(A) Khodyreva: terminal socialities

Thursday 7.9. at 18:00
Venue: Turku harbour, Viking Line Terminal, Ensimmäinen linja, 20100 Turku
Arrival and accessibility information will be updated at the bottom of the page

Duration: 1h 
The performance requires pre-booking.
Pre-booking here.

terminal socialities is a performative reading that invites its listeners to figure a Finnish ferry passenger terminal as a site where multiple socialities, constraints, and solidarities flesh out – specifically, in the entangled contexts of environmental crisis, migration politics and quotidian practices of migratisation, extractive capitalism, and green maritime logistics. The site-based reading unfolds as a walk through the terminal, as an itinerary of multisensorial encounters with it. The itinerary is composed of vignettes and scores – all encouraging one to sensorially notice how different social positions and spacetimes emerge, come together and fluctuate in relation to each other in the glass-cement container this terminal building is. 

As it moves and senses through the terminal, the itinerary mobilises one of the core communication tools that organises the space – a walkie-talkie. For the duration of the reading, a walkie-talkie becomes a means of querying the organisational codes of the space and is summoned as a tool of critical story-telling. With a walkie-talkie, terminal socialities wonders what sounds and vibrations might form the terminal and its vicinity for different bodies. Does the terminal sound like a happy crowd of suitcase wheels rolling over the tile floors? Or like a seagull’s laughter? What language does the terminal speak? Extending its attention towards other sensorial materialities, the reading wonders if the Baltic Sea one sees through the terminal’s walls equally blue for all. Does the terminal vicinity always smell like a fresh, lightly salty breeze? Does it sound like a happy crowd of suitcase wheels rolling over the tile floors? And, in principle, what dominant and alternative worlds might sound themselves out into existence here? 

Anastasia (A) Khodyreva is a transdisciplinary theorist, researcher & writer based in Turku (FI), born in Russia. 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. Most recently, they have been co-facilitating Aquatic Encounters: Arts and Hydrofeminisms, an artistic research project and communal reading space that have been dreaming of aqueous companionships and just multispecies futures (KONE Foundation 2020-2022; 2023; co-facilitated with Dr Elina Suoyrjö) & they are developing A Waiting Notebook (in collaboration with TUO TUO Arts (FI)), a durational communal research project curious about the multivalent affect of waiting.

(A)’s ways of knowing include but are not limited to collaboration as a doing-in-common, haptic encounters, multi-sensorial walks, notes-taking, and site-based writing. They have written and edited internationally (e.g., in The Unlikely Journal for Creative Arts, niin & näin, The CSPA Quarterly, Errant Bodies Press & others) and have dwelled in residencies & research retreats that include TUO TUO Arts, CAA, the Saari Residency, EST-NORD-EST and others. Their work has been supported by KONE Foundation, Turku University Foundation, Emil Aaltonen Foundation, and the Academy of Finland.