New Performance Turku Biennale (5.-10.9.2023) programme has been completed with performance lectures by researchers from various fields. Performative lectures and discussions by Anastasia (A) Khodyreva, Jean Lukkarinen and May-Britt Öhman & Eva Charlotta Helsdotter open up critical and interesting insights in the thematics of Coming Together.
Momentarily anchored in the Turku harbour, A Khodyreva‘s (FI) and waiting in the Baltic intertidal feels sore as if it was skin treated as a thick carpet endlessly stroke with a rough brush is a multisensorial lecture that figures a passenger ferry terminal as a site of intricate multivalent waiting, an embodied, situatedly and actively lived quotidian process that (quietly) contests the dominant Western globality. The lecture attends to the stakes and politics of being a waiting body that stands in the intersections of neo-liberalism, migratisation, racialisation/ethnicisation, cis-heteronormativity, and environmental crisis – all brewing thick socio-environmental atmospheres of the terminal. The offering is a part of Anastasia (A)’s ongoing (hydro)feminist research that attends to the structural politics of quotidian waiting. Anastasia (A) Khodyreva is a transdisciplinary theorist, researcher & writer based in Turku (FI). Their work scrutinises how dominant Western politics of structural marginalisation are lived and quietly subverted in one’s daily multispecies, especially terraqueous and anti-ableist, migratised, and non-binary communities.
‘The Streets of Turku: A Queer Perspective’ walking tour by Jean Lukkarinen takes its participants to see the queer-historical sites in the city center of Turku with an expert guide. The tour takes a critical look into the opportunities and challenges public space offers for people belonging to marginalized groups. The tour also makes visible the queer-historical stories hidden in the urban space of Turku. Jean Lukkarinen is a PhD Researcher in Cultural History at the University of Turku. They have researched histories of gender and sexual minorities in Finland and they focus on Finnish trans activism in their PhD research.
May-Britt Öhman and Eva Charlotta Helsdotter will discuss the case of wind power as part of the “green” transition. However, windpower plants come with the need for massive extraction and use of resources; rare earth metals, lime stone, steel, all which demand more mines. Windpower plants need large areas. In the more populated regions it is politically difficult to reach acceptance. Therefore, in Sweden and in Norway, wind power is installed in the Sámi reindeer herding territories, where the Sámi Indigenous land and water rights are still not acknowledged. May-Britt Öhman is Associate Professor in Environmental History, PhD in History of Technology, and Sámi of the Lule River valley. Eva Charlotta Helsdotter has a PhD in Land and Water Resources Management and is an Associate Professor in Water Security. Öhman and Helsdotter are researchers at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism, CEMFOR, Uppsala University and part of the research group Dálkke: Indigenous Climate Change Studies.
See the full list of biennale’s artists and researchers here.