The following texts emerged from an invitation to attend the ANTI Festival in Finland (27 September - 2 October 2011) as a visiting writer, and to respond to the festival. After a short introduction below, subsequent posts focus on five of the festival's performance events - by
Blast Theory, Lone Twin, Gaëtan Rusquet,
Juha Valkeapää
and the 100 Year Old Rock'n'Roll Band. These texts were first published as a review essay in Performance Research 17:1 ('On Failure'), alongside a series of photographs by Pekka Mäkinen.
Since its inception in 2001, the ANTI-Contemporary
Art Festival in Kuopio, Finland, has become known internationally for its
commitment to site-specific and contextual live art practices. Its ongoing
brief has been to displace art from galleries and other conventionally
designated spaces, and to root it in public and social spaces, making it
available and engaging to new audiences as small invitational frictions in the
civic everyday. One of the meanings of the word ‘anti’ in Finnish, I am told,
alongside its more familiar oppositional associations, is ‘gift’.
The festival’s 10th anniversary
programme, ANTI 2011, was curated by joint artistic directors Johanna Tuukkanen
and Gregg Whelan in loose relation to the theme ‘Remake Rebuild Renew’. In
part, this ‘ANTIversary’ festival offered an opportunity to invite a number of
artists to return to Kuopio, and to revisit sites and develop earlier projects
for a city in transition. In addition, ANTI was seeking artists’ engagements
with and responses to changes in the political culture and material fabric of
the city. During the festival itself, most of the expansive city centre square remained
inaccessible, fenced off around a cavernous pit. The void sculpted out of the
earth during this long-term excavation down to the city’s bedrock fractured the
rhythms and flows of the city centre, and left a number of buildings and public
walkways propped precariously on its edge; this hole is to be the location of –
surprise, surprise - an underground car park.
In
what follows I have chosen to focus on five performance projects from ANTI
2011. Taken together, perhaps they reflect something of the curatorial flavour
and dynamic of this most civic, emplaced and human-scale of international
festivals. In the print version for Performance Research, my short account of each project sits alongside and in dialogue with
photographs by Pekka Mäkinen, who has documented every artist and project at
ANTI over the past ten years. As part of ANTI 2011, date-stamped prints of Mäkinen’s
images from past festivals were on display in diverse locations around the
city. Furthermore, a wide range of images from his remarkable photographic
archive of hundreds of ephemeral events hosted by ANTI in Kuopio over the past
decade animate a lavishly illustrated new book launched to mark the festival’s
anniversary (1).
Mäkinen’s fine photographs provide glimpses and
traces that perhaps enable us to revisit and remake something of a startling
array of artists’ actions, processes, images, encounters, situations and
exchanges, each of them now disappeared from locations that are themselves in
process.
Finally,
I have listed the awards presented to these artists by a roving jury of local
children from Kalevalan koulu who attended almost all of the performances at
this year’s festival in Kuopio. The Children’s Choice Awards, coordinated by
members of the Toronto-based company Mammalian Diving Reflex, were staged in
the main chamber of the city hall as the final event of ANTI 2011.
(1)
Johanna
Tuukkanen, Laura Tervo, Minna Jaakkola and Gregg Whelan (eds), ANTIVERSARY - Performance, live art and site-specificity: a decade of
ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, Finland: ANTI, 2011. The book contains contributions by Jennie Klein,
Anna-Reetta Suhonen, Juha-Heikki Tihinen, Helen Cole, Kira O’Reilly, Dee
Heddon, Rosie Dennis, Kirsi Pitkänen, Simon Whitehead, Richard DeDomenici, Juha
Valkeapää, Eungyung Kim and Shoji Kato, as well as an interview with the
festival’s artistic directors.
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