SONGS AFTER NATURE 

SONGS AFTER NATURE, which originated at the Saari Residence in 2022, is a collaboration between artists from different artistic disciplines. As a performance, it addresses the current state of the planet: the sixth mass extinction, climate change, social unrest and the rise of digital technologies. Poet and writer Virpi Vairinen saw the performance at the Sibelius Museum in Turku in 2024 and has written a text describing it, as well as the sensations and experiences it caused in her.

I 

After nature, because nature has done its job, and this is now the way things are, now and forever. After nature, because people invented the word ‘nature’ to distinguish themselves from something that was unmistakably like them, but which they could distance themselves from by using another word. After, because sometimes the paradigm changes; it is the period of discourse, and in its wake, discourse leaves its mark on everything that is subsequently said and done. After, as in adapting, reaching for, imitating, paying homage to.

SONGS AFTER NATURE was a multi-artistic performance, a collectively created ‘sounding ecosystem’, as they describe it in their performance text. The group includes dancer Satu Hakamäki, shibari artist Elie Halonen, singer Rosie Middleton, visual artist Siiri Viljakka, musician and composer Pia Palme and, in this performance, also double bassist Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka. Palme played several instruments, which shoot across the verbal description of the performance, each in turn, below in the ekphrasis.

Ekphrasis is a term dating back to antiquity and it has many definitions. In some, it refers to giving a voice to something silent, making a sculpture speak. Sometimes it refers to a competition to see which art form can best express which ideas. But often ekphrasis means translation, interpretation, inspiration, adaptation: a text born from a work of art in another medium. Ekphrasis is the most collaborative form of literature; it would not exist without art that is not literature. Being influenced can also be a form of ekphrasis. The artworks described echo through each other’s structures

II 

SONGS AFTER NATURE is not only a collaborative piece, but also a collaborative process, as its initiator Pia Palme explains. It has gone through different variations at different venues in 2022 and 2024, featuring singers such as Mari Zighinas and Juliet Fraser, as well as dialogists Tuomas Laitinen and Lisa Horvath who contributed to the way the performance took shape. Even a collective piece of art is often easiest to talk about with someone who represents the group. For this text, I messaged with Pia about some ideas, but the description of the work itself is a description of my own sensory and thought-led experience.

‘Sounding ecosystem’ is an excellent description of the biodiverse nature of the work and the sense of interaction on stage. At many points, the interdependencies and series of organically arising and somehow particularly possible moments become apparent. A scientific ecosystem is always limited by something, but when used metaphorically, an ecosystem allows for the idea of movement on the boundaries, negotiating and renegotiating them. You can step inside it from many different roles, limit it to a specific time and place with a declaration, and observe it to see what is left within its boundaries. Or you can say that a temporary ecosystem has been created and it will teach the people in its presence its logic.

Much of the process itself remained unknown to me, I only saw at the Sibelius Museum a small slice of the project that started at the Saari Residence in the spring of 2022. Pia told me that the rehearsals in the summer of 2024 took place in a historic barn at the Saari Residence, where nature’s presence was evident in a much more diverse way than at the Sibelius Museum. The wind, pollen, insects and various stages of the agricultural cycle were mixed with the material they were working on. The previous version of the performance was presented in the same landscape at the Saari Residence’s Harvest Party. The branches, leaves and berries that were on the stage and used in the performance that I saw came from the same area, but in this performance they were enclosed by the building’s sealed shell, which cut off the flow of sound, the air and pollen, temperature variations and visual observations. Nature became more elevated even though there was less of it there. Or it was elevated in a different manner, a more familiar one, set up on the stage to be part of the view on audience members’ retinas. And as they leaned back in their chairs, nature looked like one meaning among others, referring to others. Poplar, rowanberries, bilberries, maple, rope, paper, high and low sounds.

III 

The concrete surfaces of the performance hall
a kind of shell made from drifting sand
where people echo between each other

rest-activating
action-activating
objects that are not where
they originated from

Carpets, cushions and beanbags that resemble Esete Sutinen’s works on rest. The daily life of a performance, the viewer’s restful mind. The chairs are conventionally arranged. This leads to people sitting in them in a conventional way. At the front, it’s possible to sit in a different way.

A piece of writing that has been crumpled into oblivion
its purpose is
its purpose is to refer to some other
moment, past or future or

now

”tell me what
a human is ”

like a twig used as a pen
asking via the fingers, the hand, the human
backwards

reverse engineering existential questions

waiting
is being on time
premature
as if it started
at a specific moment

in see-through pockets
dry lichen, maybe berries, flowers, leaves
non-human touching human
as always

It reminds me of the concept of the holobiont. Lynn Margulis in her time may have thought about people less than people think of themselves now all the time, and they say that a human is a holobiont, not an entirely clearly defined individual, but a kind of ecosystem with viruses, bacteria, fungi and other visiting micro-organisms.

It’s like when you’re not quite yourself when you have a fever and yet you’re exactly the same as always. Berries in your pocket, dry lichen rustling against your cheek, you’re connected to the landscape the same way as when you hold the handrail of an escalator.

