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Research and art

The Open Seam. On Becoming a Knot with a Storm-Sculpted Roof, on Speaking-With from Within

Application summary

Executed in the field of contemporary art, the research applies methods of artistic research. Part I of the study focuses on debating and scouting a material-based language – a language allowing a respectful and equal dialogue between non-human and human material – arising from art-making processes. Therefore, the Finnish sculptor Eila Hiltunen (1922–2003) and her metal works, created in the period 1961–1969, I selected as a case study for this research. I review Hiltunen’s workscapes (sculptures, material studies, art processes) from the perspective of Vitalist Art/New Materialism and revisit her legacy with the contemporary concept of “Material Correspondence” by Tim Ingold and the writing “I and Thou” by Martin Buber. In part II of the thesis, I re-sculpt (finalized Aug. 2018) a part of a copper roof, torn off by a heavy storm from a church in Zurich, Switzerland in 2015. It is a public artwork in progress, adapting to and being in dialog with its surrounding.

With my doctoral research I discuss a vital material cooperation. In the thesis, supported by the concepts of dialogical philosopher Martin Buber, the art-making of sculptor Eila Hiltunen as well as by post-anthropocentric philosophies, I highlight to re-envision the in- between space of one and other.

By reference to my own artistic component “Kreutzstrasse” – a rework of a roof piece that has been torn off a church in Zurich in 2015 by storm Niklas – I practice and examine the share of agency as an artist with atmospheric conditions as well as various other materials. The art-making of Eila Hiltunen, especially her cooperation with the Sibelius Monument, which I have studied extensively at the Finnish National Archive Collections in 2017, is, so I propose, a strong example of cooperating materials that form and unfold through their explicit togetherness.

In my thesis, I highly respect the artistic and societal territory from which the relationship between Hiltunen and the Sibelius Monument has emerged. Or, more simply put, I do not detect agency in my chosen examples from the past after I read about agency as understood in the present. Instead, I gently lay open motifs inherent in Hiltunen’s practice that have not yet found its way into the now. In so doing, I attempt to bring a more stable and versatile notion of material cooperation to the present.

The methods I work with in my thesis - twining, knotting, rehearsing and speaking-with - have emerged through my own practice as well as through the practice of Eila Hiltunen and my grandfather's practice as a roof maker. To cooperate with their making, their times and their material thinking enables to hold open and, by that, to strengthen the in-between space of seemingly distant spheres.

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