— PROJECT NAME
Metsäesitys-working group & Siberian Flying Squirrels Papana & Norkko
— ROLE
Performer, designer, writer, artist, flying squirrel
— IN COLLABORATION WITH
Katri Puranen & Liisa Pesonen
— DATE
2015--> Metsäesitys-working-group, performances: Zone 7 (2015), In Times (2016), Zone Z° (2017)
2019--> Flying Squirrels Papana & Norkko
— WEB PAGE FOR PAPANA & NORKKO
— WEB PAGE FOR METSÄESITYS
coming
Metsäesitys (roughly translated as "Forest Performance") is a project founded in 2015, trying to imagine different kind of relations to forest and suggest polyphonous spaces for forest discussion. One main interest is to look for ways how art could be as an essential point of different kind of processes of knowledge-producing and politicial decision-making.
Since 2015 Metsäesitys has created several workshop-performances in forests/ with forests and developed its own practice with different collaborators.
Since 2019 the focus point has been working from the point of view of the Siberian Flying Squirrels Papana & Norkko, a non-human creature with remarkable power in Finnish forest discussion due to its protection by EU law. Motivated by the risk of extinctions, flying squirrels Papana & Norkko are stepping out of their home forest in Solkivuori (Tampere, Finland) into the realm of human culture and political action, offering to collaborate with humans to look for ways to find new angles of solutions to wickedly wicked problems. They observe things with a value-free, empathetic attitude, trying to learn what is this all about and how to act as a squirrel in collaboration with different kind of creatures and processes!
In spring 2019 Papana & Norkko interviewed parliament election candidates from all major parties and shared the video pieces in their social media. In 2020 the squirrels have in their agenda things like political imagination, democracy, utopy, conflict and biodiversity. They wish to try out different roles; for example the skin of squirrel-influencers. They have founded a Creative Team of Future Creators (Tulevaisuustekijöiden tiimi) -inviting in everybody regardless of fur, skin or shell material, wavelength or molecural structure. They also plan a project with the title State of Emergency (Poikkeustila) and a Twitter – performance. In September 2020 Papana & Norkko take part in Untitled – festival. In 2021 Papana&Norkko signed their first official contract as artist in "Aikakoneita&utopioita"-project.
Their motto is: "Everything is possible for a squirrel with an agenda!"
You can follow Papana & Norkko (in Finnish) in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube.
More info (in Finnish) from Papana's & Norkko's webpage: