Liisa Ahlfors: Daydreams, small ones
I have heard people wonder who is tossing shoes on the cables above the city. Must be the newborns: they wish to continue daydreaming even after they have learned how to walk. That is worth to strive for everyone.
Renee Altrov: Correct Timing
This work tells a short story about the events that took place in Finland in 1918.
There were several revolutions in Russia in 1917. Finns felt that due to the Russian situation it was a perfect time for them to take back what belonged to them. It is a very delicate topic for Finns. I, as an Estonian, can relate to this feeling. Because of our own history I can take a very critical point of view towards the Finnish Civil War.
Through my work, everybody can now take part of Finnish Civil War.
Mikael Kinanen and Vili Nissinen: The Cage
The Cage is a performance we use to retell the old 1970’s pro-Soviet leftism in Finland. Our work comprises of an iron cage and two young men who sing old leftist songs inside it.
The former Finnish left-wing radicals have been forced into a cage. Politics has become a topic best left alone. The freedom of speech has become meaningless, for no one wants to talk.
The old cultural leftism has been transformed into entertainment. The only thing remaining is nostalgic camp. The ideology has disappeared and the fires behind the cause have become entertaining.
The youth is conservative. It has become meaningless to talk about ideologies - there are none beyond the current hype. Leftism lives on only as an identity, not unlike subcultures.
The Cage becomes a caricature of both the labour movement and the worker-aesthetics. However this may well be more welcome than the original.
Anna Knappe and Kirsi Hellman: Dick Dyer's New Syllabus
Comic prints
There are numerous useful things to know that that can not be found in schoolbooks. Dick Dyer's New Syllabus is a comic about things which are not taught in school. The comic's narrator is a fictional teacher Dick Dyer who knows everything about everything. Dick digs into subjects that are taboos or otherwise inappropriate to be dealt with in schools and gives a lecture about each subject without avoiding or distorting anything.
The comic prints are on display on the Labour Museum Werstas' announcement board together with other announcements.
Sampsa Kuha: UNITED IN DIVERSITY
The piece consists of all the civil flags of European countries. Flags are made of wood and together form a big flag with the proportions of the EU flag. Tiling, engraving and different levels in depth gives flag its own structure. This flag of nations hammered and glued together, will be painted to match the color of the EU flag and given its 12golden stars made of steel.
Riikka Kunnari: Cloaca Maxima
Postcard installation
My photographic series is about modern urban culture. I chose six pictures for the exhibition that I think relates something essential from the present urbanity. What is citizen’s relationship with nature? Can everyone influence to his own environment? What home means? Is there desolation among thousands of people? A base for my project was my visit to old Roman sewer Cloaca Maxima in this spring. It was built almost three thousand years ago to drain marshes from around the Rome. That was in some way the beginning of an occidental civilization. Now there live homeless Romans by its outfall.
Essi Laurila: Small moment of freedom
Videoinstallation
You must never grow so big or important that you cannot sit down in the swing even once a day, close your eyes and let yourself go.
Music:Psylocke&Northvibes, Beautiful flowers gone bad
Satu Leppänen: Täydellinen päivä
Petra Lukkari: Pulu
gouache on window glass
I found dead pigeons from the street. Birds had flown into shop windows. I picked empty boxes from the shops to take these birds to the park. What am I burying, when I buried these birds? I paint colourful flood of tears to window because I wonder where sadness has gone.
Aapo Nikkanen: Epic Win
First I was like WTF but then I was like OMG LOL!
Karoliina Paappa, Leena Pukki, Stina Riikonen and Lari Lätti: ROUTE COUTURE – fashion for your road
For an independent woman who knows her way, we offer a new kind of fashion.
Route couture opens a new kind of fur-fashion boutique near the city-centre in Tampere. Each garment of this collection is a unique work of art that has its own stories sewn in – one of a kind like the person who wears it. All clothes have been carefully put together and sewn in detail to meet the taste of contemporary audience. The main materials are ecological Finnish fur and leather. When you buy a Route couture -product, you can be sure noone else wears a similar one.
During the construction of the shop you can see some of our outfits on the window display.
ROUTE COUTURE – fashion on the road!
The Route Couture -project presents a collection of unique haute couture -style fur-fashion clothes. The garments are made by the artists from fur and skin of domestic roadkills - wild animals struck and killed by motor vehicles on Finnish roads. The skins have been hand collected and processed for making of the pieces. The garments are presented as a new brand, “Route couture” that includes unique tailor made fur-fashion outfits. The clothes are displayed on a shop window in the city centre to create an illusion of a new fashion boutique.
ROUTE COUTURE - find your route
A big part of the land areas of the world are controlled and regulated by people. The animal and plant species that haven’t been able to adapt to the rapidly changing conditions have either vanished or retreated to fewer anddiminishing natural habitats. Also those areas are often divided with roads leading people from one place to another. When a route of a wild animal crosses with that of a car driving a road, outcome is most often either death or injury of the animal.
Fur is understood as a luxury product used by the upper class and the wealthy. It has a certain imago that has been born (and also intentionally created) within a long period of time, and it is reinforced by the global medias and marketing imagery. In the shop the customers buy the image of the product and thereby the image of themselves as users of the product. What is less meaningful is the actual content of the package.
