Artist Coffin Alyssa

STAYING: Artistic practice towards re-indigenizing and becoming home

Taiteellinen työ / siihen pohjautuva työ | Kolmivuotinen

This 2.5-year work plan centers on staying: not leaving Finland and investing site-responsive artistic practice in the place that I live. It has formed out of my sense of home as a non-native and value for durational immersion in place; cultivating intimate relationship with the land. It is about staying to let artistic practice emerge from my rhythms of living with the land, animals, and people (Sámi, Finn, immigrant). The staying is rooted in practices of sabbath: resting, as opposed to generating or exploring new places, and offering the presence and attention of stasis. This artistic work is also an intensive staying with my questions, such as: what does it mean to be indigenous to this earth? What might be a new term for our shared primordial connection with this earth home? How is a sense of home and belonging crucial for the survival of the earth and our spiritual survival in relationship with it? The questions and practices proposed are a response to my observations of an existential homelessness and estrangement from the land. They are an embodied way of becoming home with the specific land I inhabit and, ultimately, re-indigenizing to this planet. I will develop emergent performative action in daily life as the method for inquiry and creation. This includes: the repetition of walking, participating in cycles and seasons, sensory inscription, displacing habitual actions, forming objects from local materials (like wild clay) and learning Finnish like a child to re-tether language to embodiment in the sensuous earth. This work is also an invitation to those around me: to practice staying, to root and merge by participating in rituals of intimate relating with forest, mire, and sea. I will host regular practice sharings, and dialogues to collectively hold questions. This work period will be one of listening and learning from the earth, Sámi, researchers of indigenous studies, and all those who have stayed for generations and live closely with the land.