Carried by Invisible Bodies

Anne Naukkarinen & working group

8.-25.9.2022


Carried by invisible bodies from one person to another
You don't know how you're gonna react
And when you do react
You react with body parts you didn't know you had
Very small ones, like, you know, all the little hairs you don't normally feel in your body
-Carried by Invisible Bodies, Lost Girls

The performance Carried by Invisible Bodies is a memory holder. It’s also something else, like a possibility to re-imagine. Bodies’ movements, words, sculptures, and harp music are echoes of something that was once given. They are traces of a repetition that carries, strains, bores and caresses us.

Alongside dancing, sculpting, playing the harp and reciting poetry are some of the oldest forms of art making. Carried by Invisible Bodies creates a poetical space where the present moment, personal histories and non-human perspectives of time are weaved together. Materials like clay, wax and hay follow their own processes of growth and formation, while the artists' bodies and their ways of making art are connected to layers of human cultural history. The music by Natalia Castrillón, a poem by Maarit Mustonen, and sculptures by Niina Tervo are gathered together and brought in conversation in Anne Naukkarinen's choreography.

Credits:
Choreography, dance: Anne Naukkarinen
Harpist: Natalia Castrillón
Sculptor: Niina Tervo
Poet: Maarit Mustonen
Producer: Riikka Thitz / i dolci
Print: Kalasataman Seripaja
Conversation partners: Laura Cemin, Sara Grotenfelt, Venla Helenius, Tiago Martins Pinto

Production: Anne Naukkarinen, Titanik/Arte ry, MAA-tila project space 
Supported by: Arts Promotion Centre Finland, City of Helsinki
In collaboration with: Ehkä-production, i dolci
Residencies: Arts Centre BUDA (BE), Ehkä-production/Contemporary Art Space Kutomo (Turku, FI)
Premiere: 28.5.2022, Titanik gallery, Turku

Artists’ Bios:

Anne Naukkarinen is a Helsinki based choreographer, dancer-performer and visual artist. In her art practice, the body is approached as a sensorial, emotional, and complex material that affects and is affected by other bodies, materials, situations, and environments. Time-related observations also guide Naukkarinen’s work. Naukkarinen works in intersections of contemporary dance, performance and visual arts. The scope of works range from choreographed performances to art publications and installations. Naukkarinen holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts – Helsinki (2020) and a BA in Dance from the Theater Academy – Helsinki (2015). She studied in the Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin in Dance, Context, Choreography program in Germany during 2014.

Natalia Castrillón is a harp performer, improviser, singer, and educator interested in sharing the sound of the lever harp in any context. Her musical influences come from her background in classical music, Latin American and Global music as well as experimental improvised music. She has a master’s degree in Global Music from the Sibelius Academy and currently works on her personal project and harp concert format "The Global harp, a transcultural journey". She also works as a freelance harpist in multidisciplinary art projects as well as in Interkult Ry.

Maarit Mustonen is a Helsinki based artist working with text, installation art, lens-based images and performance. Questions of language and communication are central to her work. By examining language’s relation to image and body her work creates connections with poetry. Her process often has a personal starting point which she then combines with conceptual and/or experimental working methods. Different kinds of translations, chance and play recur in her work. Mustonen holds an MFA in time and space arts from the University of the Arts Helsinki (2015), BA in photography from Lahti Institute of Art and Design (2012) and B.Soc.Sc. in communication & media studies from the University of Helsinki (2009).

Niina Tervo creates multimedia art, using mostly sculpture and installation. Her works are based on scientific and philosophical reflections on life, its structure and underlying forces. The materiality of Tervo’s sculptures alludes to the existence and imperceptibility of forces, through which she explores the interrelations between things and their intrinsic connections with their environment, alluding thereby to the structures of life. Tervo's works form abstract, yet ordinary moments, a process that makes the artist and the spectator alike part of the research as well as the artwork itself. Tervo uses a quantum-theoretical experiment as a springboard to explore the meaning of energy as a component of our life and identity. Tervo finished her MA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2018 and BSc in biology in 2010 from the University of Oulu.