Residency guests 2018

I will compose a piece for violin & cimbalom. The piece will be ca. 10 minute long. This piece will explore questions regarding my Arab-European double Identity. How one’s past/ origin influences one’s creation nowadays; and how one’s present filters the memories of the past. That said, issues regarding memory and oblivion and the ways they can influence the audience’s perception will have a major role in shaping the musical discourse of this piece. This piece will express the way I perceive my own identity as an ‘other’, i.e. a cultural insider/outsider to the Arabic and to the Western cultures. This attitude of the ‘otherness’/ ‘strangerness’ implies using certain outsider/ dissonant musical elements; however which gradually melt in within the larger context thus becoming an enriching coherent component within the musical fabric of the piece. Such musical thinking could reflect an ethical dimension as well, namely, the possibility of interaction and harmony between different cultures and people even when they may appear incompatible with each other. I.e. how an outsider to a certain culture could positively contribute to its enrichment and become thus a harmonious part of it. The choice of the two instruments, namely violin and cimbalom, is apt to underpin the aforementioned values of shared history and harmony between the Arabic and the European cultures. The violin has developed from the rabab and shall allow me to use the microtonal Arabic maqamat. The cimbalom has similar roots in the East (stemming from the Iraqi and Persian santur).

http://www.saedhaddad.com/

Photo: Jeff Elstone

Broadcasting is a persistent medium.

I explore the tools built for broadcasting audio and visual signals and turn these technologies in on themselves. This reflexivity allows new methodologies to manifest, where the language embedded in these machines move quickly and transform with a kind of inner logic.

I am working to identify orbital debris objects, track their physical transformation, and develop an audio and visual language suitable for the objects afterlife. Earth’s Lower Orbit (LEO) is populated with over 20,000 debris objects alongside operating systems. This planetary midden traces a linear global narrative of technological advancements and failures from the 20th century to present day. Much of the debris comes from rocket stages, defunct satellites, and past object to object collisions. Included in the orbiting junk are solar panels, a lost bag of tools, and microscopic flakes of paint. The language ascribed to the debris carries the aura of the object when it took part in, or functioned as, an operating system. Now absent of agency, these debris objects can share an expanded language among functioning satellite systems and human beings in (LEO). At present stage, I have built a visual database using 3D render software, fed by NASA and ESA’s TLE coordinates for the 20,000 + debris objects in LEO. The objects have been assigned signal-based signatures by way of software synthesizer and informed by my analog modular synthesizer. The debris moves in a real time orbit and oscillate according to its proximity with neighboring debris. In addition, I am developing a VR environment that would allow one to virtually interact or perform with the debris objects in real time. This is the start of where I hope to build a more sophisticated system and in turn, a series of immersive audio and visual compositions.

Orbital debris exists beyond its imbued function and life. The debris’ entropic state pushes the object into a new kind of agency. Enabling ourselves as receivers, we can re contextualize the debris as a collective instrument for sound and vision. Moreso, we may broadcast these compositions as persistent transmissions in the effort to again make contact.

http://www.victoriakeddie.com/

‘I have been studying satellite images of the Saari Residence on my living room sofa, planning my running routes and searching the map for dead ends that afford a view of the sea. Inevitably, I have also imagined what this corner of the world looks like and what it sounds like during the autumn’s bird migration and where I might find what few mushrooms there may be this autumn. 

In this, as yet unreal, landscape I will spend two months working on my collection of poems. 

I write prosaic poems in the third person which are slightly tragicomic and have capricious sentence structures. The protagonist in them is a certain Kiiskinen. He is a nondescript and estranged middle-class person living an absurd life, while the world’s upheavals carry on happening around him. 

At the bottom of the script, I have drafted another element, like the ribbon of text highlighting the headlines that runs at the bottom of the TV screen during a news broadcast. This river of text, filled with the world’s upheavals, meanders here and there, swallowing a great many ingredients and inevitably landing as the backdrop to Kiiskinen’s life. 

Poetry forces you to pose questions and it didn’t fail to do so this time either: Do an individual’s small life and the great philosophical questions fit into the same picture? How could an individual become connected to the world and feel like a significant part of it? Are meanings created within an individual’s closed inner world, or do they arise out of lightning-quick relations with the outside world? How does Kiiskinen birth his own humanity? It remains to be seen whether I will find some answers at the Saari Residence, or whether new questions come up.’

