This episode of the Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Podcast features a new audio essay, The forest will answer in the way you call to it, by Hanna Tuulikki, encouraging a conversation with the woods, exploring her Finnish heritage, and weaving together family stories, folklore and song. The piece reflects on how ideals of ecology, identity, and nationhood are constructed and entwined. The essay features audio extracts from her installation Under Forest Cover (Metsänpeiton Alla), commissioned for Helsinki Biennial 2021.
A transcript of this episode is available here.
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- Archive family photo on the farm with Hanna’s grandma milking a cow with Hanna’s mum and sister in the background. (Archival familial photograph, Lammaspuro, Sonkajärvi, circa 1953).
- Photo from the process of recording on the farm in 2019 (Vocal improvisation recording, Lammaspuro, Sonkajärvi, Finland 2019. Photo Credit Pete Smith).
- Under Forest Cover / Metsänpeiton Alla, Hanna Tuulikki, Helsinki Biennial, 2021
- Under Forest Cover / Metsänpeiton Alla, Hanna Tuulikki, Helsinki Biennial, 2021
- Under Forest Cover / Metsänpeiton Alla, Hanna Tuulikki, Helsinki Biennial, 2021
The following video is a response to this episode, by artist Sapphire Goss:
Hanna Tuulikki is a British-Finnish artist, composer and performer based in Scotland. Her multi-disciplinary projects investigate the ways in which the body communicates beyond and before words, to tell stories through imitation, vocalisation and gesture. With a largely place-responsive process, she considers how bodily relationships and folk histories are encoded within specific environments, ecologies and places. In her work, she often draws on embodied vernacular knowledges, in particular, practices of vocal and gestural mimesis of the more-than-human, to offer alternative approaches to making kin, both with one other, and across multi-species entanglements. Her most recent work engages with vital questions about what it means to live on a damaged planet, proposing contemporary, queer ritual, as a means to process the trauma that comes with ecological awareness.
For Xylophobia our guest curators for the Fermynwoods Podcast are Marie-Chantal Hamrock and Astrid Björklund. Marie and Astrid have previously collaborated as SUBTERRA for Aerial Community Radio in Aberdeen, which “navigates speculative narratives of the chthonic (of relating to or inhabiting the underworld) through text, poetry, soundscapes and music.” The two bring their own flavour to a new series of 10 Xylophobia-themed Podcast episodes.
Sapphire Goss is a multimedia artist who uses obsolete technologies to explore experimental materiality and hybrid collaborative forms to make work that grows, decays and lives beyond the screen. Sapphire responds to each Xylophobia podcast episode with a new video.