FIRSTINDIGO

How to describe living the artistic life? How to live a life surrounded by one’s own art? Making art is so intimately linked into one’s sensing of the world that there isn’t simple answers. In the current research of art, we try to map different kinds of knowledge embedded in the artistic processes. ‘Living’ with the arts is like ‘dwelling’, which in fact implies an old meaning for a house. The doors in the house keep opening and closing as a trespass to new fragments of interiors. The repetitious movement of stepping in and out of the interiors gives even the doorhandles almost allegorical significance.

Robin Rapoport is a sculptor and designer who has been choreographing for her dance company Headless Horse. As a dancer in Robin’s company, the creative process made me reconsider dancing together with the sculptural.  Robin has been looking for a living and forming entity in the sculpture, which could be realized through the dancer’s body and her movements. Another layer came from the Alexander technique, which would bring those two materials even closer together.

I asked Robin about this entire connection, wanting to know how the Alexander technique has changed her.

RR: So funny you should ask that. The other day I was speaking with a magazine publisher of home design who wanted her editor to meet me and I said I have a class for Alexander Technique, but will skip it in order to meet her. I reflected that most people do one thing like designing, and here I spend so much time on another activity perhaps losing accounts because I’m not as available. But if you understand Mr. Alexander’s work it is crucial to one’s sense of clarity. The more I go, the more I discover holding in my body that I need to release, and as an artist I am curious where this will all lead. I know I’m changing so much already. The way I stand, my breathing, and so I am not so hyper. I can make better decisions with a calmer mind. We are for the most part so disconnected from ourselves and from the proper use of the self, which enters into all arenas of movement. I am very concerned with health and maintaining it. I do not want to stiffen up but remain easy and fluid. And I think to be an artist is to think outside of the box, to think ahead, to be perhaps more aware of the dangers our planet presents to us on a daily basis. This Alexander Technique is what I do to combat that.

ORGANIC FORMS

Robin Rapoport’s sculptures and sculptural furniture display an array of different approaches to organic forms, which could be labeled, as somewhere between Scandinavian and African, they are modern, natural and primitive at the same time. The sculpture and furniture feels animated and living. In some cases it is almost talking to you, and these pieces are shaping the space. The design presence is not too loud, but the pieces make statements and offer alternative points of view to look at the space. A piece of furniture is standing on its own legs, when it is a floor lamp, for instance. And if it is a bookshelf it can even include eyeballs. You might as well know what I mean: When you talk to plants, you talk to trees. And this design is so ’whimsy’ that you might as well talk to it.

When Robin takes on the art of creating a house with her interior design, she likes to enhance the warmth of the interior walls. The walls already have imaginative touch in them. Cardboard covered walls with a touch of asymmetrical designs gives them a hint of geometry, and overall, they have ethereal lightness in them. This meditative approach, which she also calls as an art of ‘dwelling’ continues in the wooden sculptures. The sculptures both gather and form the space around them, and they have their own individualistic character. Robin’s interest to form is fluid. Materials appear with fluidity; they are towards rough or process-like, rather, than simply solid or static structures.

THE HUMAN BODY

The Dance Company is close to being like a living sculpture, where human body is constantly taking new shapes and testing the space where it moves. The dancing bodies with sculptural elements on stage together with them, is another Rapoport’s take on the theme. Along with the abstract, animated and organic forms are these narratives, which have several underlying layers. These stories unfold themselves in a course of a fairytale, or as a series of otherwise magical happenings.

Dance, short film, sculpture, and light design evolve from the same source creating narratives without suffocating punctuality. Robin’s events evolve around the form and texture. Sometimes a piece of plexiglass gives an idea to a story that becomes a gesture in the dance performance, or it is part of the furniture created, and the objects found, all made for the home. Home is an evolving space, which is the dwelling. And living one’s home is part of the artistic process. Basically home is living together with art, and art keeps changing, as the interiors get different stories and layers.