Robert Powell

Robert Powell was born and raised in Ottawa, Canada, and now lives in York. He has worked for many years in the fields of writing, journalism, photography, the arts, and urbanism. Robert is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He has published three collections of poetry: Harvest of Light (Stone Flower, 2007); All (Valley Press 2015); and Riverain (2018), as well as A Small Box of River (2016), a collaborative artist’s book and exhibition with Jake Attree. He was the winner of the 2012 Elmet Prize judged by Kathleen Jamie, and his poems and stories have appeared in Bridport: The Winners (2010), Dreamcatcher, Orbis, The Rialto, The North, as well as numerous Canadian journals. His most recent project is a short film & projection, The River Speaks (2017), with creative producer Ben Pugh. Robert’s poem ‘The Telling’ won a commendation in the National Poetry Competition in 2018.

http://www.rjpowell.org/

‘Riverain’    (Valley Press, 2018)

“Robert Powell creates a kind of achieved, hard-won intimacy in these poems; his voice is close to your ear, and this closeness brings the reader into the orbit of this fine, fine writer who offers new routes into love and landscape.”
Ian McMillan

“Powell’s new book ‘All’ exists just before dawn, caught in photographs, or at the moment of impact between a car and a man, wave and house. These poems exist today, and the freshness and immediacy bring this collection to life”
Poetry Book Society

“Powell’s ability to understand and convey the messiness, tragedies, and beauties of life, demonstrate what a very fine poet he is…..I read in a kind of hushed awe. James Nash

“In Powell’s poems there are wonderful connections between the terrains of landscape, cityscape, and imagination. Delicate, searching and often haunting, this is a heartfelt collection.”                         
Abi Curtis, Head of Creative Writing York St John University

Further Information – http://www.valleypressuk.com/author/37/robert__powell

‘A Small Box of River’

Artist’s Book by Attree & Powell (2016)

A Small Box of River is a limited edition artists’ book inspired by a series of walks along the Rivers Ouse and Foss in an around York in 2015-16. It is the result of a unique collaboration between York-born artist Jake Attree and York-based poet Robert Powell. The Box contains 15 drawings and 15 poems, printed in photolithography on Fedrigoni Materica Gesso paper.

Retail price: £70

Further Information – Lotte Inch Gallery – http://www.lotteinch.co.uk/a-small-box-of-river

A Small Box of River – The Exhibition

An Exhibition of Prints inspired by the Rivers Ouse & Foss, with in and around York with drawings by Jake Attree & poems by Robert Powell

Exhibition Contents

8 x A3 (landscape) poem and image combinations in black wooden frames 21″ x 17″

6 x A3 (portrait) poem and image combinations in black wooden frames 21″ x 17″

The 14 prints are high quality photo-lithographs on Fedrigoni Materia Gesso 250gsm paper

‘The River Speaks’ – Film (2017)

A new film (14 mins.) by Robert Powell and Ben Pugh, shot in York, UK, and inspired by the theme of rivers. The film includes drawings by Jake Attree, Ben Pugh’s striking poetic imagery, and writing by Robert Powell voiced by actors, children, and the author himself.

See the film here – http://www.rjpowell.org/

Zarmina Rafi is a Pakistani-Canadian writer and cultural manager. She will be working on a group of linked short stories, as well as researching for an essay related to the production of new media arts in Pakistan.

Photo: Ricardo Esway

Leyya Mona Tawil, also known as Lime Rickey International, is an artist working with dance, sound and performance practices. Tawil is Syrian, Palestinian, American; engaged in the world as such. Tawil has a 23-year record of choreographies and performance scores that have been presented throughout the US, Europe and the Arab world. Tawil is the director of DANCE ELIXIR / TAC: Temescal Art Center (Oakland-CA).

At the Saari Residence, I will be working on Lime Rickey International’s Future Faith – a transdisciplinary solo performance. Lime Rickey International is “shipwrecked here from the future.” She performs fictional folkdances and sings to a homeland that is yet to exist. Her sonic and choreographic platform is built under the influence of Arabic maqam, dabke, noise and conceptual movement practices. Future Faith is a work of Arab Experimentalism; Tawil embeds political sub-narratives and cultural confusions into Lime’s performance transmissions.

Lime Rickey International’s Future Faith is created with support from the Abrons Arts Center, the East Bay Community Foundation, the Kone Foundation and ArabAMP.

