Ville Aalto makes biodiversity heard

The Culture Trail opened in June and it offers visitors the opportunity to experience four works of art by artists who have worked at the Saari Residence. One of them is a project piloted jointly by the Saari Residence and Luomuliitto (the Association for Organic Farming), with Helsinki-based sound artist Ville Aalto as the artist.

One of the themes of the Saari Residence’s Ecologically Sustainable Residence Programme this year is biodiversity, and one of the projects created around this theme is a collaborative project between the Saari Residence and Luomuliitto, with sound artist Ville Aalto. In May 2021, Aalto worked on their audio piece on biodiversity in co-operation with the Kampars Organic Farm in Sauvo. For the duration of the project, they lived at the Saari Residence.

Focusing on biodiversity, the work gives a voice, through art, to the insights arising from questions on ecological sustainability and biodiversity. You are able to hear and experience the finished work from the beginning of June on the Culture Trail, which has been developed jointly by the Saari Residence and the Mynämäki Region Nature Conservation Association. The work will be available until the end of August.

“This piece has given me a new way to work in interaction with others. I worked in dialogue with the Kampars Organic Farm, and the development process has been a very thought-provoking and educational experience. It’s great to engage in dialogue with people whose everyday lives are so different to mine. Very few things seem as important right now as the ability of people from different starting points and realities to discuss things together and listen to each other,” Ville Aalto says.

“This work was created on a tight schedule and it was interesting to see what shape it took in that time. I have been working with electronic nature sounds for a few years, and biodiversity has long been the basic theme of my work. Despite the very different form and approach, I’m sure this work will have something in common with, for example, my previous installation Avian Electronics – Keinotekoinen kevät (Artificial Spring), which I also worked on at Saari Residence,” they continue.

In the Avian Electronics project, Aalto created electronic sounds that sought to mimic nature realistically, including birdsong, crickets and weather phenomena. The result includes multi-channel sound installations, a recording and concerts. The works deal with the ecological crisis, the accelerating technological development and the blurred boundary between natural and artificial. Through their work, on the one hand Aalto wants to raise concerns about the state of affairs where people feel able to control, mould and destroy their environment without serious consequences and, on the other, to inspire faith in the possibility of a balanced coexistence with the rest of nature.

Ville Aalto is a Helsinki-based sound artist. They work with audio synthesis and music technologies, producing artificial, electronic versions of nature sounds that you can hear on recordings, in concerts and sound installations. Their works are a combination of audio art, electronic music and spatial sound.

For the past few years, Aalto has been working on the Avian Electronics project. At the heart of the multidisciplinary project lie synthetic birdsong and other artificial nature sounds, with electronic soundscapes and electronic music built around them. The works explore the concepts of ‘genuine’ and ‘artificial’, the relationship between humans and the rest of nature, and the threats and opportunities created by the ever accelerating technological development. The project has produced several multi-channel sound installations, concerts and the recording Avian Electronics (2020).