Finland is a country...
Finland is a country....
Helsinki is green and sunny - the sun is out for the seven of the eight days that I'm there and wherever I walk the smell of lilacs and elderberry seem to follow. One morning, on my way to the Theatre Academy, I pass by a shrub of pine with pollen-laden cones. I discover from a local store that my place of temporary residence was once an insane asylum. Some mornings when I take this walk along the lake, on the undulating streets of Helsinki (watch yours step!) it seems like the bright yellow heads of the dandelions that bob in the breeze mock me slightly where are you going? stay here and hang with us! Look at you - so smart human. Going to work! There is a sad silver sword philodendron in the window of a Thai restaurant that I pass everyday, and horsetail shoots - around since the time of dinosaurs pave my path in the park. Burdock, its leaves as large as callaloo bush - remind me of the medicine that's all around us, nature offering herself to us, her diversity unable to be grasped by my limited musings.
Along with three students, Milda, Aino and Katinka - we co-created a zine exploring the themes of the upcoming symposium: m/otherhood. We spent the three days as if in an incubator - exchanging and developing ideas about m/otherhood. We came up with Emo - the title a Finnish word that means "mother" for our animal relatives. You can it check out here - Emo. It was a gift to get to work with these three thinkers and I'm impressed with the courage and vulnerability (the two are linked!) they all showed in this process. Together they touched upon themes of conflict mothering, intersections of class and sexuality, as well as some delving into their cunt-trees. I interviewed Wambui Njuguna-Raisanen, who practices integrates anti-racist work into her yoga practice, and included the piece in the zine.
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| Summayah & Wambui |
Connections
Last August I was invited by The Caribbean Housewife, Dutch-Curaçaon Jamain Brigithe to co-create a program for Copenhagen's Kulterhavn festival. I decided that given the location - at Copenhagen's harbor - I would rewrite Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid with a decolonial twist. Sorgenfri follows the tale of a young Danish man who sets sail on this ill-fated journey first to the west coast of Africa where Denmark once had a slave forte, and once the ship is filled with enslaved Africans, to the Danish West Indies and back again, this time without its human cargo but full of the goods plantations run by free labor provide - but the ship never returns to Denmark, it disappears just as it arrives to these seas. The ship's fate is based on fact, and the main character, a young man from Jutland, is based on Søren Kierkegaard's father. I did this because I wanted to find out more about Kierkegaard's family involvement in the trade of enslaved Africans, something that was shared with me by Jamaica Kincaid, with whom I had the pleasure of lunching with last spring.
It was at this event that I met Malou Solfjeld, who had recently discovered she was pregnant. Solfjeld is the type of reader you want to have: someone who not only reads your work, but becomes an enthusiastic ambassador of such work. Through her I was connected to Ida Bencke, the co-organizer along with BioArts Society and Aalto University for the M/other Becomings Symposium. Bencke is a curator, editor and educator and co-founder of Aesthetics and Ecology. Since then Solfjeld has given birth - welcome to the world little Mio!
Care
Talking about racial, class, gender and sexuality inequalities is one thing, but actually stepping up to the plate to ensure that individuals, no matter their socio-economic, racial, national background get the care that is necessary, is a must. I traveled a lot during my U.S. book tour, and it takes its toll. Add to that that my grandmother transitioned during this period, I was, at times, a bit worn thin. Although it is a privilege to received invitations to far-away places, I now know that the way that I'm received is just as important. Am I showing up at a strange airport with no one to meet me? Is there someone who is available for support/contact? Does it have to be assumed that the participant carries the burden of the expenses up front, or is consideration given for those with less access to funds?
It matters when we check in with one another, that we extend care to those who have traveled long distances to share space with us. I recently attended a conference with a friend who had traveled from a quite repressive country to participate in a conference about said repressive country- but it didn't seem as though the organizers took that into consideration. It's like having an anti-racism event in an overwhelmingly white country, inviting a Black person, but leaving that Black person to navigate this white foreign space alone.
I'm happy to report that although I didn't travel far to get to Helsinki, Ida Bencke and Erich Berger and his team from BioArt Society, made me feel as though I was in good, capable and caring hands, and so safe and valued.
