Grief is present in the body, emotions, and experiences, where it is difficult to measure. In the Western engineering mindset, there is an attempt to understand the ecological crisis by turning it into numbers and cost estimates. Less is said about how the crisis feels. Grief should be given space, for grief is not always a descent into despair. It is also comfort and a beginning of something new.
(Tanskanen & Kuoppa 2023, 99)
The multidisciplinary teamwork related to sensory ethnography has prompted me to reflect on how strong emotional experiences and tensions could serve as tools for reconstructing our relationship with the environment in site-specific works.
I come from a village called Suttila in Satakunta. In the fall of 2020, village activist and chairman of the youth association Jenni Kutila contacted me and asked if I would be interested in creating a public artwork for my hometown. I thought it would be nice to do something participatory and shared with the villagers, despite the pandemic. The idea of a video work was born, consisting of the villagers’ own photographs depicting moments, memories, and landscapes important to them in relation to the village. From this photographic material, I would create a video presentation to be projected onto the façade of the hundred-year-old village hall, Kalliola, in the middle of dark November.
Our idea was also to present the work several times and gather more image material between performances.
We placed an announcement in the local newspaper and advertised the Hetkiä Suttilassa (Moments in Suttila) project in the village’s shared WhatsApp group. In a few weeks, nearly 250 photographs were collected, from which I began assembling a two-part video work. Additionally, I had the opportunity to browse the local youth association’s photo archive.
Firstly, I organized the photographs sent by the villagers of landscapes and non-human subjects according to the seasons: winter-spring-summer-autumn-winter. I left people out of this section. For the second part of the work, I compiled images from moments ranging from the 1920s to the present, focusing on the village’s former and current residents, as well as significant events.
I thought that the overall piece would benefit from music or sound design. My first instinct was to contact familiar composers and sound designers from the Helsinki area, but I ultimately decided to ask local composer-musician Jukka Keskitalo to join the project. The decisive factor was the idea that Jukka, as an artist, had a special connection to this particular place, the village of Suttila, and he might be able to convey a certain emotional landscape through his music that an outsider artist might not notice. Even if the music challenged my own aesthetic preferences and was something different from what I had originally envisioned or what I was used to working with, I felt it was important to embrace different aesthetics as a dramaturgical challenge to reconcile.
The idea emerged that the video piece could be premiered with live music. In the fall of 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic had slightly eased, and gathering restrictions were relaxed, giving us the opportunity to invite the villagers and those involved in the project to a joint opening event at the village hall. The Hetkiä Suttilassa video was projected not only onto a façade of the Kalliola Village Hall but also onto a screen set up at the stage opening, with a three-member orchestra performing the accompanying music.
The piece, performed with the orchestra, was deeply moving, and for many villagers, it was a particularly emotional moment. Approximately 130 villagers attended the two performances – over half of the village’s population.
My approach to the dramaturgical organization of the material was influenced by the changing climate and the loss of biodiversity, though I did not highlight this perspective even in the project’s description. This made it possible to bypass the biases of rational thought and the reactions to climate change. The time I spent in my hometown during the pandemic revealed that the villagers had an ongoing concern for the state of their environment – for example, farmers grapple with the eco-crisis daily, without needing an explicit reminder. As feminist scholar and philosopher Karen Barad points out in her article on posthumanist performativity: “We know because we are part of the world” (Barad 2003).
How can an audiovisual, site-specific, and participatory artwork create a space for unexpressed grief? And how can such a piece, in an abstract way, function as a builder and enhancer of community in the face of global crises?
Theologian and University of Helsinki researcher Panu Pihkala extensively explores the ecological crisis and emotions, particularly grief. He describes how people may experience solastalgia – a profound sense of loss and distress when a place they hold dear is destroyed. This term, coined by Australian researcher and philosopher Glenn Albrecht in the early 2000s, merges the words “solace” and “nostalgia,” signifying a yearning for one’s home or another meaningful place. A home is more than a location; it includes people, feelings, and memories, deeply shaping us as we shape it. Relationships with nearby forests, bodies of water, or animals can become profoundly meaningful. According to Pihkala, belonging to a community often also implies belonging to a place: “A certain place, an environment, can be a significant source of hope – and conversely, a source of grief if that place is damaged. It’s about belonging to something larger than oneself, where the generational chain plays a significant role. The knowledge and feeling that ancestors have also walked here is an empowering experience” (Pihkala 2019, 28, 38).
What is ultimately the impact of the artwork and its audience on their environment and the world? “An amazing performance. You don’t always notice how someone else can see this landscape,” remarked one villager in a local newspaper interview after the premiere. Feedback highlighted the experience of empathy and “stepping into the shoes of a neighbour” (Lauttakylä 2021).
For example, in recent years, the use of fertilizers and pesticides in farming has been reduced in my hometown. I do not know if the Hetkiä Suttilassa video artwork directly influenced this phenomenon, but I dare to claim that the shared spaces for gathering and the emotional experiences created by art are an essential part of a vibrant community in times of crisis, and one of the factors contributing to a larger turning point.
