VILLI AKKA

Villi Akka is a character I created in 2014 based on the wild & wise woman' archetypes and the representation of non-male characters inside tales, oral stories and written tradition. Since then, it has been growing and gaining independence.

Villi Akka’s process is an open dialogue striving to break the oppression of established roles, building together non-discriminatory narratives. Villi Akka is about recovering intuition and instinct around multiple identities, empowering ourselves, embracing community and celebrating our ambiguities (and our weirdness).

Framing it as a project, the work has two interlaced parts:

The calling: A series of workshops where the assistants shared narrations read or transmitted to them during their childhood and youth, analyse its symbology, cultural meaning, gender roles, and its influence and relevance in today’s society. Discussing them critically, extracting their core message and finally creating their narrations supported by different methods and using the fictional character villi Akka as a “crutch” or supporting role for their cast and story.

Villi Akka’s traces: An ongoing series of text and visual art about this character and its attributes, also acting as a link within others’ tales and contributions.


Why tales?

Tales always have had an enormous capacity of representation and connexion; they flow, mutating and growing, transcending arbitrary boundaries, tacking on the weakness and sensitivities of modern living,
which in turn means that tales are common and a massive part of our cultural history and that the possess an invaluable quality of communicating concepts.

This multidisciplinary project is as any artistic work personal, but simultaneously I’m aiming for compilation of voices that can grow and be used by others as a tool or safer space to reconnect with myths, as the
best quality of myths is that they are open source.