By Aliisa Talja
It’s September 2021. Resembling this ongoing, exceptionally warm beginning of the autumn, it is sunny and warm in Mietoinen. I am in a two-month residency to investigate cultures and structures of care through sour dough bread baking. Before the residency began, I had decided only a point to begin working from: I will bake sourdough bread multiple times a week, and reflect on the process and my experiences of it in relation to the environment I’m in.
This plan lead me to reflecting on the roles of a home baker and an artist, the different conceptions and evaluations of those types of works; the relations — to the earth, to other humans, to microbes — that emerge through baking; and the quality of those relations compared to normative intimate relations. I ended up attending events of the local women’s association, baking bread in a wood burning oven with the 76-year old Eila, drinking coffee and talking about connection to the land in a trailer in the yard of a small organic farm, and interviewing a micro-baker owner, who woke up at 4:30 that morning, while they’re pulling freshly baked rye buns from the oven in the cellar of an old school building. This is the material I will pick up and continue working on during my six-month residency in the CSSM artist in residency programme during the autumn/winter 2024-25.
In my bios and introductions I’ve ended up calling myself a non- or multi-disciplinary artist. Since, what directs my work is not a certain medium, but researching a topic, getting clarity to my own experience of the researched phenomenon, and only then navigating towards an appropriate way to express my findings. In my work I aim to share or facilitate personally meaningful, both sensory and intellectual, epiphanies to other people. For example, I have produced installations, sound pieces, DJ- sets and video works. Currently I am most often creating text in the form of essay or prose, photography, and participatory exercises and events. Therefore, as much as I work in the role of an artist, I work as a facilitator.
The topics of my recent and current work handle different aspects of caring relations – both human- to-human, and human-to-more-than-human. To name a few strands of on-going work: in my photography practice I am studying the human animalness and my own perception of those I refer to as animals. I am writing notes for a text about what lichen may teach me about co-existence and reciprocity. And, I am planning a participatory project on getting to know, and strengthening the skills to set personal boundaries in relation to others, by using artistic and psychophysical psychotherapeutic methods. The work I am planning to develop during my residency in CSSM is also about relations: between microbes, ecosystems, plants, humans, infrastructures, cultures and genders.
I am looking forward to being able to commit myself to the artistic work within the stimulating and communal framework I perceive CSSM to be. I am sure I will learn a lot, and I wish others will learn from me; that there will be an enriching exchange between me and others, and that we will develop a ‘common metabolism’ that nourishes us all.
#relations #respect #care #feministanalysis #posthumanisms #fermentation
Header image caption: The workshop What’s Fermenting. A peer discussion created by Aliisa Talja and Samuli Laine from WAUHAUS collective took place on the Climate Security festival in Helsinki, Finland in September 2024. Photo: Aman Askarizad
Learn more about Aliisa’s work on their website and follow them on their instagram.