The Hetkiä Suttilassa video artwork was performed six times between 2021 and 2022. One of the performances in the spring of 2022 was a so-called private screening, where almost all the audience members were from outside the village. The piece did not resonate with this audience, as they had no involvement in it through submitting photographs or sharing a connection to the landscape. The audience members from outside the village did not recognize the places or the faces of previous generations depicted in the work, and thus the emotional impact, according to the feedback, remained weak and distant.
Cultural researchers Jenni Rinne, Anna Kajander, and Riina Haanpää point out that powerful emotional experiences are not only tied to place but also to culture, memory, time, and materiality (Rinne et al. 2020, 7–8).
The ecological crisis also manifests differently in different places. For environmental works to create deeper meanings, evoke strong emotional experiences, and revitalize our relationship with the environment. Thus we must carefully consider for whom, how, and where we create our works, and what dramaturgical strategies we employ in them.
Images of apocalyptic scenarios, such as rising sea levels, have already become clichés in both performing and visual arts. There is also a danger that clichéd content romanticizes the very destruction of humanity’s ecological future. As non-fiction writer Ville-Juhani Sutinen notes: “We see how things will turn out for us, but we can do nothing but watch it unfold with a masochistic fascination.” According to Sutinen, it would be better to pay more attention to ethics: performances addressing Anthropocene landscapes should be linked to marketing, structural changes, energy production, waste management, and other phenomena that are their original causes (Sutinen 2023, 66–70).
The most recent Hetkiä Suttilassa performance was in October 2022. While writing this text, I revisited the collection of images. Alongside nature experiences, the photographs depict time spent with loved ones, love, laughter, idleness, shared gatherings, the village school, volunteer events, haymaking, farming, various hobbies such as dancing, theatre, and skiing, restored log buildings, and the freedom to live. In fact, viewed more broadly, the imagery sent by the villagers reflects notions of a good life, almost entirely devoid of capitalist imagery.
Researcher of economic culture Paavo Järvensivu (from the BIOS Research Unit) asked: “What would the dramaturgy of radical reform in society be like, in plays, in art?” (Järvensivu 2019). Perhaps, instead of being a harbinger of catastrophe, the dramaturgical strategy should be to sensitize ourselves to places and the communities that inhabit them, and to strengthen the existing signals of a good life? To create “strange” and local emotional mirrors that amplify an already emerging eco-socially sustainable life?
In site-specific work, it is also important to be gentle. I quote performance artist and professor of Swedish-speaking acting, Aune Kallinen, on change and the so-called “politics of small movements”:
If we truly want to produce or facilitate change, when we approach the edge where change, the unknown, or the new thing not yet brought into the world lies, and if we want that change to be large or permanent, we need to be very careful at that edge – and make just a small change at a time. If the change is even slightly too big, our psychology and social conventions will throw us back, and we will become even more conservative than before.
(Salo 2015, 42–43)
Kallinen’s reflection on the “politics of small movements” offers a valuable reminder for eco-socially engaged art: genuine change often requires us to work within the limits of what feels feasible, even if those steps seem modest. Ultimately, the challenge lies not only in what we create but in how we foster a continual sensitivity to the spaces and beings around us, including ourselves. Eco-socially responsible art may not only be a response to the ecological crisis but a practice of living and working with respect, subtlety, and a commitment to collective resilience. This approach is less about the grand gestures and more about nurturing an art of presence, where each small choice reinforces an interconnected future.
Sources
Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanistinen performatiivisuus: Kohti ymmärrystä siitä, miten materia merkityksellistyy.” In Nauha, Tero, Arlander, Annette, Järvinen, Hanna & Porkola, Pilvi, eds., Performanssifilosofiaa. Transl. Anette Arlander. Nivel 12. Taideyliopiston Teatterikorkeakoulu. nivel.teak.fi/performanssifilosofiaa/posthumanistinen-performatiivisuus-kohti-ymmarrysta-siita-miten-materia-merkityksellistyy.
Järvensivu, Paavo. 2019. Ekologinen jälleenrakennus. Lecture 8.11.2019 in the series Dramaturgia ja ekologia: Ekologinen jälleenrakennus. Helsinki: Teatterikorkeakoulu.
Lauttakylä. 2021. “Sielunmaiseman pukeminen nuoteiksi oli Keskitalon haaste, kun Suttilassa koottiin valokuvahetkiä videoksi.” lauttakyla.fi/uutiset/64f92ab6-c237-41ed-9e1c-82c98f4a7c24 Accessed 18 October 2024.
Pihkala, Panu. 2019. Päin helvettiä? Ympäristöahdistus ja toivo. Helsinki: Kirjapaja. (E-book).
Rinne, Jenni, Kajander, Anna & Haanpää, Riina, eds. 2020. Affektit ja tunteet kulttuurien tutkimuksessa. Helsinki: Ethnos. doi.org/10.31885/9789526850962.
Salo, Jani-Matti. 2015. Sädekehistä – täydellisen politiikka: esitystapahtuman valo- ja tilasuunnitteluprosessista. Helsinki: Theatre Academy.
Sutinen, Ville-Juhani. 2023. Hajonneen maailman käyttöohje. Helsinki: Into.
Tanskanen, Riina & Kuoppa, Samu. 2023. Kapitalismin suuri illuusio. Helsinki: Into.