ART
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Art For All Festival is a production promoting art and culture by bringing together people across disciplines and aiming to be more accessible to everyone.

The Art for All Festival of 2022 reflected on soil as a model of coexistence and transformation.

Soil is a compound body, in constant metamorphosis. Animals, plants, and other organisms contend for its resources, finding shelter and nourishment. Being porous to changes, soil collects waste and chemical pollution. It hosts hybrid, resilient and mutual ways of living, offering a model for communities that welcome the struggles of diversity and cohabitation. Through the theme UNDER-GROUND, inspired by soil, we will imagine social ecologies and sustainable forms of living, as vegetal, earthy creatures, learning ways of living in-between nurture and trouble.

The festival 2022 took place in the Kaisaniemi Botanical Garden in downtown Helsinki. The garden houses the Natural History Museum's living collection of plants.

The festival studied the dialogue between art and science as the artists collaborated with the garden's staff and the researchers of University of Helsinki.

The festival was preceded by a week-long “garden residency” where the artists built up their work in a cross-artistic environment.

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2022, video and mixed media installation

“When I say we need to unlearn, I mean people like me, who live in the west, and who work most of the time within institutions. I want to recognize that I am a part of this privileged space. I’m not speaking for a universal we that needs to unlearn. I’m speaking from within a university, a private university, where we tend to think that we know a lot. We tend to think that being rational is much more important than being embodied— or being in, cultivating, a rice field.” - Elaine Gan, Bud Book: Manual For Earthly Knowing, Gustafsson & Haapoja


In this work we would like to explore the body as a site for knowledge and a space for unlearning institutional methods of knowing and being. The piece will document a bodily exploration of natural substances, highlighting the act of licking as an unconventional method of knowledge production.


After carrying out several experiments for this piece, we discovered that the act of licking began to move beyond the experience of taste. Our tongues formed a different connection to the various materials and substances. By exploring this act, we became aware of our body’s changing relationship to these materials. The process became less about the sense of taste and more about the bodily experience of learning new ways of interacting and relating, thereby deconstructing our relationship to a particular bodily act and changing the way we interact with the world.

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2022, mixed media installation

Laahaa, menemisen mukana seuraava

Vetää perässä, jäljessä, takaa, raahata

Jättää jälkiä pintaan

Laahaa vasten, kiinni pinnassa, vastakkain, puhki kulunut

Raahaamisen reitti liikkuu pinnalla

Jatkuva laahaus


Dragging (2022) is an installation consisting of sculptures and sound. It explores the experience of being dragged and trails and paths that are created on the surface by dragging.

2022, sound installation

Kuulostelua is a site-specific sound installation which brings together clearly perceptible and hidden, barely audible sounds recorded around Kaisaniemi Botanical Garden. The central themes of the sound installation is an the artist's interest in the everyday environment, and approaching, perceiving and experiencing it in a different way. It is also an attempt to approach and try to observe and notice the relationships, interactions, and multifaceted connections between different actors: such as people, animals, plants, materials, technologies, geographical location, and microclimates.

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2022, performance and site-specific installation

There are paths made of stone and, next to them, a gentle erosion. Erosion that stems from our feet going astray. Shortcuts, detours, illicit trails: the city is full of them. Some call it disobedience; others, desire. During the Garden Residency at Kaisaniemi Botanic Gardens, I will follow the garden's scripted routes, retrace others’ footsteps, and allow myself to drift. I will move to find companions and temporary roots, and I invite you to do the same. Stop by the small glasshouse near the garden’s main entrance. I will be there a couple of hours each day to help you get on track. If I don’t happen to be there, you will find guidelines for choosing your path. Desire paths | Kaisaniemi is a framework to reconnect, share and experiment with the streams of my research, some of which have long been buried underground.

2022, multi-screen installation

No soil means that no sustenance for humans. We take birth on soil, live on soil, walk on the soil, die on soil, and finally vanish in soil. Soil is a synonym for Soul, with immense spiritual values. Our civilization has flourished because of soil. Soil is the most extensive biodiversity reservoir. Our health, culture, and social behavior are dictated by soil.

But since the Anthropocene, humans have had countless impacts on the earth and the soil. Desperately abusing the dirt to find a pathway for more people to survive, humans haven't realized that their destructive behavior is laying down consequences for themselves.

Even though humans, in general, are consciously trying to care for the soil, human interferences remain imbalanced and disastrous, causing ecological instability.

To make people think about their behavior and pay attention to human soil interaction, I created face filters based on different kinds of soil destruction caused by humans, Urbanization, Deforestation, Acidification, Desertification, and Salinization, Erosion, Mining. To map the seven disasters on the human face is just like reminding them of the seven deadly sins they have committed to our mother ground. In this way, I intend to arouse and acquire the Common Consciousness of humans and nature.

2022, performance

A dance performance that will migrate within the spaces of the Botanic Garden. A slippage between humanity, animality, and organic matter, in constant transformation. A mutating organism travels from one ecosystem to another, allowing the surroundings to permeate its movements and breathing. In this performance, monstrous is what I become as I reach, sprouting roots towards other living organisms. It is something I can’t grasp but can feel. The audience can simply see me passing by as they are looking at other artworks, or they are welcome to follow me on my journey as I inhabit, adjust, and morph through different spaces.

2022, guache paintings on paper

Trickle trickle, soil and sizzle is a collection of narrative paintings that explore the relationships humans form with the landscapes (real or fictional) they inhabit. The work inspects the botanical garden as a social and cultural institution that has historically exhibited the wilderness of the global south as exotic trophies. In the greenhouses, wilderness becomes botanical. Natural becomes a cultural artefact, displaced from its soil for recreational and educational purposes. By reflecting on these contrasts— between the sterile and fertile, quiet and the tumultuous terrains, this exhibition contemplates on the notions of migration, belonging, cultivation and inhabitation.

The festival was opened with a performance by Charles Quevillon. The performance mixed song, electric guitar and playing a scale constructed on the venue.

Ambient artist noosa makes sounds inspired by silence.

Ismi tastes like soft and salty almond ice cream and coconut-cherry. Ismi is pale pink colored fluorescent light. Ismi performs a four song series of 2030s music with inspiration from folk songs and club hits.

My music is most influenced by the seasons and the things I do and that take place around me. In addition to making music, I make video games which brings a certain delicateness to my music. I also often make easy going and minimalist music but sometimes rough and complicated kind. There is always a pinch of somberness included.

DJ Vissyvesi gets excited about things that can be created by playing music.

ear piercing soundscapes

I process my relationship with nature through music with lots of contrast, meditativeness and experimentation. In this surprise ex-tempore show I will play my elemental climate change-themed EP Spectra completely.