Helsinki (FI), Mynämäki (FI)

A project by Sympoietic Society

Residency, exhibition, public programme

HIAP Website / Saari website

with HIAP: Helsinki International Artists Programme, Saari Residence, Bioart Society, Kone Foundation, Rhizome Dance Collective

INTRODUCTION

Developed by Sympoietic Society, Water Tales: Weaving a Nomadic Community of Practices for Place-Bound Intimacies is a residency programme and exhibition project in Finland. Building on the research initiated in ICE *, this project seeks to explore ecological grief through situated artistic practices, storytelling, and shared rituals of care. Water Tales opens with an immersive stay at the Saari Residence (Kone Foundation), where the collective engages with bodies of water, such as the Mynäjoki River and the Mietoistenlahti Bay, as agential forces capable of generating place-bound intimacies. At this residency, Sympoietic Society shares and compiles a shared repository of personal methods and collective approaches for site-specific engagement in communion with the surrounding waterscape, as well as communal processes of mourning-through-making and realisation-through-repetition. Such research is followed by Wesen: Practices for Interspecies Mourning, an exhibition and public programme at Galleria Augusta (HIAP) on the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Suomenlinna Island, in collaboration with SOLU / Bioart Society. The show explores practices of storytelling, magic, and posthuman exercises in the context of ecological grief for shifting waterscapes. Presenting three years of research, the exhibition centres on the idea of ‘glacier ghosts,’ a concept initially developed for a workshop and theatre piece with children and teenagers. Here, more-than-human spectral figures unsettle the normative boundaries between life and death, queering temporalities and corporealities and dissolving the rigid separations between extinct and extant. Inspired by Neimanis’s notion of hydrofeminism, Lykke’s concept of vibrant death, and Derrida’s ideas around hauntology, the show attunes us to the persistent, affective presence of what is ostensibly gone.

Residency, public programme

Chapter 01

Sideby, Finland

Ymmärrys ry, Kilens Hembygdsgård.

Residency, public programme

Chapter 02

Val Camonica (IT)

Avanzi, Casa Del Parco dell’Adamello

Water Tales

The first residency was initiated in the coastal village of Sideby, South Ostrobothnia in Finland, and its lingering community.

The first residency was initiated in the coastal village of Sideby, South Ostrobothnia in Finland, and its lingering community. Our primary research revolved around the area’s connection to the land uplift phenomenon, which has been ongoing since the last Ice Age. Additionally, we delved into the complex relationship between the community and the Bothnian Sea, explored culinary and foraging practices, and uncovered folk tales and traditions. Collaborating with the local homestead museum Kilens Hembygdsgård we coordinated movement exercises, drawing and embroidery workshops, walks, and sauna rituals focusing on environmental education, grieving and speculative imagination. The residency concluded with the first Fire Talk: a series of storytelling exercises collectively enacted around a campfire while sharing sourdough bread prepared by the collective. The first residency was initiated in the coastal village of Sideby, South Ostrobothnia in Finland, and its lingering community. Our primary research revolved around the area’s connection to the land uplift phenomenon, which has been ongoing since the last Ice Age. Additionally, we delved into the complex relationship between the community and the Bothnian Sea, explored culinary and foraging practices, and uncovered folk tales and traditions. Collaborating with the local homestead museum Kilens Hembygdsgård we coordinated movement exercises, drawing and embroidery workshops, walks, and sauna rituals focusing on environmental education, grieving and speculative imagination. The residency concluded with the first Fire Talk: a series of storytelling exercises collectively enacted around a campfire while sharing sourdough bread prepared by the collective.

Programme

Saari Website

WESEN

The first residency was initiated in the coastal village of Sideby, South Ostrobothnia in Finland, and its lingering community.

Wesen (German): (a) being; essence, central character, nature of.

What remains when an ecological being vanishes? What lingers, transforms, or returns in unexpected forms? WESEN — Practices for Interspecies Mourning is the first solo exhibition of the collective Sympoietic Society (SyS) and functions as a reflection on the group's long-term artistic research into ecological grief and more-than-human kinship. Evoking both nature and the spectral presences, the word wesen guides us into an exceptional shared space of mourning: not as an endpoint, but as a generative site of collective imagination and ecological attunement.

The exhibition originates from the project ICE * In Case of Emergency (2023), which explored the disappearance of European glaciers and associated folklore. In it, Sympoietic Society travelled to Sideby (FI) to research glacial land uplifting processes, Val Camonica (IT) to connect with ancestral stories by the Adamello glacier, and finally to the Austrian Alps to commemorate the late Rote Wand glacier. The project concluded with a farewell ceremony not for a dead landscape, but for one melting into transformation. Since then, the collective has grieved for these fellow bodies of water and cultivated practices of collective mourning in the form of site-sensitive workshops, performances, storytelling sessions, and walking practices.

This exhibition focuses on the tools and traces of these practices. Glacier shrouds, ghostly costumes, ceramic vessels, embroidered tapestries, and children's drawings function as a material link between the lost and the nearby. Ready to be embraced once again, these objects will be activated in a series of events, performances and workshops throughout the time of the exhibition. Through these tools and traces, we ask: How do we embrace grief in the face of extinction and climate crisis as an ethical and relational act? How can mourning be interspecies, intergenerational, and situated—an active process of sensing the world otherwise?

Pamphlet and Essay

HIAP page