VILLI AKKA

The character of Villi Akka was born in 2014 as a result of personal research on the archetypes of the wild woman & wise woman, and their representation as feminine and non-male characters in tales, oral stories, and written traditions. Since then, it continued to grow and gain independence.

Villi Akka turned out to be an act of resistance against the systematically violent systems in which we are embedded, as much as a celebration of the untamed “feminine” in counterpoint to the biopolitical masculine. An ambiguous being, wise and cosmic yet essentially earthy, that rarely speaks yet talks about recovering our intuition and instinct, ancestral knowledge, rituals, and empowering actions, as well as embracing the multiplicity of our identities within our communities.

My praxis with Villi Akka has evolved from independent artistic research and studio work into a multivoiced, open dialogue, striving to reconnect with our ancestral knowledges, situated and diasporic, and to break the oppression of roles within the binary opposition system, so building non-discriminatory narratives together.

Framing it as a project, the work has two interlaced parts that inform each other:

The calling: A series of workshops (2018-23) where assistants use tales/stories that have affected them or imprinted them when growing up, through the lens of the Villi Akka, we analyse their core message, symbology, cultural meaning, gender roles, and their influence and relevance in today’s society. Discussing them critically, they create their own narrations, using the fictional character Vili Akka as a “crutch” or supporting role. While the majority of outcomes are text-based, narrations can also take shape as sound, movement, or other cultural expressions, such as shared rituals. (link)

Villi Akka’s traces: A series of visual art, performance art, and text-based works I created in connection with Villi Akka and its attributes. This also serves as a resource library for the workshop participants. (link)


Why tales?

I chose tales as the primary material because they have always possessed a vast capacity for representation and connection; they flow, mutate, and grow, transcending arbitrary boundaries while capturing the vulnerabilities and sensitivities of life. Even when under the pretext of “modernity,” tales, myths, and storytelling have been continually stripped of their original contexts or reshaped and censored as tools for control and indoctrination, they endure as the whispers they carry.

Stories and myths form a significant part of our cultural history, and their invaluable communicative qualities are undeniable. Perhaps because they are also portable liminal spaces for transformation and interconnectedness, allowing us to connect with ourselves and our communities, human and beyond. Their nature, like the Villi Akka, is equally untamable and anti-oppressive; the greatest strength of myths is that they are open-source.