History
The balcony
On Meganom, Marika and Anton have a balcony. An enormous boulder has fallen from the mountain; in their June conversation, they say that at first sight it is “disgusting”. Yet it offers shelter from the rain. They lay a plank across the stones, make a bench and have a place where they can sit and read. Nearby is a large coral formation that stays warm when the sun has already set and the other stones have cooled.
They read Hannah Arendt's Vita activa together. In the conversation, the question of what they are doing in this landscape leads to two short turns.
Authorial Comment
— As Hannah Arendt says, it is human beings who create the world. — Like we made the bench today.
One Room, June 2020. Transcript
History
History
The bedroom is on the mountain, the bathroom by the sea, the office with internet near the lighthouse. To get from one room to another, they have to walk along the shore. “Our multi-room apartment has spread out, sprawled across 5 km,” they say. The space is named after what they do in it: sleep, wash, read, talk to people in other countries. Under these names, a life together already exists.
This apartment comes with a condition: they must be ready to pack all their belongings in five minutes. The balcony does not remove the possibility of having to leave immediately. Reading quietly under the rock and being ready to pack up the dwelling are parts of the same day. It is from this coexistence that the everyday life they speak of takes shape.
Staying together
By the spring of 2020, Marika and Anton have been living between countries for several years. They have refused to return to their former life and are trying to continue living and working together without tying themselves to one place and its institutions. In their later text New World, they connect their emigration to dictatorship and terror in the countries they left, and to the idea of the artist as belonging to the world. They describe the world as their shared apartment. Their refusal of the former conditions, and the cost of that refusal, precede the pandemic. In March, their accustomed instability takes an immediate form: different citizenships and closing borders threaten to separate them.
The artists' text New World Letter to the festival, 11 June 2020
On the shore, their dwelling is a tent and their means of transport a two-person kayak. In their letter of 11 June, they explain that this life allows them to stay together. They call the kayak a sign of mobility under conditions of closed borders. What will later become a proposal for the festival already serves them in everyday life.
In this situation, they continue doing what they did before: making tea, sitting, writing, talking. In the conversation of 28 June, Meganom is compared with the Office of Nonknowledge in Mänttä. The people perform the same actions, but now there are no walls around them. The question of work arises in the midst of this continuation.
Authorial Comment
— And then these same people, they're doing the same things, only their walls have collapsed, everything has fallen down, and there's just some bare surface left, and they're still making tea, still talking, sitting, writing, only for some reason without walls. And this is where the Politics of Nonknowledge begins.
Conversation about scholē, Meganom, 28 June 2020. Transcript
History
Getting connected
In June, they participate in Saari Home Residency while remaining on Meganom. They devise their own diagram of time for the residency. In the conversation of 28 June, they connect what is happening on the shore with this work: for them, the practice of Nonknowledge takes form precisely in the artist's everyday activity.
In One Room, they describe the route to the internet: they have to climb the mountain, cross a field and reach the lighthouse. Their “office” is there. To take part in a conversation at a distance, they first have to follow a quite specific path.
Support from Saari, help from people nearby and a connection with Finland are part of how this life is organised. In September, Marika and Anton will write that withdrawing to the peninsula preserved their world and their communication. To meet the rest of the world, they climbed to find a 3G signal. The place they inhabit is already connected to other people through their own actions.
From this shore, they are already taking part in the residency and talking to people in Finland. Yet life does not have to know in advance what work will come out of it.
At the end of One Room, the possibility of assembling the rooms, images and conversations that already exist meets an objection: does such an assembly turn into a plan for a further series? The reply is: “No, I'm planning from what's already there. I'm not saying we need to go on doing more of the same. I don't know how it should be done.”
Recording conversations, images of rooms and an inventory of things allow them to look at their own life from the outside. In this gathering, they take on curatorial work: they return to what they have lived through, compare its traces and prepare them for an encounter with another person. In the conversation of 28 June, they speak of a curatorial practice that marks out the absence of the artist and the work: “No, the place is there, that's exactly the point! The artist isn't there. But he occupies it.” Everyday life acquires a form in which it can be preserved, passed on and enacted anew.
Bringing themselves
Participation in New Performance Turku presents them with the next task. They are invited into a performance situation, but cannot travel there physically. They need to determine what, precisely, can be present before the people in Turku.
On 11 June, Marika and Anton propose sending the kayak. It is their means of transport on Meganom. The proposal includes its dispatch, delivery, exhibition and auction on the festival's final day: the buyer will be able to purchase a work of art or an item of sports equipment. Shipping is provisionally estimated at around 300 euros. The same letter proposes another possibility: a live musical audio-video broadcast from the shore.
On 18 July, they report that the brokers are asking for 4,500 euros, including documents, duties and insurance. Declared a work of art, the kayak remains cargo within the transport system. The artistic decision has not removed the obstacle that brought it about.
By this time, the Index, compiled on 30 June, already exists. It records what is in the bags, what has been put into folders and what is hanging on the line. Among the things are laundry soap in a blue soap dish; men's checked underpants; a printout of Erwin Panofsky's table. Their positions preserve the arrangement of daily use: clothes on the line, paper in a folder, the folder in a bag. In July, this inventory will be put to another use.
The common body passes through text
In the letter of 18 July, the entire collection of things is called a common material body. Instead of transporting it, they propose passing it on through text. Each element can change its material carrier; in the artists' conception, the whole should remain recognisable. The list becomes a code for a new enactment of what has already been happening on the shore.