Robin has created her home in the woods of Greenwich, CT, together with her husband Edward L. Milstein, who himself is a painter of geometric color. Both share a passion for the arts, design and architecture. These three-colliding elements are coexisting in their home, where exterior is also mixing with the interior. A visitor who comes to their spatial industrial loft-like house and art gallery encounters the presence of the woodland nature. The house is evidently coexisting with its environment, as the landscape is not too worked, but remains the same type of organic fluidity with the rest of the things around. They collaborated with the Robert Young architects to create their ’Art Barn’. In the summer the house has a wire screen wrapped around it which is covered with wisteria, and so becomes a green jewel box in the woods emerging from a winter cinder block form of grey. It is amazing how a ’green screen’ that is like a living skin over most of the surface make the concrete-block look different. The greenery also adds thermal insulation. / More pictures for the house are seen at http://ryarch.com/art-barn

LIGHT DESIGNS

As of today, Robin has developed Light Designs. She is creating fixtures that come from the sculptural roots of using wood, copper and paper. Interesting ceiling lamps are the ones like an octopus or simply ‘branchy’ wired designs, which are light weighted structures for the ceiling. Ceiling lamp can contain one long rectangular design that has two branchy-designs attached to it, or it can be a smaller sculptural design having one wire inside them.

I asked Robin few more questions. I wanted to know how living in the woods inspires her. I also asked, where will her designs be in the future, and where will her passion be.

RR: I think there is nothing more beautiful and magical and instructive as Nature and so I stay here, somewhat hidden and enclosed and perhaps somewhat lonely at times as well but this is where my work unfolds. When I travel to New York it is to study the Alexander Technique but then I come home to walk the property where I have lived for 24 years. Every year I add or shift plants and every following year I can take pleasure in watching them bloom. Outside and inside are distinct yet connected, as are we with both an exterior and interior persona? With so much suffering and tragedy in the world I feel blessed to have this place as a personal sanctuary and which makes me acknowledge every day a higher being which I can attribute the beauty all around me to.

I hope my Light Fixtures can add beauty to a room. They are crafted by hand so each is unique. I am happy to personalize them for customers meaning that I could change the paper color and or wood color. How fascinating is it in Nature that a plant on the outside can be a dull grey with spikes and when it blooms the most delicate of leaves and colors emerge. And this color is for our eyes to appreciate like cinema except you can touch it.

My next passion is to have a home furnishing boutique where I would sell my designs for tablecloths and ceramics, as well as have my design services. I love to set the table, and I find very little of interest in the tabletop design right now. So much of what is out there is about simplicity and “whiteness”, but perhaps just too much simplicity. We have lost great craftsmen (women). With the current economy people are afraid to stock inventory that is not trendy. But I am uninspired by what is now trendy. I just find it bland and so will make my own.

VISIT ROBIN RAPOPORT’S WEBSITES: robinrapoporthome.com

http://robinrapoport.com/

Robin Rapoport established Headless Horse in 2002 in New York City. The dance company has performed in live show, in festivals and in her short dance films. Her ‘Thief’ appeared in Palm Springs International Film Festival, and in the Jumping Frames Film Festival in Hong Kong.

Cultural geographies can be full of imagination.  Finland’s geography shares attributes of ice and snow, whereas some other places are filled with sand and heat. North, cold, south, warm, masculine, feminine, are ideas that we unconsciously relate to our cultural geographies. Then, ’space’ when attached to cultural geographies is partially ‘virtual’. Interesting is, how our imagination creates space as ‘absolute’, ‘relative’, and ‘relational’ (as David Harvey challenges it). What I am thinking in relation to my new work-in-progress research project within arts, is a questions of imagination; how do we as cultural beings and citizens of the global world, create meaning from our cultural origins, or from our cultural geographies. My current research is not about Finland, but I like to reflect one particular attribute, which so often defines Finland’s geographical imaginary. That is the forest, and forest has a meaningful and long prehistory in Finland.

Folk traditions in Finland’s territory never considered forest as pure wilderness. From the prehistoric times, people utilized its resources leaving marks on a terrain. Originally, forest metsä in Finnish language did not mean the totality of space where trees are a dominant feature of the landscape, but the term pointed to the sacred. Metsä was an edge where inhabited regions of the people ends. It was a borderline for the everyday social life (tämänpuoleinen) and it was a route to the other world (tuonpuoleinen) (Anttonen 2003, 299-301).

