Olla ei mistään kotoisin (Of No Origin)

Application summary

The Finnish phrase “olla ei mistään kotoisin”, literally meaning “from nowhere/ of no origin”, can imply low quality or no worth. What does it mean to come from nowhere? Or from too many places, with no single home to claim? Who decides whose lives and histories are worth archiving? The project Olla ei mistään kotoisin (Of No Origin) grows from a mystifying bricolage of personal family history – bits of stories here, a photograph there, and the silence that surrounds them caused by consecutive wars and political upheavals in China. I explore how fragmented memory, inherited grief, and cultural displacement shape the perception and construction of the body. The body exists as a site of rupture and illegibility – but this very illegibility carries a liberating potential for redefinition. The body here also extends into circulations of proxies, substitutions, and replicas across cultural contexts: from piles of deserted Buddha sculptures and molds in the yard of a Buddha factory in my hometown in China, to mountains of discarded mannequin torsos on the central streets of Accra, Ghana. To access memories that cannot be fully told, I turn to uncontained forms, shifting languages, and broken syntax as strategies. I am creating an ensemble that consists of a series of glass sculptures embodying the domestic labor of washing, text-based works, alongside curating the collaborative zine series OEMK – Olla ei mistään kotoisin. The online zine version is dynamically coded, generating a new constellation of fragmented memories with each reading. Moving through feminist, postcolonial, and hauntological frameworks, I weave personal narrative, archives, queer and diasporic thinking to ask how alternative systems of belonging and knowledge may emerge from what is obscured or lost. This is a collective process across borders. Collaborations with queer and diasporic communities in Finland and internationally will take the form of workshops, exhibitions, and shared publications.