This edited volume breaks new ground for understanding peripheries and peripherality by providing a multidisciplinary cross-exposure through a collection of chapters and visual essays by researchers and artists.
The book is a collection of approaches from several disciplines where the spatial, conceptual, and theoretical hierarchies and biased assumptions of ‘peripheries’ are challenged. Chapters provide a diverse collection of viewpoints, analyses, and provocations on ‘peripherality’ through bringing together international specialists to discuss the socio-political, aesthetic, artistic, ethical, and legal implications of ‘peripheral approach.’ The aim is to illuminate the existing, hidden, often incommensurable, and controversial margins in the society at large from equal, ethical, and empathic perspectives.
Our Artivism issue is inspired by dismantling the contemporary conception of art and by a space where working methods, contents, and ideals produced by art have changed. This also enables negotiations and struggles between various conceptions of art. The art-historical contexts of activist art are rooted in 20th century avant-garde, German expressionism, and feminist art and in the anti-war and anti-racist civil rights movements of the 1960s. In the history of science, activism has been an essential part of European intellectuals’ self-understanding and operating culture. Today, as conceptions of art have changed, conceptions of science are also in flux. Small movements towards science activism, a new kind of integration of theory and practice, are emerging in Finland. Scientific and artistic practices have come closer to each other, recently influenced by material threats to humanity’s future: biodiversity loss and climate change. These threats are forcing us to give up on the 18th-century belief in progress and the anthropocentric worldview based on controlling nature.
Politically transformative and critical art plays a central role in fights for environmental protection, gender diversity, and antiracism. Activist art, being often radical, searching for something new, and integrating people and environments, is tied to power–knowledge relations. In this issue, we approach artivism as performative art related to questions of power, matter, and representation as well as their relations. We focus on the fact that art, in its various creative forms, includes political objectives. At the same time, we explore the ways political action can be creative. Artivism, based on the interests of a researcher, artist, activist, and various communities, may be connected with personal and political objectives related to subjugation, resistance, and empowerment. Activism as a form of artistic practice may also be quiet, tentative, experimental, and searching. Sometimes, it leads to social changes. At other times, it appears as slow, nearly invisible movements and powers.
Artivism overlaps with the world’s material dimensions and materialistic contradictions. It is a pursuit of change, movement, and a non-essentialising way of approaching the world and society. We invite our readers and experiencers to join us in this ongoing movement!
We thank all the artist-researcher and the peer-reviewers for their invaluable contribution to this issue.
Rovaniemi is home to culturally significant trees and green areas, which are highlighted in this exhibition, exploring their history and present through a publication. The exhibition “TREES, PARKS, PEOPLE” is the result of collaboration among 11 artists and visual creators from various fields. The exhibition features photographs, lithographs, videos, sculptures, and installations. Additionally, there is a community art piece created by around sixty tree enthusiasts, showcasing photographs of trees that are to be preserved. The participating artists and visual creators are Miina Alajärvi, Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja, Panu Johansson, Hilkka Liikkanen, Mervi Löfgren Autti, Mari Mäkiranta, Kirsikka Paakkinen, Karoliina Paatos, Eila Puhakka, Kaisa Sirén, and Jukka Suvilehto.
Old trees have witnessed much, and each generation forms a new relationship with them. Trees are also an important part of people’s, cities’, and even nations’ identities, as they hold many stories, experiences, and lives. The artists in the exhibition express, through their works, the shock that arises from the felling of a nearby forest or an individual elderly tree. The grief is entirely justified, as within our lifetime, we simply cannot witness a newly planted tree reaching its full age. The lifespan of a tree can exceed human lifespan several times over; while our lives on Earth come to an end, the life of a tree is just beginning.
Poster image: Mari Mäkiranta The exhibition has been granted by the Finnish Cultural Foundation
Free Rivers Art collective, 2022, Twenty-five kilometres walk, video 5:46 min (short version). Performative walk and video filmed near Kittilä’s goldmine in Finnish Lapland. Under the road is a pipe for the polluted water from the mine. Polluted waste water runs in river near by the Levi tourist center.
Water and soil samples from the polluted rivers near mining industries in Northern Finland. Water and Soil, ink-jet photgraphy, 2022
During the covid 19 I started to photograph my neighbourhood men living on my home street. These men, like many of us, needed to stay isolated during the pandemia.
Visible Grounds exhibition and art curating in collaboration with Professor Eija Timonen and Kalevala Society, Valo Gallery, Rovaniemi, Finland 18.10.–9.11.2017.
My photography series On Foreign Grounds in a group exhibition in the Faculty of Art and Design, University of Lapland. The exhibition was curated by the director of the Photographic Gallery Hippolyte Henna Harri.
Our Meetings exhibition in Vaasa City Art Hall consists of young peoples’ dreams and future hopes in Namibia, South-Africa and Europe. During the exhibition we organized two workshops in order to develop and study decision-making, communality and city planning in youth communities. The exhibition brings together young people living in different countries and continents, and asks how the political, regional and societal changes affect on young people. The exhibition was organized together with Professor Satu Miettinen and Service-Designer Reetta Kerola.
Over a period of a spring and summer in 2013, 16 young artists photographed their living environments in Finland, Estonia, the Netherlands, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia and Russia. The Such an Early Spring exhibition demonstrates how young people interpret the social changes, cultural diversity and everyday experiences that are attached to their living surroundings. The exhibition and research has been funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
Photographs by: Daria Akimenko, Roselinde Bon, Daria Maroń-Ptak, Mari Mäkiranta, Anka Simoncic, Alexandra Shpiro & Ana Žolnir.
Detail of the installation. Photographs by: Daria Akimenko, Rovaniemi, Finland and Ana Žolnir, Celje, Slovenia. Installation by: Daria Akimenko & Mari Mäkiranta
Film by Nuno Escudeiro, Mari Mäkiranta & Daria Akimenko.
The material of the film contains the still photographs and stories related on young people’s living environments. Thank you all the participants from Poland, Finland, Croatia, Russia, Slovenia, Estonia and the Netherlands.
Photograph by: Tomi Kosonen
Mari Mäkiranta 