In the thirteenth century, early Baltic-Finnic population covered over 230 local villages in Finland’s territory. An old custom was that ritualized spaces were separated apart from the living areas. Certain trees in metsä had hiisi-inhabitants (hiidenväki) were the dead beings were put to rest at hiisi-sites. These hiisi-inhabitants were the supernatural people of the post-mortal world. When Christianity was brought into the country, the hacking of trees that had hiisi-inhabitants started, and churches were built on those spots. What then happened was, that folklore also converted hiisi -term and its ontological referent to signify ‘Hell’, as a borrowed duality from the Christian theology. The forest started to signify borders between the ‘civilized’ world and the ‘pagan’ world (Anttonen 2003, 299-301).

How does this imagination enter our current ideas of the forest, is intriguing. How do we see the forest, how do we process it, occupy it, harness it, and so on?

Reference: Anttonen, Veikko 2003: “Sacred Sites as Markers of Difference-Exploring Cognitive Foundations of Territoriality”. In Lotte Tarkka (ed.): Dynamics of Tradition. Perspectives on Oral Poetry and Folk Beliefs. (Essays in honour of Anna-Leena Siikala on her 60th Birthday, January 1st 2003). Finnish Literature Society: Helsinki, pp. 291-305.    

Avainsanat: Forest.

photo: AH (courtesy of firstindigo)

…Addition to this writing: Liisa Kaljula from Artishok comments on March 21, 2012:

So nice to read your contemplations on alternative curating and also that you merge it with feminist theory! Some little remarks though on the purely factual: Artishok was founded in 2006 as a platform for different activities on art and criticism, but mainly as an art criticism blog, 2008 it started with Artishok Biennale. The founding formula of the biennale was that there had to be ten artists and ten critics involved in the exhibition each time. The rest has been up to the changing curator. This time instead of one person picking the participants, I wanted to let the critics choose, and for that to make sense, they had to be with as different backgrounds and agendas as possible. So this is why there are critics who are into queer theory and feminism, phenomenology, self-mythology, modernism, video games, sculpture and installation, photography and so on. So basically these ten critics who all have different agendas pick ten artists - and they will all merge in the autumn as one big happy family, when each and every critic has to write about each and every artist.

Avainsanat: Virtual museum.

Our lives can become targeted, and the world events can break our innocence of time and space. The political turmoils in many areas of the Middle East have evidently shown us that our imagination of cultural space can change rapidly. International media has been ‘good’ in influencing our views of the significance of recent political turmoils.

Once undergoing a radical process from being a state under oppressive powers, Egypt took a route for re-branding its image in the world. The sequence of events towards a revolution in Egypt took place in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in February 2011. This political performance became a testimony of a new type of nation branding, which operates with the help of global testimony. The advertising value of the events in the international media is in the question of, how did the revolution realize itself through the use of contemporary technologies? The revolution was not only local in terms of its impact, but it was simultaneously taking place in the various surrounding regions, and ultimately it took notice of the entire world through the modern telecommunications devices. SMS messaging, the use of Twitter and Facebook became channels for branding a new and globally more attractive appearance for Egypt. Men and women, young and old, came out from their homes bringing their radical presence, and fighting for the better future.

As a political performance, Tahrir Square stands as an utmost example of branding a nation. The sequence of events radicalized some common ideas that usually stand for the images of Egypt as an ancient, and merely an anti-modern state. The representations of the region’s backwardness, as it comes to people, its ruling power, and even the medieval imaginary created around the cultural artifacts (use of camels etc.), has been holding a strong place in our imagination. These representations were crashed and set in turmoil. Yet, the immediate surface and media representation, the use of stereotypes by the international media, as it discusses Egypt, still seemed to continue.

I went to Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif’s lecture on March 3rd in 2011, as she was lecturing at the Edward W. Said memorial lecture at Columbia University. Her view on the local peoples’ communal actions that gave Egyptians new voice throughout the world, was very moving. It seems now that in today’s global world, nation branding involves voicing that promotes both uniqueness and difference. From the cultural political points of view, critical consciousness started building itself in Egypt, that perhaps elsewhere would transform itself to a milder forms of ‘re-imagining our new nations’. Yet, Egypt’s cultural space became an example of nation building that carries across national borders. Its new imagination has become contested in the global space.

Avainsanat: Egypt.

