Conversation between the artists Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas and the artist and curator of the CAA project Lotta Petronella, that took place on Korpo island on the 30th of March, 2011.
Q: First time in archipelgo?
N: That was almost a year ago. In the beginning of summer 2010.
G: I think it was first week of June 2010 when we came and we had a trip with Tapio who was a commander of the Finnish Navy unit that is located on one of the islands. I think we went to the former military bases in Jungfruskar island. We tried to grasp this complexity of archipelago which has history as being very important as place for different routes, ship routes in the Baltic Sea not only between Sweden and Finland, Estonia and Russia, but also Denmark and other countries. If you look back in the history it’s been very important and very difficult point for navigation of the ships. Then also very important point in the history of the military as well. Especially in the Cold War times. The Cold War times made us to be interested in this place because we are interested in how much the Cold War and the technologies which were employed in the Cold War left trace in the Baltic Sea as in a very complex ecological system. We know that the Baltic Sea was used as a grave for burying chemical weapons after the Second World War and again in the face of the new constructions or the new infrastructures which are built on the Baltic Sea for example Nordstream – the Russian-German gas pipeline. There were and there are still some fears how much it would affect those chemical weaponeries that are buried on the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Also being here we understood, and it was one of our incentives to look at the life and at the specific model of what it means life on the island. What it means this life which is so much connected and that makes impact to the surrounding, very visible impact. Sometimes when we live in the cities, we live in kind of metropolies, we don’t have this awareness. Here every step becomes very obvious, very visible, and at the same time meaningful. These were starting points for us to consider the crucial concepts, concepts like biosphere, that we should address in our research.
Q: Where have you come now? This is your third time here, and you’ve started developing ideas for your actual project. Can you talk a little bit about that?
N: Yes, as Gediminas mentioned, we were interested in wide range of different problems and aspects but while talking to the people, scientists, like Katia Bonnevier for example and others, we’ve figured out what are the problems that are urgent. One of them is meadows that are changing and disappearing as people nowadays keep much less sheep grazing these meadows. At the same time we started to think about the concept of islands in the islands, to look for some particular spots in these meadows where technology doesn’t reach, wireless-less places and places without internet. We’re looking for an idea how to merge the “blind spots” and meadows together and came to conclusion that sheep cheese could be a good marker to map these territories of fictitious islands and particularly because sheep cheese is not produced in Finland. We have visited local shops around the islands and in Turku, but couldn’t find any locally made sheep cheese. We met people raising sheep. Different EU support programs encouraging this activity. So we said why not make wireless-less sheep cheese? This is a pilot project which could be a test, an experiment for something new, but maybe could also develop into a forgotten local tradition.
Q: So it’s actually introducing something completely new but still using things that already exist here because sheep farmers are quite a thing in the archipelago. You found that it’s not easy to do it because it’s difficult to find someone who has done that kind of production.
G: Well, you see, I think that it’s a quite interesting question – what is the product of the research? This question addresses the scientists and the artists. Some people would say that they understand that we’re engaging the process but what is the product of all this research? I’m inclined to give such answer that maybe the cheese is more a mediator, the cheese is the media, is the instrument for us to map all these different relationships between the human activity and the animal, between the human body and the animal, between the colonized spaces by the technology and we know that technology has been developed to colonize spaces and territories and places of human activity, of animal activity. This is also discussion of what Agamben is negotiating between bios and zoe, between the animal life and the political life or the naked life (zoe) and life (bios) that is political human life. Precisely this discussion about the biosphere is offering us to consider other aspects of the human life and other categories that are making our environment and our surrounding more human.
N: She wants to bee in the film. Come! (addresses the sheep) She has something to say. (sheep cross the road) They are looking for an experiment, I guess, an adventure.
G: I think that it might be productive also to approach the cheese as an instrument, and the process of making cheese as the laboratory, as the learning process, as process of sharing knowledge, as process of pedagogy.
N: And also to think of a fantasy, of an imagination, in a way. We’ve got the idea to produce sheep cheese after coming just two times into the islands. Once you start investigating the traditions, the habits and the ideas behind why people keep sheep, it gets more interesting. So far it’s still far away from making cheese.
G: Yeah but it also gives us an excuse and also a condition at the same time to map these different overlapping territories between human and the animal, between human and the nature, between the culture and the nature. And also to map precisely actions of our interventions – how we intervene with the nature? What trace we leave?