The diagram has two material sides. On one, the things are in use by Marika and Anton. On the other, the things are to meet the festival audience. A digital file carries the inventory to a place where the original body cannot be transported. To complete this passage, someone will have to read it, choose objects and arrange them in space. In the letter, the artists call text a universal code: it is to transmit the common body through space and time, preserving the unity of the whole as individual things are replaced.
The team is given a condition: use only the Index, without photographs or video of the original dwelling. Those carrying out the work are entrusted with deciding which things will occupy the specified places and how the installation will be arranged. Its materiality now depends on their actions.
On 20 July, Marika and Anton clarify the rule of substitution.
Authorial Comment
We just want to point the important detail: every object in the list could be substituted by whatever. What is important is attention to the object and the fact of a decision to replace the object by another. Whatever is absolutely what you like.
Letter of 20 July 2020. Letter
History
In the next paragraph, they refer to Agamben, The Coming Community and Quodlibet. Their reading of любое (lyuboye, “whatever”) connects substitution with what a person chooses for themselves and gives their attention to. The person carrying out the work has freedom; its exercise is what must give the work a body.
Other people's things
On 4 September 2020, The Tunnel is presented in Turku. Found objects, comments and participants' names appear beside the original entries in the team's table.
| Thing on Meganom | Decision in Turku | Participant | |---|---|---| | Laundry soap in a blue soap dish | Marseille soap from home, used to wash woollen clothes | Leena | | The wedding shirt of Susanna's former husband | Their own black and gold wedding dress | Anni / AOFP | | A fragment of a canister retrieved from the sea | A broken sculpture of a bull's head | Salla | | Marika's two passports | Salla's two lunch passes | Salla | | Anton's passport | Salla's dance pass | Salla | | Gasparov, Entertaining Greece / The Capitoline She-Wolf | Edward Said, Orientalism | Leena | | Panofsky's table, a black-and-white A4 printout | Panofsky's table, handwritten on A4 | Salla |
Substitutions in Turku. Table of substitutions
The substitution of a bull's head for a canister fragment stands on its own. Beside the substitution of Orientalism for Gasparov's book, Leena proposes a change of focus and a reconsideration of the relationship to the East. In other rows, Lakoff and Johnson answer Bibikhin, Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurélien Barrau answer Mamardashvili. The participants bring their own everyday things, their own books and their own questions into the inventory.
The life of two people remains legible in the list: what they wore, read, kept safe, washed with and used to store their papers. As objects are replaced, the places through which this life can be recognised remain. Another life appears in them at the same time: that of the people who supplied the chosen things and made the decisions. On 18 September, Marika and Anton will also call the result “a self-portrait of the authors of the interpretation” and thank seven co-authors: Leena Kela, Antonín Brinda, Anni Sundbacka, Salla Karvonen, Henrikki Jokela, Lotta Valtanen and Isa Lehtinen.
This portrait is recognisable through the life together and the history of its transmission. In the July letter, Marika and Anton formulate a condition for this transmission: each part of the common body can change, but the whole must preserve itself. Carrying out the work requires another person's decision: the choice of things and their arrangement. In the words of the letter, the curator and producer become sources of its materiality and aesthetics.
On Meganom, they made a place where they could continue to be together. In Turku, other people continue this presence. They give it matter, their own time and attention. The transmission is thus completed in an encounter with a new audience.
The centre that is everywhere
In their kitchen conversation in Děčín, Marika and Anton return to their own estrangement. If indeterminacy concerns all things, the position of the stranger ceases to be only a personal failure.
Authorial Comment
— So this feeling we have of being alien to everything, our understanding of ourselves as strangers, concerns the universal condition of all things. This is what lies behind the screen of social order, the system of concepts and customs. We find ourselves not on the periphery of an ordered cosmos, but at the very centre, which is everywhere.
Děčín kitchen conversation. Undated. Transcript
History
On the shore, this position took shape through small actions: making a place to read, distinguishing the days, climbing to find a connection, recording things, continuing a conversation. In Turku, other people's actions were added to them. The scale of what is happening changes with the question addressed to it: how it is possible to live, think and appear before another person from the place one already occupies.
The formulation about the centre lets us see the scene with the bench again. The book, the threatening rock, shelter from the rain and two people reading are already joined in it. The world finds a place in their relations with these things. Neither leaving the big city nor being absent from the festival exhausts what has happened to them.
New performances
In the video New World (2021), the expedition has a continuation of its own. The artists' description speaks of a virtual labyrinth and a tunnel connection being made through it.
On 13 December 2021, at Studio ALTA in Prague, Marika and Anton read the original Index in the performance Now. The inventory of substitutions from Turku is on the wall. The voice names one set of things; another exists before the audience. With the reading, the interval between these embodiments returns to the room.
The documentation retains the question “What can we do?” and the answer “You did it already.” The person who asked the question has already entered the situation. It also preserves photographs of the performers with upturned folding chairs, with strings stretched across their frames. An everyday object acquires another use within the shared duration of the action.
A new performance, Panofsky, Soap and Underwear, was announced for 21 October 2026 at the Extended Library, HFBK Hamburg. On 20 October, it was being prepared: the list was to enter performance again, together with Samotryas.
The Panofsky printout lay in a folder, the folder in a bag on Meganom. In Turku, a handwritten Panofsky table took its place. Panofsky's name, soap and underpants have been brought into the title of the announced performance. The things among which life unfolded bring people together in one place again.
Related Works
Whatever