JC: WOW, was it really THAT long ago??? I remember it well, it was my first trip to Finland, so very memorable. I am 43 today, time to start thinking about growing up. After all, it is the thought that counts…..

JC: The most recent places have been Saudi Arabia, UAE, Brunei, Malaysia and Estonia. I think that every performance every artist gives, inevitably builds bridges, but then if the context is one of tension, conflict, or post war (power vacuum) then this becomes more poignant, as there can be also need for healing and reconciliation. The difference begins with every individual making an effort, which in turn, makes a difference. The carbon footprint is a difficult subject for me as I do travel far and wide, and to get to Dubai for instance, I would need to go by train all the way to Istanbul, then buses from there. Sounds great, even romantic, but impossible given the amount of concerts I do every year. Maybe one day I will be in a position to not think about how many concerts I need to do every year, and just travel this way, which would be amazing. Saying that, I will take the train to Siberia for my concerts in Novosibirsk in April.

JC: The creative process involved here come from two perspectives, me as a film maker and a musician. The music came easily with David Lillqvist (another Finn!). I rarely play with drummers, so this brings out a clearer sense of rhythm. The video was more difficult because we struggled with light in some of it, and it was COLD! For me, the video making process is not always or only about the story of the music, but a little about the personality of the performers. Maybe this is because I am a performer first and foremost, and I feel it important to connect with the audience personally.

JC: Big question, as I am in the middle of some big changes. I have started this project www.jesseralwadi.org which is an initiative based in Abu Dhabi (UAE). It is many things, including education/workshops for schools, performances in the UAE and internationally (in UN concerts in Geneva and NYC). But mainly, this project is something which enables me to continue the theme of ‘building bridges through music’ on a more official level. I am off to Dubai and Abu Dhabi on Monday to secure funding for the first year. Wish me luck!

FI: Thank you so much Jason, your projects are awesome, you need lots of good luck! Happy and safe travels!

And here *Endless summer*

Avainsanat: Jason Carter.

February is a great month. Sami national day on the 6th celebrates cultures and heritage of indigenous Sami people, on February 28th Finns have their Kalevala (the National Epic)-day. During the mid month, people who are interested in the old time traditions can head to Røros in Norway. This event is called Rørosmartnan – Røros Market, and will be held for two weeks starting February 15th until the 29th. The historical marketplace opened in 1854, and has occurred every year since. Fans of traditional dance and music can learn and dance at old sangerhus (singerhouse) with the tunes of rørospols-dance. The old mining town is since 1980 a Unesco World Heritage site.  The market itself is a wonderful place to look for vintage, arts and crafts, local and traditional foods, etc.  Be prepared as the town is located 630 meters above sea level. I went there in 2005 for couple of days and recommend the event as a fun social experience.

official website for market: http://www.rorosmartnan.no/

photo: firstindigo

Avainsanat: Rørosmartnan

There is only so much we can do with the urban panning? Move cafes to the rooftops, leave the city center only for taxis? Start using bikes in the city. What remains in the city that never sleeps aka *NYC* are the yellow cabs. As I have gotten used to them in my everyday life, I thought to invent something that would describe my mindscape, or, rather, imagine together with the cabs. One rainy day I figured that the rain looked like yellow. The yellow rain landed on our coats, we hurried as usual, yet something was different. It was perhaps the awakening to the spring, the anticipation, or coming into this realization that the colors are there around us. The everyday is packed with shapes, colors, lived and animated livelihood, art, design. Anything.

I love one thing, *pink*. Now, when That color arrives in the city, occupying the busy business and residential avenue of New York, something Is in the Air. Last year this extravaganza color paraded a good amount of time on the street called the Park Avenue. Will Ryman’s ‘Roses’ created from fiberglass and stainless steel, and thus having a naive and almost clumsy look in them, were just lovely vitamin for the city. Imagine pink and red roses in gigantic size, and then the bugs on top of them. Ryman’s roses were attractive, and most importantly, I found my favorite bug. I had a reason to walk the street over and over again. I had a reason to think that the city is beautiful even on a rainy day when windgusts are kissing my back, when my mind is somewhere far away thinking of the faraway places of the wildest unconquered nature. Here my gigantic bug was making my day happy, and making a boring and secured street plan look childish and funny, a little bit tilted even. It is surprising what art can make out of the convenience of the everyday as it mixes with more serious urban plans. Only a Spider by my favorite artist Louise Bourgeois would make me happier, if I met one on a street corner of course.

