Henna-Riikka Halonen & Aino-Kaisa Koistinen

A porous autopoietic entity, a response, first draft

huminaa
ääni yhtyy linja-auton meluun
mikä virhearvio kuunnella tätä täällä
mutta sittenkin jotenkin sopiva keinutus, liike, matka
First image: organs disconnected
something reminds me of Monty Python
we are inside something
and there is something moving
sound, a cluck, like chicken
the noise of the bus and other passengers
clouding what I hear
drawing my attention
shapeshifters
something flowing in
a voice addressing me
this is us, this is me
this what flows
the networks of cells like
nebulas
a cell like planet
is it a cell or something else?
a porcupine
a photon
see-through
i am not
a natural scientist
another image: landscapes of flesh
within me within us within we
fantasy worlds
maa-alueita ja mannerlaattoja
valkoisia, kelluvia
then a forest of kelp
but inside you
then mushrooms growing
i should now more
about us, living bodies
concepts to name things with
what to call these mushrooms with?
näitä lehvästöjä
ja sitten, leikkaus avaruuteen
ja sitten, vedenalaiseen fantasiaan
onko tämä kaikki minussa
vai kuvittelua?
ja mitä väliä on ymmärtämisellä
something is moving
on the screen, within me, us
we are watching
together
writing
together
breathing
words
beauty and disgust tied into together
is this what I am?
ymmärtää ilman sanoja ymmärtää
miten rajallinen määritelmä
suddenly there is music
a syringe
little spiders
an ear
on a blob
I am reminded of the ear
on the back of the mouse
a monstrosity
this is about networks
networks
in the space
place
that we all are
chords tying together, tellings
of blood
why write these words
and not others
why this chain
a vampire?
do I really contain this beauty?
do
I
contain
can it be said? – or am I leaking, boundless…
of the world, from the world
kuva: ruskea silmä, minun silmäni, peili
yhtäkkiä jostain muistuu mieleen
minä pienenä tyttönä
itkemässä äidille
ettei naistenlehdissä näy kuin sinisiä silmiä
miksi minun silmäni tällaiset, tällaiset
ja tässä nyt, ihmisyyttä edustava ruskea silmä
ja silti, mikä etuoikeus, etuoikeudet
valkoisuus, keskiluokkaisuus, muun muassa
sen opin vasta myöhemmin
ja sitten –
we, companion species –
koirallanikin on ruskeat silmät
oli ruskeat silmät
entanglements
Harawayian kindred spirits
tuntea yhteys koiraan
ja sitten
liike, liikun linja-auton mukana, tässä,
tämä sommittuma, tuntuma, tu tu tun tun tu ma ma
kuulokkeet päässä
mutta mikä minä? but which I?
we are companion species
– resistance is futile –
who is we? how many wes do I contain?
the notes filling me
until they fade
the story
that is not a story
ends
continues within
I, us, we
companion species

Aino-Kaisa: This is the second time that I have written a response to a video work (see here). This time, however, I am not only responding to a video, but we are crafting a dialogue – between our works, artistic practices, and us, a poet and a visual artist. What can we give each other, responding to each other this way? For me, writing with your artwork (or, as I like to spell it, “writing-with”) created a certain flow, an enjoyable stream of consciousness, the video inviting words and experiences, suggesting a rhythm for writing. Yet the associations, of course, also stem from my background as a scholar reading Donna J. Haraway’s work (e.g. Companion Species Manifesto), and my embodied experiences and memories (such as my history of watching Star Trek). When writing, I avoided pausing the video, and any thoughts and experiences needed to be quickly transmitted to words. No room for hesitation, editing, perfectionism. Nor stop to think, why I had just changed language.

Afterwards, I edited the text slightly to let the text itself suggest amendments to its poetics. Did this experiment produce something that I might call an artwork, or poetry, or speculation? Perhaps the text does not need to stand alone as (a speculative) work of art but emerges as such through this dialogue – or, the video and this dialogue give an interpretive framework, a context, for the text. Now I would like to throw the ball to you, Henna-Riikka: This method seems to have created some space for me to write. But does my writing create a space for you? What kind of space?