LINKS:

https://www.danceelixirlive.org/leyya-mona-tawil.html

https://www.limerickeyinternational.com/

Introduction coming soon.

Plasticine, paper, Gute Laune’, Anna Breu & Samet Yilmaz, ideation workshop April 2018, Berlin

Collectives Anna Breu and Samet Yilmaz meet each other under the sea, where sound is muted and mermaids rule. During the residency they work together with an aquatic children’s choir and a well trained crab to compose a song to be performed live on the wetland.

Anna Breu is an artists’ collective founded in 2013. Its members are Antti Jussila, Jari Kallio, Jari Suominen and Sakari Tervo. Anna Breu’s work has dealt with time travelling, Kalevala, the myth of Atlantis, medieval tales and the paintings of Rembrandt and Akseli Gallen-Kallela. Anna Breu typically breaks down the foundations of its works and then reforms them using genre fiction.

The collective Samet Yilmaz (formerly known as k.i.Beyoncé) consists of the members Susan Kooi, Lukas Hoffmann, Lot Meijers, and Nikki Oosterveen. They started out in an artspace, hosted in a former snackbar with a flooded basement in Amsterdam. In the meantime, after dismissing their previous name, they have undergone a radical image change. Regardless of the name, they see themselves as a group that developed a way of being in the art world.

Introduction coming soon.

Introduction coming soon.

Introduction coming soon.

Log kya kaheinge? Is an Urdu term, roughly translated in English as ‘ What will people think?’, referring to the general attitude of ‘giving a damn’ about other peoples opinions. These ‘other people’, refers to the rest of society who may have little to do with our lives, but whose opinion will inadvertently effect our decisions, as is common in Pakistan (and South Asia) at the cost of our own happiness.

While this phenomenon applies to men too, as females Rabeea and I have experienced it firsthand. The term Log kya kaheinge? defines our career choices, our behavior, the way we speak, live our lives, and think or perceive the world around us. It stunts our experience in this world, making us believe we need to fit into pre-designed boxes of what a ‘perfect’ female is, where being unusual or unique is most often considered a disability and innovations are considered threatening, especially to the male gender and prospective ‘mothers in law’ when it comes to ‘approving’ their sons wives.

In our practice, Rabeea and I comment on society and how it works, either on our own struggle with ‘fitting in’ or critiquing societal perceptions and societal events on a larger scale. Working with audio, video, objects and drawing to comment on our ordeals as females living in Pakistan, with pieces especially created in the SAARI Residency space, we would like to create a series of videos and/or drawings in collaboration with each other and the people or communities we interact with at SAARI.

We would like the opportunity to examine the similarity of childhood games and fairytales, especially black goat myth (Finish Santa) in collaboration between a Finnish rapper (Junnu Savolainen), a Korean performance artist (Hyunji Park) and puppet artist (Hwang Suyeon), an American performance artist (Nathaniel Hendrickson) and short filmmaker (Christopher Watkins) and an Italian interventionist artist (Gianluigi Biagini). Inspired by midsummer celebrations, Jack Smith’s film Normal Love, and our own artistic practices, we will come together to form a collective assemblage, combining these tales, and games to create one unique story to be made into a short film and a collective performance at the conclusion of the Saari Residence.

At Saari, we will begin the preparatory work on LINNA: Island of Sorrows, which was born through discussion and artistic exchange during our time in residence at the Saari Residence in 2016. This large-scale, multifaceted experiential art event will comprise multiple concurrent component projects.

LINNA explores Suomenlinna as a physical and metaphorical space that has colonised and been colonised, in which the colonisers (Sweden, Russia) have established their hegemony, and where the colonised (i.e. prisoners, dissidents, etc.) have been imprisoned. Thus, we explore the line between public/private, past/future, inside/outside and the place we occupy on this continuum. The project is our memorial to the victims of strife past and present, and our vision for humanity’s unified future.

The core team (Serena Chalker, Alexis Diamond, Marjukka Erälinna, with Ana Mejia Macmaster and Hilja Roivainen) will use the Saari Residence to plan the following elements of LINNA:

• Researching and investigating the background, personal histories and untold stories of the Finnish Civil War and other key events in Suomenlinna Island’s history, in collaboration with researcher Ilkka Jokipii, who will be joining us at Saari.
• Constructing the framework for individual and collective works within LINNA
• Developing the design and installation plan of the Island of Sorrows and associated community workshops through consultations with Saari Community Artist Pia Bartsch.

