I'm a Finnish-Dutch artist, educator and organiser living in Amsterdam-Noord. In my work I explore the revolutionary potential of collective creativity. As an autodidact DJ, filmmaker and anarchist, clubs are my art school and protests my phd.
I'm a Finnish-Dutch artist, educator and organiser living in Amsterdam-Noord. In my work I explore the revolutionary potential of collective creativity. As an autodidact DJ, filmmaker and anarchist, clubs are my art school and protests my phd.
2019
Artists: Cyprien Gaillard, Rana Hamadeh in collaboration with André Castro, Louis Henderson and João Polido, with poems by members of The Living and the Dead Ensemble, Sondra Perry and Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa
Curatorial team: Mirna Belina, Gideon Kiers, Lucas van der Velden and Juha van 't Zelfde
Tags: Amsterdam, art, film, music, research, technology
Under the title HEREAFTER, the Sonic Acts 2019 exhibition aimed to explore the genesis of our current crisis – and what happens in the hereafter – by reflecting on the issues we are forced to confront on a daily basis: the inequalities caused by colonisation and geostrategic manoeuvring, the challenges brought forth by immigration and the climate crisis, the ever-present exploitation and precarity of the work force, and the way technological advancements disrupt and not emancipate – that is, the gooey mesh of global capitalism.
In order to gauge the complexities and interconnections of this crisis and re-imagine a different reality, it is helpful to look back, re-evaluate and untangle the threads that encumber our thinking outside the sticky terrain of neoliberalism. Works presented in this exhibition, which took place in three acts across three spaces in Amsterdam – Arti et Amicitiae, De Brakke Grond and Stedelijk Museum – were created by a wide range of artists who share a sensitivity towards the ‘legacies’ of our past, with which we are currently confronted and combine the drive to explore, engage and address these important topics through nuanced voices. Now more than ever, we need their alternative interpretations, readings, proposals, visions and imaginations to prepare, activate and ready us for what comes in the hereafter.
I was part of the curatorial team for the exhibtion in Arti et Amicitiae. The works exhibited there examined structures of power by collecting traces of Europe’s colonial engagement with East Africa (Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa); reflected on the complicated entanglement of technology and images in constructing the black American identity (Sondra Perry); meditated on the ways in which traumatic events of recent history can be read in – or have been memorialised by – urban or ‘natural’ landscapes, architecture and public space (Cyprien Gaillard); invoked the restless spirit of one of the leaders of the Haitian revolution of 1791, Toussaint Louverture, transporting him back across the ocean from France, where he was imprisoned and died, to Haiti (Louis Henderson and João Polido, with poems by members of The Living and the Dead Ensemble); zoomed in the question of the word qur’ān which inspires a score that posits itself as the index and administrator of ‘all potential discourse’ (Rana Hamadeh in collaboration with André Castro).