@firstindigo

Avainsanat: Will Ryman.

Great experience collaborating with AUNTS in Brooklyn…This video highlights some of the atmosphere:I would sum up that the content is not only artistic and fun, but at least its about community and identity.

Avainsanat: AUNTS.

Coming up is a super cool event about Historic preservation in New York. Preserving our ecosystems and heritage includes also streets and other public spaces, as well as historic buildings and architectural landmarks.

Tomorrow on January 17th, Euro Circle network is hosting a benefit for the “Neighborhood Preservation Center”. The Van Alen Institute’s 6th floor gallery is the event location, and the address is 30 West 22nd Street New York. One of the event hosts Elin Jusélius is pursuing her Masters at Pratt in Historic Preservation. She told me that the basic idea of this event is to introduce the historic preservation field to people who are interested in learning more about it.

EJ: Historic preservation (or heritage conservation as it is called outside of the US) is a changing field, it deals with both tangible and intangible heritage. It is closely linked to sustainability as it is always greener to keep existing buildings, than to build new ones. For instance, all buildings have ‘embodied energy’, the energy spent on building it, on processing materials, and on transporting the materials to the site.

Historic preservation also deals with ‘a sense of place’ it examines what the contributing factors are that gives a neighborhood, a town, a city an identity. It evaluates the significance of a building which could be cultural, architectural, historical etc.

FI: New York’s Penn Station demolition in the 1960s was pretty horrible. I saw the Pennsylvania Station past and future exhibit in the Transit Museum Annex in Grand Central Terminal last summer.

EJ: Penn Station has inspired many to get involved in preservation, personally I am still shocked that anyone could think that it was a good idea to tear it down! Grand Central nearly had the same fate but preservationists won, this was a highly significant event, the court decision made preservation ‘legal’ in New York!

Avainsanat: The Van Alen Institute

My essay Arctic Angel: Running with the Wind, Dancing with the Snow, came out in a fantastic new book (December 2011) JOULUN FANTASIAA JA ARKTISTA DRAAMAA. ARCTIC DRAMA PRODUCTIONS, by theater director Lilja Kinnunen-Riipinen. The book collects performance events from last 20 years from the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland. The book can be ordered from the City of Rovaniemi: Sevenprint.

ARCTIC ANGEL: RUNNING WITH THE WIND, DANCING WITH THE SNOW
By Inka Juslin, 2011

In this text, I reflect my choreographing and dancing experience with the Arctic Angel (Lumienkeli in Finnish). Going back in time recalls a ritualistic presence. What is most radically present as memory is the landscape of the North. The idea of wilderness in Lapland creates symbolic displacements. It feels almost mysterious. The memory is filled with sensuous attachments to the snow and air.

The performative moment was created in the snow, which was also the main element in the designing process. My first starting point was to experience the nature and landscape, and then transfer that intuitiveness into movements and bodily expression. My feeling is that as a dancer I had to consider the place of the performance differently from the usual. In the choreographing process of Arctic Angel there were two aspects, which sustained. We were performing in the actual slalom slope. Part of my choreography was to run down the slope in order to show the character’s power. I was performing the role of Arctic Angel. First great difference was when I encountered the wind in my body; the wind was such a strong element that not only it affected my movements but also the costume needed alteration to work in the wintry conditions.

As the wind affects a performer so the snow influences the movements. I had to take into account the snow surface and the fact that the snow might get more slippery during the evening performance. When I think about the environment in Lapland as a site for choreography, the indigenous Sami people and their concepts for snow is beautifully present. I would like to suppose that my dancing experience in the Arctic Angel reconnects to the history of the Sami people. My inspiration for crafting, at least, came from mediating the different words for snow, which I learned from the Sami language. I acknowledged too that Finnish language shares multiple characteristics of snow, so Finno-Ugrian languages echo the closeness of nature in human experience.

