With Isto Rahkila and Teemu Ruissalo we composed and event called Päivällinen, which was a part of the event one century abc that lasted a week in Turku in November. We had a day full of performances, sound and fun in Forum Kortteli, a city shop center-type-of-place and then at night we moved to the river side, to Titanik gallery, where the performances continued. Lisa Holmén and myself started the day with the Grape Piece.
My only wish for the performance was for it to be fun and light. I had just seen a performance that had been done with a a very serious face. Anyone acquainted to any scene of art is likely to be familiar with the humorlessness that sometimes co-occur with it. I was compelled to do a performance that is the opposite of this. It is quite hard.
I went to Lisa with a couple of ideas and one of them had something to do with balloons. Balloons are light and fun and a fun material, we decided to go with that. But then the idea changed and it changed again, and again, and once to something totally different, and then again back to the balloons, and we (specifically I) were unsure, until we came into possession of the balloons. Then we recognized the potential of the balloons’ ”funness”. We laughed to the sounds of balloons being released of air in different ways.
So we assembled these huge balloon costumes that resembled grapes (by a very fortunate mistake). The balloons were amusing us throughout the process. The sounds they made, the way they flew in the air ones set free. So in the performance we made curious and hilarious sounds with the balls of air and moved slowly taking a hold of the space of the shopping mall. It was hard to see and hard not to laugh. We also had a bowl with empty balloons for people to blow. Next to the bowl stood a sign that said in Finnish ”This is a performance” which was an homage to Markus Copper. The performances duration was about an hour and fifteen minutes. At the end we popped each other’s balloon-costumes with needles.
The reason why it was difficult for me to agree on a concept for the performance, was because I always have a very clear thought behind my pieces. Something about living, feeling, patriarchy, work culture, anything.
When the piece morphed from my original concept I lost the thought. At least I thought I lost the thought. I thought it was just the balloons and there was no point to it. Why do this performance if it does not have any societal value? It was just trash, literally, because, for me, the thought behind would have justified the consumption of the balloon.
So, as it turned out I was taking the ”not-serious” -performance too seriously.
Pictures: Santeri Niemi
the works 