Arkisto

Reflections behind the festival

We are living through a multi-crisis era that highlights the need for a new imagination, for multidisciplinary, multispecies and multidisciplinary artistic alliances and for a more holistic understanding of the environment. The ongoing alliance of right-wing and fascist thinking in Finnish politics, the mainstreaming of these worldviews, and cuts in social subsidies and climate funding are further reducing the living opportunities of diverse natural and human ecosystems.

In Finland, less than 2.9% of the land area is still covered by natural forests and almost 80% of Finnish forest types are classified as endangered. There seems to be no realistic understanding of this reality and its danger in the public debate. The concrete fight to save forests is completely ignored by the general public. This period also challenges creatives more broadly to reflect on the questions of where, for whom and by whom spaces are created and art is made, and what kind of works this period needs. 

A multi-art festival in the forest aims to create a space for artists, activists and makers to reflect on such questions and to give concrete expression to them. At the same time, it is a proposal to continue the dialogue between nature and culture initiated by the existing original installation in the Soiva Forest. It proposes different ways of dealing with the links between man-made life, art and the diverse ecosystems of the forest.

The binary, crude division between "man" and "nature" justifies the short-sighted exploitation of our habitat, ignoring the interconnectedness of the whole planetary web of life. The festival therefore emphasises the need to move away from binary configurations, the interdependence of environment and humanity, and the intertwining worlds and forests as the necessary lifeblood of all life. 

The festival pauses to reflect on the solidarity of multiple species and on art as a means to influence these forces that shape the life conditions of human communities and natural environments. The event reminds its creators and the public that it is not possible in this world to make a profession, create spaces or works without actively influencing and creating a wider reality. Activism is not a separate process or group of people, but active agency is ultimately part of everything that happens. The event is also intended to highlight concrete forest protection struggles that are already underway.

Art and creative work play a huge role in the processes of creating realities and as a dimension that takes up space. It is essential to question where art takes place and what kind of space it creates. Perhaps the multi-faceted and multi-voiced space that takes place in the forest, bringing people together from different contexts and built together, dismantles the structures of bourgeois art and makes us imagine a more communal way of creating, thinking and being.

Could art be built precisely through surprising alliances, by combining different landscapes, ideas and alternative perceptions, by experimenting - sharply but playfully. In the middle of the Soaring Forest, on the slopes of a ridge, screeching from instrument to instrument, it is easy to imagine this play becoming a reality. 

The festival is an arena for the Tyrolean experience of art in the midst of nature, and for a variety of local and national cross-disciplinary debates about the forest, humanity and the crises that are creating a new era of cooperation. It creates a space for artists and the public to discuss, in a participatory and dialogical relationship, the meanings that the forest, in all its symbolic and concrete dimensions, conceals. It also makes us dream and reflect on what kind of art and life the forest enables or needs, and what human communities could learn from forest ecosystems, their diversity and mutually supportive structures.