Arctic Angel was strongly environmental artwork, which reflected about the geographical location where it was created. The local artwork was designed specifically into the environment. Yet, as every work of art has multiple dimensions, the Arctic Angel created its own contrasts. The big classic theme of fire and ice formed a battle in the narrative. This could also point to contrastive factors in the performance environment itself. The geographical location of Lapland has diverse history. It is a traditional landscape for reindeer herding. Then environment has encountered wars and border changes.

Arctic Angel brought local and international audiences into the forest around the Levi Centre, which resembles traditional landscape in Lapland. The entire aesthetics of the artwork respected the bringing of people into experiencing the nature with meditation. Working with specialists in lighting and set design, using pyrotechnique and ultraviolet light to enhance the snow in our performance, magnified a term metsä (forest) to become a space for ritualistic events; in participation and in feeling of closeness to the nature and to its invisible and sacred sites. ‘Sacred’ in metsä performances included both the ancient and the modern. The performers were snowboard champions, visual artists, actors, and dancers. The work was a production of the Levi Ski Centre in Lapland. Audience was walking into the forest. And from there it walked to the slope to watch the performances, which took place during late evenings.

‘My performance experience’

The word ‘spacing’ disturbs a traditional sense of space producing it with a different sense. With our affective pasts and with our physical memories, which we are carrying along, we cannot overlook our artistry and the choreographic experiences without emphasizing the role of our bodies as territorial and as attached to their environments. In the practicing of choreography, all kinds of radical connections to environments come across. Interpreting a work can reveal this connection.

A snowboard comes down the ski hill as if it was a projectile with a fire tail. A familiar and yet foreign design is passing through and drawing a clear spatial projection. I follow this movement trying to imitate a snowboard. I centre my weight and balance as low as possible. Having a light upper body that is ready to navigate a route in a slope I have a sense of snow. Then I imitate gliding as it makes the running down the slope easier. I imagine a rocket appearing from the darkness. First I am only a spot that is hardly visible. As I drew nearer where the audience is standing, my running body touches the ultraviolet lighting. The lights make my face and clothes glow the paleness of the snow, which is mixed with a fainted colour of the ultraviolet lights. This effect is almost cinematic.

I run down as fast as my feet let me. To create an effect of maximum tension I have to extend, reach out and then move away from my audience, which stands in the landing. To perform the role of Arctic Angel requires using of vast area that is divided into two parts. The first stage is the actual slope. After I have been hiding in the darkness of the forest, which is my dwelling place, I run downhill. I am invisible from my audience: I have fire as my companion, the snow as my surface and the night stars as my roof. I am a nomad staying close to this temporary place. I smell the surrounding trees and hear the silences of the forest. What is so characteristic to this experience is, that I see myself as an Element dancing. The visibility of my body exhibits almost immaterial designs between the snow and air, the wind. I stretch my body’s existence beyond the living, because I represent an Angel of the Arctic sphere. I also die as a character. It feels difficult to comprehend it in the level of performance. My question is, do I possess the character or is the character moving me? How does a role of the Arctic Angel die? The character is not a role, but it is a dancer’s body, a metallic body constantly transforming the elemental, watery becoming icy, and water into snow. Reversely, it melts back to water and watery to be finally absorbed back in the earth’s deep surface.

In the second stage, I am close to my audience, which is in the landing. Two times I have entered the slope like this. After my first run, I return back to my camping place in the forest. After leaving my trespass in the silence of the forest, I adopt a cosmic speed of an Angel. My first run is about killing. I come down the route of the snowboard, which represents a projectile. On this way, I pass a Human traveller, who falls being touched of my forceful speed. After my second run, however, I have reduced my distance and speed. I have come close to my audience almost touching it with my hand gestures and gaze.

As an Element dancing, as an Angel doing her task, I imagine the magical bonfires of the gunshots. It is war, and the soldiers’ bodies are frozen in various angles in which they were shot. The bodies look sharp against the whiteness of the snow. The flurry and icy snow becomes coloured, it is now red snow, yellow snow and black snow. In the burned air and in the burning horizon, there is a burning tree as a burning silhouette. The wars in Lapland burned entire forests and landscapes. The war as a performance was more effective than any of the ones we create. The soldiers were the ‘performers’ in real time, who nestled in the forest in their grey, white, and green costumes. In the darkness when there was not a single sign of daylight, another human being became a divine messenger.

Avainsanat: Arctic Theater