KAAMOS | Poetry amidst darkness with Daniel Malpikka

Daniel Malpikka speaks with literary critic Vesa Rantama about his solo exhibition, artistic lineage, hybrid identity, and the intersections of Finnish and Latin American literary modernisms. KAAMOS, the exhibition, was held last summer at Gallery Augusta, part of the Helsinki International Artist Programme (HIAP). Unfolding through text, sound, film, and installation, it explores themes of darkness, political poetics, and displacement. A version of this text was originally published in Nuori Voima (3/2024) under the title Kaamoksen runoilija.

You’re known for working across both text and image. Has one medium been more central to your practice? When did you first start combining them intentionally?

I come from a family I consider unconventional, non-dogmatic. I grew up in an environment where literature and the arts were part of the everyday. My childhood was, in some sense, sensitive and attuned to the latent value language carried within our home. My parents’ library, for instance, was rich with encyclopedias and 20th-century literature, especially poetry, theatre, and Latin American journalism. The same went for image and sound: I had early access to auteur cinema, progressive rock, video games, and analog photography. It was normal for me to move fluidly between Kurosawa, Buñuel and Kieślowski, or to listen to Zappa and Emerson, Lake & Palmer; to play Metal Gear Solid, read about marine biology or the theory of bonsai, or immerse myself in the novels of Laxness.

On my father’s side, I am the third generation of poets. My grandfather died in a motorcycle accident at 28, when my father was only three. The only things my father inherited from him were two objects: a railwayman’s pocket watch, stopped at the hour of his death, and twenty typed poems. It was perhaps in that suspended time between my father and grandfather that the Malpica family was condemned to poetry. My father is a reserved and multifaceted man: a public accountant by profession, but privately a poet, photographer, musician, and bonsai grower, though he never pursued any of these formally. On the other hand, my mother is a journalist specialized in theatre. I grew up watching adaptations of Sartre, Grotowski, and Cortázar, a lasting influence I credit for my sense of the performative space in writing.

The truth is that my youth was shaped by economic precarity, where everything was lacking except access to culture. Poetry became my most vital resource, and for that I am grateful. We’re talking about Mexico City during the transition from the 1990s into the early 2000s, a time marked by deep inequality, globalization, racism, gender violence, and the so-called war on drugs. William Carlos Williams speaks in one of his poems about defeat as a revelation of unexpected worlds. For me, that’s what Mexico was: a place of beauty and vitality, underscored by injustice, cynicism, and absurdity. And it was there that poetry became a possibility.

Those years trained me to improvise life itself, perhaps rooted in a sensibility where poetry isn’t just for writing texts, but for invoking situations, possibilities, even tensions. I remember once being stopped by the police in front of my house in the middle of the night, for no reason. When my mother saw what was happening, she burst out the front gate yelling: “What are you doing? My son is a poet!” The officers, shocked, let me go. They didn’t quite understand what they had touched, but they knew it was something incorruptible. “Sorry, ma’am, we didn’t know he was a poet.”

We lived in a kind of ghetto built along the edge of a ravine, once a historic village eventually swallowed by the city without proper planning. A poor neighborhood stripped of its name in the 2000s, when the city built one of Mexico’s most important business districts. Aerial photos of Santa Fe tell the story clearly: skyscrapers on one side, corrugated tin roofs on the other, divided by a bridge ironically named Poets’ Avenue. That collage, that absurdity, for me, that was poetry.

And precisely in absurdity, things unfold. My second public reading happened at 18. I say second because I wasn’t invited to the first, I crashed it. But that interruption led to an invitation to the second, which turned out to be an international poetry festival in Mexico City called Poesía en Voz Alta. That same night, the American poets Amina and Amiri Baraka performed. As often happens, the real scene took place later, in a jazz bar downtown with an improvisational poetry jam in multiple languages. “My children!” Amina Baraka said as she embraced us. I took her words as a kind of literary baptism.

That moment broathen the possibilities of a poetic landscape for me, not just as written words, but as embodied presence, as collective act in its vitality. From there, I began to see other disciplines as potential poems. So in a way, the mix of text, image, and space in my work comes from a hybrid legacy, one that has only grown deeper through the Finnish tradition and its linguistic, geographic, and visual dimensions.