Our group consists of Petar Mitric, scriptwriter/producer and PhD fellow at the Film Studies Department of the University of Copenhagen, and Belgrade-based visual artist Bojan Radojcic.

It is Petar’s film script “Strawberry Jam” that put us together. The main character in the script is visual artist whose newest artwork is a symbolic nexus in the film’s story. Bojan Radojcic’s role in the project is to create that artwork that should appear in the film.

The main story of the script takes place in 1992, but it is told from the present moment. The main protagonist is a Copenhagen-based visual artist who exhibits his artwork inspired by his teenage years that he spent on the border between Bosnia and Serbia during the Yugoslav war (1992-1995). The main character is settled-down in Copenhagen now. Twenty-two years ago, he was a refugee. But, he is still in the state of a constant flux. He managed to escape one place, but he will never belong somewhere else again. The solitude with which he left his home country is the solitude that will follow him for the rest of his life.

The Saari Residence provided us with a possibility to spend some days together, since we live in two different countries, in order to be able to come up with the final idea for the artwork to be used in the film. By the end of the residency period we managed to agree on how the artwork will look like and we even started making it.

http://www.bojanson.blogspot.com/

The Olento Collective consists of a small team of artists and creative individuals dedicated to the development of Olento. It is our ambition to produce an artificial intelligence (Olento) capable of learning affective information via a modicum of multi-modal information streams, with an intent to deploy iterations of it in environments ranging from academic to artistic. In  the Saari Residence Olento Collective will continue its artistic research on the aesthetic possibilities of artificial agents with a dancer, Anne Naukkarinen, and a singer, Veera Hirvaskero.

Pat Nav, Jaana Ristola and Ismo Torvinen founded the Olento Collective in 2013. Jani Hietanen and Matti Hyvönen joined the collective in 2016. The members of the collective at the moment are Jani Hietanen, Matti Hyvönen, Jaana Ristola, Ismo Torvinen.

Kuva: Sanela Selimović

Photo: Ioana Cojocariu

Multilingualism is a central part of my life and work and the question of language loyalty/disloyalty, regarding my first language/mother tongue and provenance is inevitably and involuntarily significant, especially when it comes to my artistic endeavours that come to be in the realms of former Yugoslavia or in the context of Yugoslav diaspora elsewhere.

I write in three languages; English, Swedish and BCS (Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian [+ Montenegrin]), a language I, along with others, refer to as “Naški” or “our language”. I have published a book in the three languages paralleled, but mostly not translated. At Saari I will primarily focus on three parallel manuscripts connected to performative poetry and hence work with these texts in combination with performance ideas. For the last couple of years I have mostly been performing in collectives, but am also keen to develop my solo performances tied to the texts I am working on. Simultaneously, I will be recording audio poetry with lo-fi musical elements based on the texts.

Alongside this, and time-allowing, I would like to explore some more things. One of them is this triad of the Yugoslav, the Swedish and the Finnish, something I would like to delve into on site.

This video was made a year ago, when I was originally supposed to reside at Saari. In it I talk about the above-mentioned field of interest:
https://vimeo.com/186251528

Marianne Holm Hansen is a visual artist who works across media and method
including writing/ text-based work, drawing, photography, collaboration and
conversation. She explores how experience and knowledge is formed,
communicated, embodied and/ or understood through organising structures,
established methodologies, behaviours, habits and, in particular, language.
She is currently considering how we give form to that which exists outside
language. She has employed the notion of the void ­ as hole, gap, pause ­ as
metaphor for communicating in situations where language falters or entirely
fails.

She sees the Saari Residence as a unique opportunity to approach her
residency as a possibility for being in, and experiencing fully, the Void
itself. “I’ll attempt to place myself in a position that is entirely open,
including open to the potential that the impact of the residency may
radically shift the direction of the project as well as my practice
overall.”

Hou Chien Cheng was born in 1981 in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan. He received an MFA in Free Art from KASK School of Arts Ghent Belgium in 2009. Since then Hou has been exhibiting and participating residency programs in- and outside Europe. In 2012 Hou initiated an audio-visual, literary trilogy project titled ‘Orchestrating the Borrowed’. The trilogy contains three books – Brown, Green and White. Brown was published in 2014, followed by Green in 2016. During his time at Saari Residence Hou would develop a part of the final episode of the trilogy – White – which speaks of the psychology behind seeking validation. Hou currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Introduction coming soon.