Henna-Riikka: Since quite a while I have been thinking about how visual and spatial practice can come together with literature in a meaningful way. What can we, artists and writers, give to each other? I think my goal in my artistic practice and also as a researcher has been to resist summary, to make something that cannot be explained in words, although as a video artist text is an inherent part of my works of course. But I also think a text that responds to an artwork that already exists can have a life of its own, without the work, similarly as the work has a life of its own. They meet momentarily and even entangle, but keep developing their own logic. I think poetry and visual art function in a broad sense, in a similar manner. Writing is not in itself worse or better than drawing, for example. You can write in many different ways, just as you can draw. I think the challenge concerns the design and construction of the whole exposition, the way in which the different parts, stages, makers and audiences are interlinked. You also talked about flow and rhythm and I think this is a way to go, allowing yourself as maker and reader of the work to follow them.

I think in this way the associative poetic way you responded to the video work can be very fascinating. And as we can see, the text then becomes a lot more about how you experience, sense and remember the world but at the same time creates new access points, underlining the porosity of the work. Interestingly in the first reading, I didn’t notice that part of your text was in Finnish. I guess that was because here the language becomes something else than the carrier of the message and appears more like a material or perhaps as a texture.

Aino-Kaisa: Your videos above make use of science fiction and fantasy imaginaries, and the technique of estrangement. More specifically, they make the familiar, in this case the human body, somehow strange (I simply adore the talking nose!). I have always been drawn by the power of speculation in fiction/art. Drawing, again, on Donna J. Haraway’s work, what kinds of worlds – or, indeed, worldings – are we making with our imaginations? Writing-with your work Tissue enabled me, in a way, to step into a speculative world and associatively continue and expand it; although the text itself ended up not so much crafting a speculative world or environment of its own but chasing a personal, embodied train of thought inspired by your speculation. How do you see the role of speculation in your work?

Henna-Riikka: I am interested in using the means of speculative fiction literature that can break the boundaries of human-centered thinking by bringing non-human actors, models, systems, and temporalities to the fore. Alongside artistic methods, it can bring together differently situated, porous bodies through retelling and rewriting. I think speculative fiction offers new temporalities and imaginative leaps. One of the ways to do this is through thought experiments, asking questions such as, what if, as if?

For me, a literary text itself is a kind of prosthesis and allows these playful thought experiments and new kinds of temporalities that we cannot quite recognize, but can see some familiar strangeness in them.

The video Tissue started with a simple thought experiment; what if human bodies as we know them didn’t exist but instead organs and tissue would be grown in prosthetic factories. The talking nose is sort of a main protagonist and this quite obviously was inspired by a great literary classic The Nose by Nikolai Gogol. But unlike in Gogol’s novel, where the nose enjoys freedom in a wide world after detaching from the face, here the nose remains connected to the prosthetic world. Access to another world is only achieved by turning inwards, through the nostril, skin, tissue and the nervous system. This realm reveals a fantastical multispecies world created from a modified scientific 3D model of a human cell.

However, while discussing speculation as an artistic strategy, I think we must remain critical of its free use. Although speculation can be productive, it isn’t always beneficial. Capitalist systems also use speculation as a form of oppression, so we need to carefully consider whose dreams we are dreaming.

About the authors:

Henna-Riikka Halonen is a visual artist/researcher who has worked on and produced many collaborative and large-scale projects and and has shown her work widely in international exhibitions. Currently she is working as a Visiting researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki and as a Senior Lecturer of Contemporary Art in Turku Art Academy, Finland. www.hennahalonen.com

Aino-Kaisa Koistinen is a scholar, a poet, a writer, and teacher of creative writing. She/they currently work as University researcher at the University of the Arts Helsinki Research Institute in the profiling area Artistic thinking that is driven by artist pedagogy (funded by the Academy of Finland 353305).