), trying to finalize the ANTI 2013 programme, the CEO course, my upcoming new work, applying travel grants to be able to be on a seriously exciting panel at PSI#19 in Stanford, US in the summer and getting ready for my Iisalmi-Helsinki-Brussels-Chigaco-New York-Kuopio journey that starts tomorrow!

So it’s all about work, day and night, 7 days a week.
It’s about art, research, places and spaces.
Packing and unpacking.

I feel tired but inspired.

I don’t think I can ever travel anywhere without thinking of Doreen Massey and Panu Lehtovuori.

Is it too much to travel with four pairs of shoes and three handbags?

Johanna

IETM Dublin


So I’m in Dublin in my first ever IETM meeting. Actually, I’m not sure if that’s entirely true as I might have attended a session or two years ago in Helsinki, but this feels like my first IETM and is definitely one outside Finland. I’ve never been to Ireland before and it’s quite puzzling to come to a new city and country and to feel that one does not have any time to engage with the place. So to just walk from the hotel to a venue, and then to another venue and then to find a reasonable place to eat and then to go back to a venue you visited earlier. So my first superficial impressions of Dublin are that the stereotypes of Ireland are not just stereotypes… The pubs, the music, the dialect actually are very visible and strong part of the urban culture. Of course, I’m aware that I’ve been mostly walking around the area of Temple Bar with tons of bars, pubs and cafes but still. I wasn’t really expecting to be so surrounded by Irish music and Guinness!







So visiting a town for the first time and being busy with IETM session and the artistic programme, I really appreciate that the organizers have programmed quite a lot of site-specific activities. So far I haven’t attended any of them, but tomorrow morning at 8am I’m heading for a swim in the Irish sea Jen Coppinger. She’s taking a group of people for a swim by James Joyce’s Martello tower at Seapoint. It’s going to be early and probably terribly cold, but I want to sense the sea so this is a perfect opportunity.

Then tomorrow I’m also seeing two site-specific works. One is a walking piece and in the other one audiences are driven around in cabs. I’m really looking forward to those and to experience the city a bit more, a bit differently, as the local artists have wanted people to experience it.

Can hardly wait.

Johanna