Caroline Picard: What is the Helsinki International Artist Programme?

Jenni Nurmenniemi: HIAP is one of the largest residency centers in the Nordic and Baltic region, hosting up to a hundred students per year, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary practices. We have two locations: one is on an eighteenth-century fortress island, Suomenlinna—not too far from the city center, though it feels quite remote. It’s visually interesting with a mix of Slavic and Scandinavian influences. The idea is that living and working spaces are combined, so that life and work entangle nicely. Our other location is very different. It’s a former cable factory, where we have three studios. That site is very urban and industrial—a nice contrast to the otherwise picturesque island location.

CP: Frontiers in Retreat is specifically interested in ecology and art, is that right? And it’s also part of HIAP?

JN: HIAP runs several projects, of which Frontiers in Retreat is the biggest one. It actually occupies quite a lot of our physical space and mental capacity at the moment—or until 2018; it’s a five-year engagement. HIAP has a few other thematic programs of which maybe one of the most interesting to mention is Safe Haven. This program allows people persecuted in their home countries—for example, those who may be under threat of human rights violations or those who have their freedom of speech suppressed in their home countries—to take a break of a kind and take up residency for a longer period to rethink their situation. HIAP is part of a residency network that allows these people the chance of a haven.

CP: In these sorts of cases, do you find that you have to coordinate with different government bureaucracies?

JN: Absolutely. It has been a very challenging residency program. Ethically, there are so many questions, and I actually am not the best person to talk about it in detail because it’s run by another group of people. What happens when the residency ends raises questions about ethical responsibility; sometimes people need asylum, to establish their lives in a new context. What is the responsibility of the residency and art center then, and what are the constraints and possibilities around how we can support these people? I think this relates to the art and ecology residency in the sense that when an organization like ours is running a project involving local communities (which is often the case with Frontiers residencies) the question of continuity and support comes up again. For example, what happens after the artist has left? Will their processes and initiatives continue or will their work just vanish as if it never happened?

CP: People often bring that up in relation to social practice projects. Take, for instance, an artist wants to come to a community and build a greenhouse, but then nobody takes care of the greenhouse after the artist leaves and it ends up just falling apart …

JN: I might have to say more about the Frontiers structure. We have seven locations and some of their ecosystems are quite fragile. If an artist wants to make an intervention, that will obviously have some consequences, influencing the balance of its particular system. For example, a Berlin-based artist, Tue Greenfort, wanted to work with mushrooms. He came to work on the island of Suomenlinna and started researching what kind of mushrooms grew there, whether they could actually provide solutions for food production. He often works with mushrooms, and in this context, he wanted to cut down a huge mushroom-infested tree on the island in order to turn it into a mushroom habitat that would produce mushroom-based protein for Suomenlinna’s residents.

I think the most interesting part was the negotiation with the chief gardener of the island, who explained how important this tree was, even though it might look dead—trees like that facilitate a tremendous amount of biodiversity. Removing it could potentially damage more than just humankind on the island. The conversation was rather speculative, but removing one tree might have interfered with the island’s ecology drastically. All in all, there are twenty-four artists working within Frontiers.

CP: Do most Frontiers projects take place in nontraditional exhibition spaces?

JN: Yes and no. I think people move nicely between gallery or museum contexts and their fieldwork as well as at the intersection of theory and practice. We wanted exactly that, to provide a platform that allows people to move between the rigid categories that usually structure how one navigates the art system.

CP: I find it amazing how much invisible work there is to curation—boring paperwork, bureaucracy, administration, as well as hosting and facilitating. What is a curator to you?

JN: It’s a question that I think about pretty much every day. Being a curator involves a lot of invisible work as you said, especially now, and especially because I am a bit weary of imposing trending theoretical or conceptual frameworks on my approach. Every six months or so, there is some key concept that people start to obsess over. I am wary of that. I try to construct open platforms where things emerge organically or slowly, and then I engage deeply with the artists’ work over a long period, taking time to recognize the artists’ capacity to mediate between different forms of knowledge and different disciplines. They can cross these boundaries, and I try to support that potentiality.