Q: This is a good way of explaining how you work. Your work is more investigative, research-based. You got the idea already last time in November when you were here, and now you are trying out, talking to people, finding ways… Can you talk a little bit about that because it’s quite different practice to what people normally think of what the artist does.
G: Well of course when we talk about the research-based practice or the process-based practice, I would still prefer research than process because process can also mean many other things. It is an essential part – meetings with people who have expertise, knowledge of the place. During week we spent in June, some days in November, and now, end of March, we are meeting people who run restaurants, hotels, people who are having small sheep farms or just few sheep as we see here. We’re also learning of all the different aspects of why they have animals. It could be aesthetic reasons, reasons for the quality of landscapes. It was very interesting to hear that European Union is supporting aesthetic qualities of the meadows and program of certain traditional habits as raising sheep that were lost in the recent history. So EU is encouraging this. Our project, I think, will tap in this discussion which sometimes even develops into confrontation between the local site and the regulations that come from the EU or the regulations that come from bigger cities or from other countries that try to imply certain standards. Maybe those standards are not necessarily really matching the desires of the people who are here on the local basis, and maybe they know better what is really productive for their milleu. I think that our project will look into these confrontations and maybe in this process we can develop something like a scenario that could unfold this confrontation in a more productive way.
N: Maybe we should also talk about what it means for us as artists to be in this particular environment, that particular setting because it is a fragile setting as well. We would hardly imagine ourselves coming and being rude and drastic and making a big intervention. It requires certain sensitivity to what would be possible but at the same time still keeping this critical approach..
G: It’s also a different task. On one hand, when you are a player in a very defined playground which can be art institution, so it’s very clear what are the conditions of this play, the agencies and the audiences, and how you approach them, how you involve them. In this situation it’s really beyond art institution, which is also remote from other art institutions. It doesn’t have a traditional audience or the audience that has certain experience in the history of cultivation in the traditional sense. It becomes much more difficult, much more tricky for the artist and for the artistic practice to be enfolded here. So it puts the traditional artistic practice into the question. That’s why we’re using the term ‘laboratory’ and we’re using the term ‘experiment’ because precisely in this setting you challenge this traditional notion of the artistic practice, of the artistic research, the audience that is cultivated. You also put into the question the art as agency.
N: Also participants and potential audience, those people who are here, what kind of role they’re playing in all this? What are their expectations of what the art is and how do we challenge that? What knowledge they get from our interventions?
Q: So far I think that people have positive reactions because for people it’s positive to see that in order to experience art you don’t need to go into a museum or into an institution. But of course for the artists it also proposes a problem because we’re not in a safe territory. You have a potential audience that has possibly no kind of understanding of contemporary art practice, so you still have to keep the criticalness and the integrity of yourselves as artists, not becoming overly popular. At the same time also to realize a fact that you are in a sensitive environment and how do you work those two things together? Do you find out that it’s more of a challenge to you or does it make things complicated because you have to look at the audience from much wider perspective? If you work in the gallery, you immediately know how to operate so your limits are completely different, you can play with things differently because people know that they’re seen art whereas here it’s very different because that space is not marked as an art space.
G: Yeah but nevertheless the questions that are discussed within the frames of art institutions, they’re still relevant, no matter how much we try to claim that we’re outside the institution, we have to be very careful with this as well because it’s clear that the situation that we’re trying now to frame as whether it’s activity or artistic research, or we’re claiming our activity as activity that is produced by us as artists, we’re already producing certain frames. In that sense I don’t see the big difference producing and acting here than producing and acting in the gallery space because we are working for these concepts that are negotiating territories between politics and aesthetics. We are also discussing the territories between the participation and exploitation, the idea of cultural industries that are colonizing different spaces. In a way, through this work, through this project we have to find answers how to build argument of what we are doing here on this island. So in that sense it makes it even more complex to work in this setting.
N: Yeah but at the same time, I think, more interesting.
G: Professor in the fall and the shepherd in the spring.
N: In summer.
G: Yeah, maybe that’s the future.
Q: But that’s the way to live out there. You need to be doing many things.
G: Exactly. And this is a beautiful thing that we realize how diverse – again, speaking of this biodiversity – also one of the aspects is that we are thinking about a scale of different opportunities. So we don’t have the farmer who has 1000 sheep or 1000 cows or 1000 pigs but have one animal. Or three. Yeah, that’s true, we learned sheep can’t stay alone, they have to be in the community. But in the small community.
N: Look at her (points at the sheep). Beautiful.