I have lived in Turku for seven years and have come to see this city as one with a beautifully active and vibrant independent culture scene, much more so than in most cities of a similar size. However, many potential audience members face language and information barriers to exploring this side of Turku’s cultural identity. My vision for the role of Audience Ambassador was therefore to act as a companion to newcomers curious to start exploring performance art. I hoped to connect with fellow members of the immigrant and international community, new students, and Finns who have returned to Turku, for example, after living abroad. How could I help make the city’s independent arts offerings more visible and accessible to them? How could I help them gain a sense of ownership and belonging to it?
A fresh start
For my first group in the biennale, I chose to engage with the Fresh Start Club Night, because being a newcomer and having a “fresh start” go hand-in-hand. The night featured new works by three international women: Anabela Veloso (Portugal), Hanna Ijäs (Finland), and Anna Maskava (Latvia). And more importantly: their performances all focused on using storytelling to show how our environment shapes us.
I invited mentors from the Community Powered Integration (CPI) project to participate in this performance night. The CPI project is a fantastic European Union and City of Turku funded initiative that trains volunteer mentors, who have already been through the integration process themselves, in holistic integration skills to support new immigrants in their integration journey. I decided to open up a dialogue about cultural wellbeing with this group. Wellbeing from culture is part of the City of Turku’s overall culture strategy, yet this aspect of wellbeing isn’t currently included in the integration model that the mentors study for their training. The group was excited about the topic; they all wanted to feel confident using art and culture as a tool to support their mentees and discover more about what Turku’s diverse culture scene has to offer themselves.
I started by serving pizza to the group, both as a gesture of appreciation for the work that they do as mentors but also because pizza connects to NPT’s Pizza and Performance Art events. The mentors weren’t previously aware of the biennale, now they know it’s a place they can count on to find thought-provoking performances and sometimes free pizza! Anabela Veloso’s Crafting a Nation formed the inspiration for the practical side of our evening. Veloso’s practice weaves together pottery and storytelling and reflects on the history of the Barcelos Rooster, a traditional folk symbol from Northern Portugal that was co-opted by nationalism during an authoritarian regime. I invited the participants to craft their own symbol, emblem or mascot from their home country using air-dry clay and some other materials for inspiration. I hoped that by thinking about the meanings of emblems from their own countries (and by working with clay, as we would then go on to watch Anabela Veloso do) they would feel more open and connected to her work.
This activity was the highlight of the evening for me as we watched creativity unfold, secret artistic talents came to light, and we listened to each other tell the stories of our sculptures. One participant from Bulgaria shared her clay creation of a beautiful Bulgarian dress and rose; a participant from Ukraine fashioned miniature traditional instruments from her clay; another from Iran told us about the grape and winemaking traditions of his region; and someone who had returned to Finland from the Netherlands crafted a colourful scene of dutch tulips from her clay. Each object told a different story about the country and their personal relationship to it.
I had planned a series of follow-up conversation topics that would enable participants to investigate what their symbols might mean more deeply and also politically. But as I listened to the mentors share stories and memories, I realised the importance of giving time and space to allow them to express their sense of belonging and symbolic worlds without bringing up other difficult matters in their home countries. In our ambassadors’ discussions this type of flexibility was seen as an essential skill: the awareness to read a group’s needs, to adapt to them and respond in the moment.
After the activity, we packed up and headed across the road to the Art House. As we walked together, the enthusiasm from the group was infectious. For me, this captures one of the reasons for involving audience ambassadors into the biennale: How can we enhance and elongate the impact of an audience experience from beginning to end and beyond?
Let Peace Awake
For my second group, I chose Nigerian artist Jelili Atiku’s Let Peace Awake procession around the Aura riverside. A process integrating Ifá rituals for peace and mental healing, which, in his own terms, “gathers energy for sustenance and self-balance in our catastrophic world.” I wanted to offer a family-friendly experience in English that would explore Finnish rituals together to get into the right mindset to join the procession. I have found my own deep connection to Finland through learning more about its people’s historical connection to nature and I believe that many of us can relate to the need to find “self-balance in this catastrophic world”. Can we gather energy and self-balance from nature, like Finnish ancestors did before us? Could exploring this topic together strengthen our relationship to local nature and a sense of resilience?
Reaching international families proved more difficult than I imagined. My limited access to the right communication channels, competing with family schedules, and overlapping events that weekend all made participation harder to secure. Nevertheless, we gathered a small group on that fortunately beautiful sunny Saturday and headed to Vartiovuorenpuisto.
The Vartiovuori park was just a short walk from the start of Jelili Atiku’s procession and is also the only location in central Turku that appears on the Hiidet kartta, a map showing the locations of ancient pagan sites in Finland. We met at the former site of an ancient spring located conveniently at some stairs leading to the park and after some conversations about the ancient spring and the rituals surrounding it, we headed into the park and created a cosy picnic area together under the trees.
According to Ritva Kovalainen and Sanni Seppo’s wonderful book Tree People, Ancient Finns would gather at sacred groves to celebrate and offer sacrifices under a tree or bush of special significance. In the absence of modern day sacred groves and trees, I invited participants to explore the park and choose their own important tree. I asked them to consider what qualities drew them to that particular tree and offered tools with which they could document it: paper and pencils for sketching and beeswax crayons for making bark rubbings.
After spending time searching for and creating a visual memory of our tree, we each guided the group to our tree and presented our insights about them. I was struck by how different everyone’s choices were. Some participants were drawn to the awe of nature, selecting the tallest tree; or one with the most intricate bark patterns. Others saw stories in the trees they chose: branches that felt like an invitation to climb; a trunk that split and met again, mirroring the disconnections and reunions of the human experience; and another with thin branching trunks spiraling out from the ground evoked in one participant a sense of flow. We concluded the activity by sharing ways of being in nature that we could carry forward into our everyday lives.
The journey to join Jelili Atitku’s performance was filled with a calm and joyful energy and I again felt the value of audience ambassador work in heightening the experience of an upcoming performance. As we arrived on the other side of the Aura river, the activity connected and contrasted nicely to the event itself as we witnessed a body-painted Atitku performing Ifá rituals with branches and leaves before whisking the audience on an energetic procession for peace. It all truly felt like much-needed sustenance in this catastrophic world.
Final reflections
Planning activities for groups before having attended the performance itself involves doing extensive research, having faith in the method and a bit of luck, and in this case I’m happy with how it came together!
Being an ambassador has been a great opportunity for my personal and professional development. Through the course facilitated by María Villa, I learned a lot about performance art and many pedagogical approaches to facilitate audience work with it.
The visits to different art organisations across Turku were inspiring, and I appreciated how much freedom and flexibility we were given to develop ideas and experiment whilst at the same time being supported and encouraged.
The biennale was a great way to put our learnings into action, and above all I met the best people in my fellow ambassadors and the supportive community we created. I hope this is only the beginning!
Carly Markkanen
Carly Markkanen is a musician, researcher, and creative producer whose work explores how clarity and curiosity can co-exist to promote belonging and inclusion. She specialises in accessible communication tools to challenge assumptions about how we talk about art and culture, and to invite audiences to be open to surprising experiences.
Carly is co-founder of Selkokulttuuri ry and a producer on the Kone-funded environmental music and art project Old Forest Echoes. She also freelances as a horn player and teaches at Turun Metsänkävijäin Soittokunta. Carly studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London and also holds an MA in Arts Management, Society and Creative Entrepreneurship from the University of the Arts, Helsinki.