Later, as a History student at Mexico’s National University, I gave form to this transdisciplinary impulse: I published my first chap books, founded and directed an emerging poetry festival for four years, and launched Radiador, a literary magazine that became a formative platform for publishing, editorial design, and curatorial work.

How did you become a Finnish artist?

I consider my work to be part of the Finnish literary corpus. That might sound strange in a country where political and linguistic divisions still segment the literary field. But identity is complex, inherited, forged, negotiated, transformed, or seized. For me, poetry cannot be subject to the hegemony of national frameworks. There is no Mexican or Finnish poetry, only poetry written in Spanish, Finnish, Sámi, and so on. So being a Finnish writer has become an inevitable geographic condition. The variation of my name is a gesture of acknowledgment toward the Finnish tradition that now shapes me.

My writing has undoubtedly expanded thanks to Finnish literary and artistic networks: reading, translating, and exchanging with poets like Olli-Pekka Tennilä, Mathias Rosenlund, Cia Rinne, Niillas Holmberg and Hassan Blasim.

In retrospect, it’s striking how a common practice in one place becomes political in another. My cultural work over the last decade has included producing multimedia poetry events that served as both performative experiments and collective platforms, connecting artists across languages and scenes. During the years when my immigration status was uncertain, it was precisely those same writers, cultural workers, and artists of Finland who spoke up for me. That, I believe, is a kind of implicit citizenship, an honorary Finnhood.

In an interview with the legendary singer Chavela Vargas, a journalist once questioned her Mexican identity because she was born in Costa Rica. She responded: “Mexicans are born wherever the fuck they please!” Malpikka nods, as steam condenses on the concrete walls of an urban sauna.

Finnish poetry is written in whatever language the fuck it pleases!

Your exhibition in Suomenlinna featured a recording of a negative residence permit decision from THE FINNISH IMMIGRATION SERVICE. Is art for you a tool for social commentary?

Every public artwork engages in dialogue with its viewer and its time. During the exhibition, the piece titled Päätös, which included that recording, was placed alongside two monumental visual abstractions. The pece itself is not a pleasant experience for me, as it reveals a deeply private and vulnerable moment. But it gains its full meaning in context, as part of a larger whole. Kaamos is the long poem of my current darkness, which is the darkness of the reader, of poetry, and of the world.

Furthermore, the exhibition was conceptualized around four audiovisual pieces. The first is inspired by the opening chapter of my unpublished book Written with X (Se escribe con X), which explores various nomenclatures of fire. These poems are, in a sense, political, laden with references to the Caucasus, Zapatismo, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and other intersections of resistance and mythology. The piece was filmed using a combination of analog and digital formats, later processed through various software. The poems were audible in the space in both Spanish and Finnish translated by Eva Malpica. The second piece opens two concrete geographies in my life: Suomenlinna and the Mexico City metro. Both serve as windows, bound together by a rewritten fragment from Octavio Paz’s The Monkey Grammarian. The sound installation for the piece Päätös was created in collaboration with Pedro MacLoughlin. The final piece was not originally conceived as part of the exhibition, the world’s current reality forced it into existence. It is a critique of cruel indifference: a sealed jar containing, among other things, a watermelon that, at the time of the exhibition, was seven months old. The image of a watermelon slowly collapsing into an unrecognizable paste. That is the image I carry of our global reality. A world that watches, in cowardice, the annihilation of the Palestinian people. A transparent genocide. A darkening of discourse.

As a whole, the exhibition’s sound design rendered the space as a single, cohesive body, something akin to a motion poem, where text and sound drift through the gallery at intervals, immersed in the metaphysical darkness that is Kaamos.

On the other hand, the exhibition was not conceived as a closed or rigid structure, nor do I hold strict notions about what a space should be or how it must function. Kaamos also operated as a platform, a living installation that welcomed other poets and sound artists into its atmosphere. During its run, I curated a special event, inviting Amado Peña, Juan Duarte, Nathalie Sallegren, and Wild Perra to perform darkness on their own terms. The gallery became a shared terrain, shifting between installation and collective ritual. One of these interventions gave rise to Línea, an unintended piece by poet and translator Amado Peña, created during his performance using soil, flowers, and ice. I decided to keep it, and the piece filled the gallery with mosquitoes.

A part of the exhibition’S PoETRY deals with the burning of books. Is that a looming threat today, or something we have left behind?

If the last century belonged to hegemonies, perhaps this one belongs to differences. But recognizing difference means admitting something is fundamentally broken in how the world operates. One of Finland’s greatest virtues lies in its social equality, a product of the welfare state. But today we are witnessing a Finland aligning with global trends that favor private interest over the common good, a oxymoron to the very values Finland is known for. We are seeing the dismantling of culture, social safety nets, the creeping privatization of public healthcare and education. What lies ahead is poverty, exploitation, and class division. In that sense, I am pessimistic. The burning of libraries is a metaphor for the future we are heading toward, the dissolution of something we took for granted. If I am wrong, then it will be because a new world emerges. This one is unsustainable.

As for what lies behind the fire, poet León Felipe named Prometheus as a metonym for the lyrical voice. He reminds us that poetry is a fire that belongs to everyone and no one, a flame passed down through time. When the poet immolates the poem, they are simply channeling fire, a collective record of our humanity. Perhaps there lies the invitation to make another world possible.

You’ve worked on a project comparing Finnish and Mexican modernisms. What are the parallels?

Yes, it’s a 400 pages comparative editorial project that links Finnish modernism with the Mexican avant-garde movement Estridentismo, through their respective magazines Ultra and Irradiador. A project of considerable ambition, developed over the past two years in close collaboration with my colleague and friend, Emmanuel Vizcaya. The book will include essays by Clas Zilliacus and Elissa Rashkin, key researchers of these literary movements. Clas’s text will be accompanied by Spanish translations of poems by Elmer Diktonius and Edith Södergran.

Both movements were driven by a spirit of experimentation and rebellion against literary tradition, and both were fascinated by modernity. You can feel that energy when reading Diktonius alongside Estridentismo founder Manuel Maples Arce. But there are political differences, especially around nationalism and internationalism. Ultra allowed for bilingualism; Estridentismo fell short when it came to indigenous languages, for example.

The book will also feature Latin American literature, visual arts, and literary translations of notable contemporary authors from Finland such as Rosanna Fellman, Olli-Pekka Tennilä, Mathias Rosenlund, Miia Toivio, Matilda Södergran, Inger-Mari Aikio, Ye Yint Thet Zwe, Katariina Vuorinen, Karri Kokko, Cia Rinne, and Niillas Holmberg. 

How do indigenous poetry in Mexico and Finland influenced your work?

My relationship with contemporary Indigenous literature in Mexico stems from spoken word and community publishing. I think of Nahua poet Mardonio Carballo, Zapotec poet Irma Pineda, and the Taller Leñateros collective in Chiapas, one of the most beautiful publishing projects I’ve ever seen, run by contemporary Maya women.

In Finland, one of my earliest literary friendships was with Sámi poet Inger-Mari Aikio. Through her I discovered the works of other Sámi poets, including Niillas Holmberg. That led to the publication of the trilingual book Roaðði (Sivuvalo, 2016), which compiled poetry by Inger-Mari and Niillas, and was launched in Mexico City at an international Indigenous literature festival. My parents came to that presentation.

A few years later, I traveled to the Sápmi region while working with Inger-Mari on her book Boulbmatjávrri ellain (DAT, 2020), a total book documenting her home region of Buolbmátjávri. Through that work, I wandered the town’s lake, listened to local stories, discovered Wimme’s electro-yoik, went fishing like a Sámi, saw dismantled fox farms, picked berries, ate reindeer tongue, and heard tales of Nazi planes that had crashed during World War II. For me, seeing the vaivaiskoivu in the North brought me back to my childhood—watching my father tend his bonsais while thinking of Mexican snow. Most people don’t know that the snow in Mexico City is made of volcanic ash, the voice of Popocatépetl.

When I think of the Sámi, I think of the Zapotec word diidxazá, “the language of the clouds.” The word is also a variant of the Zapotec language. While traveling through the North, I learned that one of the greatest Sámi legacies is to leave no trace at all. Most of the settlements I visited were nearly invisible.

To be cloud, and dissolve into the vastness of the tundra.