By showing a skin of a roadkill as an expensive fur product or moreover as Haute Couture high fashion, Route Couture -project challenges viewer to look through fashion, design and windshield. Thereby it questions general opinions on beauty, luxury, marketing values and truths, and justification of the use of “common” space.
Pekko Rinkinen: Kulli Kuningas
Jukka Silokunnas: No loitering
installation
My work will ask what is loitering? Who is there to tell what is allowed and what is not? And does that apply to old buildings too or just humans?
Liina Soosaar
My topic is immigration and tolerance. I have decided to approach it by looking at the society through the botanical. For me there is a strange parallel between human and vegetal. Nature is one of the things Finns appreciate and value. It is something they are really proud of. Plants migrate too, but we do not tend to criticize that.
Mikko Torvinen: Ex Nihilo
3D animation in Second Life, 8 min, 2009
Traditionally, the sauna was the first building constructed when people built a new home for themselves.
The digital sauna takes elements from two different traditions: a scene from The Seven Brothers and a detail from a Chinese funeral ritual, where relatives burn effigies of things they believe their loved one will need in the afterlife.
It is a ritual that uses a simulation to create a link between the seen and the unseen.
How is the virtual created or seperated from the real - is it like a fractal, or do virtual worlds have their own transcendence, which returns only to the simulation itself?
Martta Tuomaala: Worry doll 2009
Worry dolls are small, hand-crafted dolls, which are traditionally made in Guatemala. According to a legend a person can tell one worry to each doll before going to bed and in the morning the dolls have grieved all the troubles away.
My performance is, in a way, a reversed worry doll. People usually measure their own destiny in relation to the experiences of others. You might be able to feel better if someone has more problems than you have. The work gives the opportunity for the audience to forget their own worries, but also opens a possibility to see their own life in a deeper sense.
Kristian Tuomainen: Robbers and Cops
performance
Saturday 24.10.2009 at 19.00
In the city center of Tampere in the area between Hämeenkatu-Rautatienkatu-Suvantokatu-Aleksanterinkatu
Years of the childhood are gone. The rules of the game are still same.
Picture: Laura Konttinen
Milena Tähkäaho: City air liberates
”Libraries gave us power
Then work came and made us free”
Nicky Wire, 1996
The woman in my photograph relates to a steam engine. The photo represents imaginary cross-section from the inside of the machine. I want to toy with a thought that there is an anonymous workingwoman inside a steam engine.
Industrialisation and urbanisation brought changes also into society structures. Women’s role went through a transformation when constantly growing industry offered them a job and own wages. Transition was assisted by the fact that men were on the war front. Women’s position as a family provider as well as factory production bearer strengthened crucially. A working class woman’s independency was rather a vital condition than manifestation of a freedom of choice.
Industrial revolution opened up new interpretations about an individual as well as the entire society. ”Red” way of thinking considered a working class person as a part of bigger machinery. A person’s input was essential but still the workers were seen as anonymous and easily replaceable. The books of history introduce them as an unidentified crowd. Only the pictures of the rich and powerful were marked with name and status.
Steam engine’s cylinder pair was named after women as well as many other machines that are seen as gracious and noble. The women are those who are remembered because of their social status. The act of respect can contradictorily also be considered as a commodification. In reality women were absent from the actual working space where steam engines were located. In my photograph the woman is present and her participation is undeniable.
Juho Viitala: Rentoudu Vellamossa! | Ta det lungt i Vellamo! | Take it easy in Vellamo!
Installation
RENTOUDU VELLAMOSSA!
TA DET LUNGT I VELLAMO!
TAKE IT EASY IN VELLAMO!
'Relax in Vellamo!' is an installation in the middle of the Media tunnel
located under the Siperia-mall. It offers a chance to stop and take a
rest on the hammock in the idyllic courtyard of Villa Vellamo. The trees
carrying the hammock curve above, and the top branches waving in the
wind make for a great visual escape from the hectic everyday city-life.
This escape would be ruined, if it weren't for the hearing protectors hanging
by the hammock. Putting them on makes this really relaxing, without them
the noise of the bulldozers (tearing down the surroundings) that has been
unpleasantly arousing the enhabitants of Ratapihankatu area for too long,
well - it would definately make it a little harder to relax. Soon the whole
area, Villa Vellamo and it's lovely courtyard included, the old trees and the
fireplace will be torn down by the city of Tampere and it's irrational and very
unfinished city planning. There really is no need for any of these buildings
to be demolished, and without a thorough plan of what's next, this operation
frankly seems like Tampere acting rashly again - and with ugly consequences.
This work wants to ask is the city of Tampere incompetent to perform any
renovative actions without destroying some more old and culture historically
significant milieu, this time in the heart of the old workers district of Tammela,
in Ratapihankatu? It also wants to remind us how important it is to take a brake
from all the rush of modern life from time to time, to re-evaluate the well-being of
ourselves, of other people and of our environment above the values of productivity,
profit earning capacity and the insane self-purposive progress of man. In a time
like this when we've become so estranged from the values that every Finn was once
raised to hold dear - we need reminders of what's meaningful in our joint city
space and how can we influence things like whether our future courtyard has
green grass and old trees - or just more glaring advertisements and gray
parking lots.
Take it easy in Vellamo today, for it is not going to be possible much longer.