Introduction coming soon.

film author, curator and anthropologist

The Lost Innocence – script/treatment for documentary film.

I am documentary scriptwriter, director and editor. I am also curator and anthropologist. In the essence, the searcher for stories and storyteller, always seek the voices and stories of individuals, groups or communities that stayed silent and invisible.

Searching for the place of memory and past in the present moment is in the essence of my works. How we construct them in our mind and emotion? How we carry memory and past in the present? In my latest film “The Flood”, the topic was the collective memory of the inhabitants of the submerged town. In my earlier work “Day of Youth” it was ideologies and believes from the past that still divide people in the present Serbia. Now, my biggest challenge is to explore it not only in content, but also in methodology by using nonlinear film narrative; not common in documentary film.

“The Lost Innocence” is documentary that I’ve been filming in Romanian foster – family in a space of 11 years. The material that I made eleven years ago, describes the last moments that orphan Andrea spent in her foster family before she was taken by her grandparents. Later, it will turn out to be also the last days of her innocence childhood.

Andrea was transferred from her caring foster family to grandparents in 2007, when she was six. There she survived traumatic child exploitation. After two years of searching, her foster family found her in the bad condition and bring her back home.

The story will be placed in 2019, during the events that follow celebration of Andrea’s 18th birthday and the day when she legally needs to leave her foster family. That is the moment when memories starts to come out on the surface again. Interweaving past and present, film will explore memories and transfer experience of Andrea.

My aim is to intertwine past and present from material that are made in such long period (different technique, I was different as an author, characters changed etc). Analyzing the material from previous filming, I want to explore it as places of memory in the final story.

In documentary film world, no one gives you a time and space to experiment, to dream your film, to be inspired and to cross the bounders of the already known. Everything revolves around the industry and production. The Saari Residence gives that space. During my stay at the Saari Residence, I will research and reinterpreted filmed footage from 2007, explore non linear narrative and applied it in a script/treatment for documentary film.

Introduction coming soon.

Introduction coming soon.

Through performance, installation, and sculpture I create visual cycles that investigate the source of movements. Pedestrian movements: those are the ones our body learns first. But how do these movements develop alongside and amongst other bodies? These questions stem from my desires to break down choreography to its deriving gestural movements. In a recent performance, Sourced, I created this cycle using four bodies which were all influencing each other through visual, verbal, and physical cues. Molly physically communicates to me, I verbally tell Constance, and Constance physically tells Priscilla. The autonomy choreographed into each “role” allows the performers to determine how the phrases change or develop throughout the process.

See some of my work at www.lindsayparnell.com

I recently graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts with a BFA in Sculpture + Extended Media with minors in Dance + Choreography and Art History. Since graduating, I have been working with Natasha Kovacs on projects involving communication through physical language, contact improvisation and bodies as transportative communication capsules. See some of our collaborative work at  www.nk-lp.com

At the Saari Residence, Kevin Allen Schwenkler and I will focus on research into the development of scores and the peculiarities of their language. Since this is tied with group listening practices and group dynamics, our project benefits from developing connections with fellow residents and with the area as a social space. This research, combined with methods for the collaborative generation of scores based on listening and scribing practices, will lead over time to specific set material for a performance.

Queerness and mixed racial identities are the source of my movement through the world. My artistic practice is an instance of this movement. By collaboratively composing performance scores I attempt to showcase this. Such compositions make manifest my belief that embodied collective action is the source and goal of all aesthetic experience. My recent piece Concerto for Voice, composed for the Mills College Contemporary Performance Ensemble, represents this. The piece consists of a network of musical tasks expressed primarily via text, each in addition to the shared task of interpreting vocalizations adjacent to speech that “comment without addressing anything.” All tasks, all sounds, and all actions in this piece are meaningless outside of the group atmosphere. So, the overall effect is one of collective sense-making of the musical unknown.

I am a recent graduate of Mills College, with an M.A. in Music Composition. I hold B.A. from Hampshire College in Mathematics, Physics, and Music.

See more of my work at www.k-a-s-music.tumblr.com

At the Saari Residence, Lindsay Parnell and I will focus on research into the development of scores and the peculiarities of their language. Since this is tied with group listening practices and group dynamics, our project benefits from developing connections with fellow residents and with the area as a social space. This research, combined with methods for the collaborative generation of scores based on listening and scribing practices, will lead over time to specific set material for a performance.