The calling (I)
The following documentation of my exhibition in Rantakasarmi gallery (Helsinki) gathers a selection of some of the first works of my ongoing project Villi Akka.
We could say that this force is animalistic, her voice is a mute pulse that awakes us from numbness, her figure in the corner of our eyes a reflection and a reflex, scaring us at night when the darkness is to conform and suppress as the only acceptable way to be civilised.
Who is calling?
In a world where She must be frightening because of their wisdom power and ferocity, healthy attributes as creativity, independence, and self-reliance are what make her “dangerous” to the status quo.
Do you see her?
Myths, fairy tales, and stories are a tool to preserve and to erase.
She has been dressed with the skin of a variety of supernatural creatures (witches, sorceresses, demons, the cursed, etc.) tantalising us with an image that can be both liberating and oppressive to women: being a woman with power in a world where women are often otherwise powerless.
Can you?
Could we find the balance of an image which is both an accusation and also a representation that many find empowering?
Can we prevent ourselves from trying to bend and fold into shapes that are not ours?
Can you recognise her voice?
Up: Memorial wall (heads made of resin, synthetic hair, reindeer horns, wood, acrylic paint). Villi Akka’s seeds (glass, plaster, resin, synthetic hair, wood). Ritual’s wall: performative photographies, drawnings and text.Each image had assigned a number corresponding to a fragment of text from a tale, song or poem. Examples of text below:
“- We will be fire - Shivers are coming” (5)
“Incubation has a particular sound, as it has growth or intuition.
As a river, we float in and maintain us elastic, changeable, alive.
You are not lost if you still can hear the river.
You need to be lost to learn to find the river” (8)
“I remember the hair, as bedsheets”(16)
“In spring one was chosen, I remember the pink and purple ribbons dancing in the warm air and the sounds of the horns against the branches, they left offerings under the cherry trees. I was stepping closer when my mother pulled my arm and said: Things are not what they look like” (4)
Every creature has a predator.
-I love you so much. I could eat you up.- (7)
“I hear you even louder when I can not see you; I chase your footsteps as hares, the whispers between sand grains.
Your weight is on my shoulders like snow melted under my tongue, your shadow dance within my eyelashes with the movement of my eyes, when I dream of you, they see us.” (12)
Through this work, I retrieve, examine and understand my "Villi Akka" as an endangered species. Holding her against my deep psyche I try to confront my prejudices, my fears and indoctrinated constructions. In the discomfort of our shadows, we learn of power and love.
