Songs After Nature

Free entry

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SONGS AFTER NATURE is a collaborative project at the intersection of experimental
music theatere and performative art. It is designed as a composition in the posthuman
sense. It relates to the current situation on Earth, as we face the sixth mass extinction,
climate change, social unrest and the rise of digital technologies. The performance,
including the music, scores, texts and storyboard, has been developed in a collaborative
and transdisciplinary process by Satu Hakamäki, Elie Halonen, Rosie Middleton, Siiri
Viljakka and Pia Palme within a two-week working period at the Saari Residence in
August 2024. The collaboration began during the Saari Residence in spring 2022. For the
performance at the Sibelius Museum Turku, they are joined by the musician Margarethe
Maierhofer-Lischka.

In their cooperation the artists expand beyond their main practices to establish artistic
relationships based on interdisciplinary experimentation. Critically inspecting the power
relations that habitually rule their artistic fields and the dominant disassociation of humans
and nature, the artists wish to explore a polyphonic time-space in which image, text,
sound, movement and the more-than-human-world weave together as unknowable
affective agencies. Informed by our embodied knowledge we view the boundaries between
entities and the inner and outer world as porous and interconnected. We prefer to define
the piece as a sounding ecosystem, a theatrical and performative ecology in which our
process is situated.

The focus is on relationships and entanglements, particularly between movement and
visual arts, in the form of contemporary dance and shibari (rope bondage), drawing and
music in the form of vocal, instrumental and electronic sound. In the theatrical time-space,
performers, performance traditions and audience converge. The artists look into the theme
of metamorphoses and becomings. Many generations of artists have studied this theme,
which is increasingly important today during these times of change in the Anthropocene.
Our understanding of what it means to be human rapidly evolves, and we belong to a
broader continuum, a planetary ecosystem. We are intermeshed with the environment
and, in life and death, connected with the planet, the Earth.

Content warning: This performance contains shibari, also called rope bondage, in which
people are tied and their movement is restricted by the rope. The rope-bondage seen in
the performance is consensual between performers and is executed with the utmost care
by a professional rigger.

 SKE austro mechana has supported the compositional process of the piece SONGS AFTER NATURE.

The event is organised in collaboration with the Saari Residence.

The Saari Residence, maintained by Kone Foundation, is a residence located in Mynämäki, Southwest Finland, for artists of all disciplines and nationalities. At the Saari Residence, artists and researchers can focus on their work in a peaceful rural environment and share their thoughts and experiences with colleagues. The residence’s long-term activities and thinking are underpinned by an ecological approach, which also covers social and psychological sustainability. Its keywords are slowness, insight and change. https://koneensaatio.fi/en/saari-residence/