Application summary

At the Saari Residence, I will work on Available Futures: Boreal Cartographies for Getting Lost, an investigation into the landscape of Mynämäki: its organisms, its material fragments, its layers of time; through drift as method and sensory cartography as result. For six years I worked as an engineer on the construction of hydroelectric plants in Colombia. From inside that system I learned to read with technical precision how a territory transforms: what disappears, what resists, what persists beneath what progress considers finished. That experience is the engine of my artistic practice. Since then, my work has been a way of walking slowly through transformed landscapes to see what remains. In the Atacama Desert I found microorganisms surviving conditions we would consider uninhabitable. In Buenos Aires I found the remains of reconfigured territories holding memories no one had named. The question that drives me is always the same: what persists? What forms of life, memory, and landscape survive outside the dominant narrative? Available Futures is a concept I developed in previous projects. Futures are not unique, linear, or predetermined; they are latent, multiple, and situated. The future for Finland is not the same as for Colombia. Saari would be the next chapter: the same question, a radically different landscape, and therefore, its own materializations. During the residency I will produce hand-drawn sensory cartographies and a manuscript of speculative texts moving between observation and imagination. The first two weeks are for arrival and exploration, walking without destination, listening. The middle weeks for sustained fieldwork and writing. The final two weeks for editing and letting what was found settle. Throughout, I look forward to the conversations, the weekly presentations, and the unexpected directions that other residents might open.