Departing from the title of the current exhibition ‘Diary Life’, event guest curators Petronella Grönroos and Marjolein van der Loo want to expand on the notion of a weather diary. They write:

Realising to the impossibility of innocently observing the weather in the times of accelerating warming of the climate, we want to pay attention to the interconnections present in our shared ecosystems with other forms and modes of being. With the help of artworks, stories, and shared activities we would like to invite the audience to various attempts and understandings of what a non-human diary could be.

Choosing bodies of water, and water in (our) bodies, as a point of departure we will activate narratives, images, and objects to relate to times and dependencies. Formulating questions on future, past and the relation between water and stone we will activate the participants and shift our focus on less human-centered time frames. Finally while enjoying beverages produced with a fermentation process, we will experience a process of microorganisms establishing different compositions over time. Moving between these different scales of size and time we want to experiment imagining and empathising with different beings and elements that relate to flux and change.

As a part of this programme we will screen Leah Beeferman’s video piece Coast Forms(2017) taking us to the liminal space of a coastline. We want to thank the artist for giving us permission to use this work.

Welcome!

The event is as a collaboration between Kohta kunsthalle and MA programme Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art at Aalto University.

Image Credit:

Duria Antiquior by the geologist Henry de la Beche, depicting life in ancient Dorset based on fossils found by Mary Anning, National Museum, Cardiff [public domain]