The Saari Residence as a chronotope

The Saari Residence, set in the Finnish countryside, 30 km from the city of Turku, offered an ideal space in which to expand on these concerns. As Taru Elfving and Irmeli Kokko argue (2019: 20, 24), residencies in rural or peripheral contexts can function as‘laboratories for sustainable living’, cultivating ‘affinities and diversities’ and empowering ‘collective intelligence towards social change’.

Furthermore, something else was also of great interest to me: residencies constitute ‘chronotopes,’ in providing and also making time and space, as Pascal Gielen points out (2019: 43), inviting one to ‘reside temporarily’ in order to ‘generate outcomes that sustain.’ (Schneider 2019: 66).

I was particularly interested in this paradox, as residencies grant one the right to peacefulness and safety — but only in order to focus and be productive, in alignment with the demands of the wider contemporary art world. 

Upon arrival, I was struck by how each of us arrived with our own unique wishes, goals, needs and materials. Some travelled lighter or easier than others – literally and metaphorically.

For visual artists it is always a challenge working in a new space – rarely do you have everything you need to hand. For writers, it is more about finding a good spot to concentrate.

One of the artists in residence explained how it is always important for them to create a certain environment and atmosphere where they can work, while one of the writers said he found stepping away from his usual writing habits greatly rewarding.

For me, I enjoyed how little I had taken with me, and how, for a time, I had more physical and mental space to work and live.

Material ecologies and artistic practices

The environment played an immediate role in shaping our experiences: the dense trees, the pond, the wooded pastures, the fields, the animals, the fungi, the birds and the insects, the sky, the clouds.

To those of us coming from loud urban environments, this landscape was intense – quiet, yet brimming with life and matter. A multitude of different species, each with their own rhythms, reminded us that we were only ephemeral residents among these permanent more-than-human inhabitants.

As Ella Prokkola, Eveliina Kunnaton, and Elisa Lähde (2024: 7) have written referencing the Saari landscape, we became ‘actors among other actors, bodies among other bodies’, ‘cohabiting, composing, and shaping the landscape’. Soon we found ourselves talking about what we saw, heard, noticed, or smelled while familiarizing ourselves with the area.

The daytime colours at Saari were bright, and the darkness was thick like a blanket; it felt like you needed to carve a way through it. Everything was physical, tangible, messy, with blurred boundaries between what is ‘natural’ and what is human-built.

In just two months, September and October, we experienced a shift in both weather and season, from light clothing to winter layers, from longer days to longer nights. For those coming from the South, this also brought respite from an alarming, prolonged heat.

These embodied transitions also led us to adapt our routines or develop new ones. Walks, jogs and bike rides became intervals and key moments of spacetimemattering, offering opportunities to connect with matter.

Residency Director Leena Kela explained the importance – also one of the Kone Foundation’s goals – of striving for balance between social, environmental and mental sustainability, an aim that corresponds, not coincidentally, with Guattari’s three ecologies, their inseparability, and the need to think transversally.

As part of my research, I planned discussions with my co-fellows focusing on materials, materiality and matter. Through these, stories were told that manifested a plural view of matter shaped by diverse practices and cultural and geographical backgrounds. This involved, for instance: ink and the history of drawing; the quill pen and the materiality of language; seaweed as a base for artworks; ‘invasive’ plants and the altering of local ecosystems; everyday objects and the body as matter; and apps and the physicality of digital infrastructures.

These stories revealed histories of colonization and exploitation, as well as possibilities for resistance, regeneration and resilience. The narratives also connected materials to practices and to their longevity, disappearance or loss.

Materials, it became clear, give birth to practices and also to habits of accumulation, re-use, or disposal. As the artists expressed, making involves constant negotiation and collaboration with matter, taking into account the properties of materials.

Or, following Tim Ingold (2013: 21, 31), the maker is ‘a participant amongst a world of active materials’,  ‘in the process of making he “joins forces” with them’, ‘knowing their stories: of what they do and what happens to them when treated in particular ways’.

Working with materials thus reminds us of our connection to matter and, hence, to the planet itself. Artistic labour becomes a negotiation with matter’s vitality, reminding us of our embeddedness within planetary material processes.

Towards an ethics of mattering through art

While taking notes, writing, and reflecting on our discussions, I realized I was sidelining my own embodied relation to matter. Why was I approaching materiality primarily through the practices of others? Was I risking a disembodied stance?

Curatorial practice, as Lisa Rosendahl (2025: 446) notes, is inherently relational: ‘the curatorial body speaks with and through others – always. It recognizes that being in relation is the start of being’. It is a body that ‘lets itself be affected, invaded, and changed: by the contexts it operates in, and by the artists and artworks it is in relation with’.

While working at Saari Manor, within the particular autumn landscape and its premises, where everybody followed their own pace and brought their own references, I became aware of how each and every one of us was affected by it all – by time, space, encounters, and matter.

I became aware of how we all work intra-actively – as Rosendahl argues, adopting Barad’s writing – with our thinking and decision-making co-shaped by various forms of agency, human and non-human, and their constant changes and becomings.

The in-betweenness fundamental to curatorial work materialized differently in this context. Becoming aware of the situatedness of my research – something I had not planned for – I slowly found my way to address matter, its vitality, and our inseparability from it. This pointed to the importance of relations, but also to the space given to rethink dependencies on material culture, habits, and rhythms, and to account for ‘our part of the tangled webs we weave’ (Barad, 2007: 384).

Living and working ‘together-apart’ at the Saari Residence thus made me realize what is meant by the ‘ethics of mattering’, and the ‘responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part’ (Barad 2007: 393). This is an ethics based on ‘trans-corporeality’, highlighting ‘the interchanges and interconnections’ between ‘different bodily natures’ (Alaimo, 2010: 2).

As the residency ended, I considered the stark contrast between the human-made infrastructures awaiting me – cement buildings, traffic, dense urban flows – and the vibrancy of matter at Saari: open pastures, wooded paths, bird towers, and rural cosmopolitics (Elfving 2019: 229).

Stretched time would soon shrink again and disappear behind deadlines and commitments, yet I carried with me a heightened awareness of how intra-actions with matter shape, condition, and produce temporal and spatial experience.

If matter ‘does’ time, as Barad argues, then our accountability lies in recognizing the agencies we engage with, mobilize or suppress. Saari made this vividly perceptible: agencies matter, and they come with responsibilities.