M/other Becomings Day 1 & Day 2
With the m/other becomings symposium, we conclude a two-year spanning collaboration between cultural institutions, artists, and thinkers which hosted a program of exhibitions, workshops and lectures in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland.
Over the course of two days with keynotes, panels, and with other formats we will take a closer look at the im/possibilities of mothering, not as an essence, but as troubled practice and as a modest, utopian, and oftentimes exhausted precursor of hope. We want to ask what it means – and may come to mean – to make, to mend, to make space for kin in spite of and against the social reproduction of sameness and compliance, and the (bio)politics of gendered and racialized violence. Likewise, we will explore reproductive futures and probe if and how life sciences allow us to challenge and transform our ideas and possibilities of reproduction and the maternal.
m/other becomings is a collaboration between Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (DK), The Association for Arts and Mental Health (DK), Kultivator (SE), Art Lab Gnesta (SE), and Bioart Society (FI).
Guests included keynotes by Ionat Zurr (artist, Symbiotica), Tiia Sudenkaarne (researcher) as well as presentations and panels with Ida Bencke (curator, LabAE), Margherita Pevere (artist), Signe Johannessen (artist), Emilia Tikka (designer), Lyndsey Walsh (artist), Riina Hannula (artist), and Chessa Adsit-Morris(theorist, Center for Creative Ecologies).
You can see the entire symposium here - M/other Becomings Day 1 & Day 2 .
It's a privilege to be able to gather, share and develop ideas with such a diverse group of thinkers. One of the ideas that kept on cropping up was the idea that as humans, we could never really ever grasp the entirety of an understanding - an idea that I think is always important to keep up front in all of our intellectual investigations. Personally, I feel as this is one of the biggest hurdles of humankind - this idea that all can be grasped, comprehended. This is also something that the Palestinian scholar Magid Shihade reminds me whenever he talks about one of the people he has studied most, the 14th century North African historiographer Ibn Khaldoun, who also stated, and re-stated this conundrum of sorts.
It's easy to go to a conference and walk away feeling drained: the indoor lighting, the hours and hours of social interactions, that can be crippling for those of us who are either exhausted by the oppressive scheduling of capitalism and all that it has to share: racism, classism, etc. But this wasn't the case this time. Rather, I felt invigorated by the ideas being put forth by the other participants, from Zurr's reflections that included the narrative of the incubator (did you know that they artificially incubated eggs in ancient Egypt?!) and some of the ethical questions we may want to consider when we talk about life; life as fetish/commodity and the strange affair of babies in incubators on display at Coney Island once upon a time...
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| Ionat Zurr |
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| Tiia Sudenkaarne |
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| Ida Bencke |
Ida Bencke conjured up Revolutionary Mothering and the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs and her groundbreaking Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Bencke talked about mothering as a revolutionary practice (Ala Cynthia Dewi Oka) and about an art project in which she was involved that made installations in a mental institution, and how this shifted the power dynamics. Bencke even showed an actual ad that was on display a few years ago here in Denmark - on busses and other public spaces, that encouraged Danes to have more babies (which made me wonder if there were any such campaigns in place in Black and brown countries? I could guess the answer...)
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| Emilia Tikka |
Emilia Tikka (designer) spoke about Mnemonia: Memories of the Birds, and the work she is doing with Oula A. Valkeapaa, a Sami reindeer herder living in the northern fell region of Finland, close to the Arctic Ocean. Their work deals with how the lives of humans and reindeer coincide. Tikka is a Finnish born transdisciplinary designer whose research and design practice focuses on speculative storytelling, exploring novel biosciences and the human a film that involves futuristic possibilities that bridge the genetic memories between human and in this case, the reindeer, while Riina Hannula made space for microbes along with other non-human relatives
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| Signe Johannessen a modern-day "bone collector" |
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| Lyndsey Walsh |
The day before leaving Helsinki to return to Denmark, I found out that an old friend of mine was also in Helsinki - Andre Amtoft. Andre tells me over an amazing dinner at Restaurant Nolla that there are over 20,000 types of bees, and most of them are solitary, meaning that they don't arrange their social structures around queens. He and his Habeetats colleague Signe Voltelen, were in Helsinki to install homes for these very important allies and relatives of ours.