My work is also a lot about hosting: a lot about listening and being supersensitive to nuances. We somehow set certain loose parameters, follow what emerges, and then try to tease out meanings. Meanings in plural, because I don’t feel it is ever possible to construct a coherent or singular narrative around art and ecology. That topic has emerged here at the HKW many times. I believe it is important to allow space for complexity and to select epistemological multiplicity that generates difference.

CP: Today, there was a related critique that the Anthropocene is problematic in that it represents a single totality. Maybe it would be better to refer to Anthropocenes, to allow for multiple timelines or extinctions, multiple experiences, types of experiences, and various relationships to our ecological times.

JN: I am fond of imagining history as a web—interconnected webs or networks—a network approach to history instead of maybe a kind of chronological timeline. I like drawing from different cultures as much as possible, recognizing that, okay, I’m situated.

One project I thought a lot about during the “Co-Evolutionary Perspectives” seminar has to do with mining or the extractiveness in extraction industries. In that context I’d like to bring up this project by Serbian artist Mirko Nikolić. It began last year, and now it has had iterations in different locations. It’s called we heart copper & copper hearts us. Mirko is looking into what kind of ideas and meanings human beings have attached to copper. He set up this site, weheartcopperheartus.co—a data mine that sources everything with “#copper” from across the world, from different social media. He uses this to study what the metal signifies to humans in different contexts. Then, actually, there is also a physical DIY data center, which Mirko is going to take to different mining sites in Southern Finland this spring.

CP: And he exhibits in a gallery space?

JN: It’s a good example how we exhibited Mirko’s work last summer, the prototype we displayed out here at the Gallery Augusta, as part of the group show titled “Excavations.” This year, the work is going into action, so instead of hanging it from the gallery ceiling here, it’s going to hang from trees; and it will go on tour. The idea is that Mirko can fold it up, put it on his shoulder, and somehow cycle to a different copper mining site, or undiscovered deposits even. Maybe ironically, I love the word “deposit” in this sense, meaning a site that has not yet been excavated or extracted.

Mirko has been researching ancient mines in Finland, ongoing mining projects, and future mining sites. His method of stitching different timelines or historical moments together is putting emphasis on how much we rely on copper. We tend not to really think about it, although the metal has been a subject in the art world for quite some years now; however, copper’s conductive properties actually allow us to use our technospheric devices and build this whole network that we articulate as the technosphere.

CP: I also keep thinking about the Joseph Beuys reference to “I Like America and America Likes Me.” That said, then, I can’t figure out whether maybe it’s some sort of a game, something like, “Oh, is the coyote the copper?” In some ways, I think of Beuys’ coyote as a nexus point for all ecological, political, historical narratives. It’s sort of funny to think about precious metals that way. Of course, although embedded in so much of our experience, we tend not to think about them as such.

JN: Exactly, that’s well articulated. Through Mirko’s work, I always feel led toward dissolving the hierarchical binaries of Western dualist thinking.

CP: You mean like the nature/culture binary for instance …

JN: Exactly. But also the division between material and immaterial, animate and inanimate. For instance, the idea that data is somehow immaterial. Mirko’s project has an undeniable material aspect: there is the website, of course, but then you can also see, for instance, that Mirko himself works in the copper mines in Serbia. He really engages with the material, both extracting it and putting it back into the Earth. There are all these sediments and layers to his project, and that is what I find fascinating.

CP: Another thing that struck me was the negotiation with labor structures that seen similarly embedded …

JN: Absolutely, here, another Frontiers artist, Bart Vandeput, or Bartaku, a Belgian mastermind, also conducted his artistic research in a mining city in Serbia. He is very interested in labor structures and the fact that actually there are not that many miners left.

CP: I was wondering if you could talk about the Anthropocene, ecology, and the words we choose to work with when looking at our own ecological era: do you see the term Anthropocene as a fad?

JN: I like how you mentioned that it might be a good idea to talk about the Anthropocene in plural. It is also very much about language. It’s hard to translate sometimes from Finnish to English, but I think the term provides an umbrella under which we should recognize that humans are influencing most if not all ecosystems in this biosphere. But I want to know how to go beyond that acknowledgment. There, I think, we need specific concepts: I for one am very careful about what I impose on the artists I work with. At the same time, I realize, they also need critical dialog and input from curators. What we have tried to do with the Frontiers project is to build a glossary that allows for different epistemic frameworks or multiplicity.