Welcome new residency guests!

The last working period of the artist’s and researcher’s residency year at the Saari Residence began with an international theme.

From November to December, the artists David Bergé (BEL/GRC), Baran Caginli (TUR), Jacinta Jardine (IRL), and dancer-choreographer Iris Karayan (GRC), artist Valentina Karga (GRC), comics artist Laura Kenins (LVA/CAN) and Lauri Antti Mattila will reside and work at Mynämäki. Translator Kristiina Drews will continue working as a residency guest at the Saari Residence.

During the residence period, artist David Bergé will work on a project, Ghost of Modernity (working title), which is a multi-image mobile installation. The work explores the situation in Seoul, South Korea, where urban life and wildlife are relentlessly thrown together due to rapid urbanisation. The idea behind ​​this work is to highlight the peculiar time and space at this unique interface.

The Saari Residence’s artist and researcher retreat joined the Artists at Risk (AR) safe residence network earlier in the spring; the Turkish artist Baran Caginli is the first AR artist to stay at the Saari Residence. Caginli will work in Mynämäki for two months, after which he will spend one month in Helsinki, funded by the Saastamoinen Foundation. In his work, Caginli makes use of various fields of art, dealing with identity issues such as ethnic discrimination and power conflicts between the state and citizens.

The Irish artist Jacinta Jardine is writing an immersive theatrical performance during her residence period. This multi-sense presentation is about the will to survive and refusal to surrender in a dystopian sci-fi context. In the play, she explores how important the fundamental human desire to survive is in today’s world, and its relationship with the ever-growing desire to succeed and live forever in people’s memories.

The choreographer and dancer Iris Karayan is creating the foundation of her new work, which will be premiered next year in Athens. She is collecting material from the internet on recent events in Greek society. In her work, she intends to commemorate and recreate the narratives of these stories. She will ultimately interpret and transform her research materials into choreography.

Artist, architect Valentina Karga works with multiple media, often alongside the public or communities. Her artistic work can be defined as being at the interface between the conceptual arts, architecture and social art. At the Saari Residence, she is working on video footage from the perspective of climate change, in which she is trying to understand why people refuse to acknowledge unsuccessful practices and examine what will happen next.

During her residences, comics artist Laura Kenins is drawing a comic book, The 90th Birthday, which tells the story of an old woman, Betty. In the story of her 90th birthday, she remembers her childhood and adulthood while a young filmmaker records her life story on film. The 90th Birthday is a metafiction, which moves between Betty’s idyllic memories and the present, and between Europe and Canada, while examining immigration, family ties and women’s roles from the early twentieth century to today.

At the Residence, Director and performing artist Lauri Antti Mattila will write his new performance text H. (hidas esitys) [S. (Slow performance)]. H. is an intertextual dialogue with the original, a rewrite of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which Mattila wants to highlight what Hamlet was missing, and the absences in this respect.

Translator Kristiina Drews, who is the Residency Guest of the Saari Residence, will continue to translate the short stories of Lucia Berlin. The first part of the series of short stories, Siivoojan käsikirja ja muita kertomuksia (A Manual for Cleaning Women and other stories) was published in Finnish in October. You can read more about Kristiina Drews’ plans for her period as the Saari Invited Artist here.

Read more about what our guests are planning to do at the Saari Residence here.