On the stage, a voice repeats what the twig is asking
it’s like the wind circling
the slow, low sound of a string instrument
P plays another instrument
like wood
that has had a previous life
or is living its second life
that has sound travelling through it
like water molecules sometimes, energy on an indecisive day

the world fills up with different materials
you can only say how much in whispers
what this causes
can now be seen on the singer’s face
heard in the high tone

that sings about destruction and hope
they tie her up
move her around
sounds come out

the one doing the tying is power
objects orbit P’s gong
a pine cone in each part

where will the cone end up
trying to escape, motion
is now a slow formality

the strings aren’t sure
they don’t know what’s going on
but they do

with the water tinkling, the dancer and the singer are tied together
they are a soft mass of sound and motion
it’s hard to say
if anyone is fighting it
or doing what they must

“how to ”
P says

“this convergence
this mess
that pollutes my mind

getting entangled”

what is this
I can list its parts, but
I can’t make sense of it

“ bound together by invisible ropes”

a twig is painting with a human hand
a plant that became

speech moves at the speed of existence
like a thought, reality

“this is paper
such an old material”

the writing lags behind
the speed of documentation
is not the speed of existence
history is always incomplete

the dancer is released from the ropes
and paper,
now the prisoner
now released

“silence maybe”

at the low frequencies of the double bass
a long rope gives up, disappears
berries fall onto paper

purely decorative dead leaves
dried out, it’s a more beautiful word than dead
it’s in the liminal zone
where we can still recognise it
a short way from living
but without water

everything descends, flattens itself
the law of nature that applies to the world above the surface of the water
nature’s song
the dancer and the singer are lying down, drawn to the earth

when they get up, they eat berries
like people who have been freed/have given up and try to grab dropped opportunities
some of them go to waste
they get thrown about

a small land of plenty
a wonderful mess
a minor fight
a shared passion
a frenzy

S picks berries
they’ve been squashed
underneath them there are more notes
something more to say,
to state

The person doing the tying up moves around the stage, and the way they tie up the dancer who is damp with berries is reminiscent of the trickster in folklore, a creature who breaks the rules of people and sometimes nature, who teaches people a lesson by a small act of mischief or by creating an obstruction.

As it is necessary to identify the facts,
to curl up even tighter.

dry twigs rub against the drumhead
they sound like rain, impossibly
like a flood
like a rainstorm
that the strings pour down
the singer paints streets and slopes going down

“shifting in time
in space”

Some more leafy big twigs are tied to the dancer. They dig into the skin like a rope,
but it looks painful. But it isn’t necessarily. The dancer has a blissful look on their face,
as sometimes happens when a person is tied up in place. There are high and low sounds and

“shifting”

large dry twigs hit the drumhead
they are and they aren’t soft explosions
the human confronts the inevitable
tied up in the ropes
everything is bound to them
the human ties everything to themselves,
dragging, pulling
everything down with them
even when they seem to be stuck in place
and deliberating

“let me turn into moss
into grass, into rock
instead”

eventually the only thing the human an do is be present in their creation

and the way they looked then
they couldn’t be seen

IV 

I thought for a long time about the meaning of the art of rope bondage in the performance. It’s difficult to put into words. It has very different connotations because of its history and its diverse applications today. I think about rope and recall Dominique White’s exhibition in London this summer, in which winding metal rods rise twisting and turning into the air from wood that looks like it has been discovered at the bottom of the sea. Even next to real rope, they look like rusted rope. They no longer hold anything; they float like they were under water, only now they float in the air of the gallery. The ropes in White’s works refer to sailing knots and to the people who were transported across the seas. The SONGS AFTER NATURE performance is not about the sea, it is a performance of the earth.

I search and search. Catachresis is the mixing and misuse of metaphors, the creation of “analogies without which certain areas of reality would remain unnamed” (Monica Świerkosz). Then by chance I run into Nancy K. Miller’s arachnology again. In this theory inspired by Ovid’s character Arachne, writing is likened to a spider weaving a web: texts/ideas are cast like threads and inevitably originate with the author and the author’s body. They create something in themselves and together with what is caught in the web. From this kind of writing the metaphor of the web leaps to the next level, to the performance I’m watching on the stage, and makes me think of the movements of the person tying up the dancer and the individual knots I saw on the stage. The way the web affects the visual, auditory and semantic material: stretching and tightening, waiting, dropping into different positions, detaching, interlacing events, shifting the viewer’s focus, extending across the stage, falling suddenly, becoming invisible underneath a layer of others, connecting things. Because whatever is in the ecosystem and in the knots of the web continues to exist and build up until the show is over. And even then the process continues.

Sources

Landwehr, Margarete. “Introduction: Literature and the Visual Arts; Questions of Influence and Intertextuality.” College Literature 29, no. 3 (2002): 1–16.

Świerkosz, Monika. “Arachne and Athena: Towards a Different Poetics of Women’s Writing.” Teksty Drugie 2, no. 2 (2017): 8–26.

Abdel-Razek, Jamila “Dominique White’s Shipwrecks Surface from the Depths”. 9.8.2024. https://www.frieze.com/article/dominique-white-deadweight-2024-review