Jaana Laakkonen

I write here to tell you, there… If you are around Treignac – that is in Corréze, that is in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, that is in France – between 27/6/2020 and 30/8/2020, you are warmly welcome to visit a lovely place on Earth that is called Treignac Projet. I have an exhibition t/here for the third time, more or less. We call it ouoùouille.

The exhibition is on the first floor (which I am used to thinking of as being the second). It is in a valley, where also a river finds its route. It is on a plateau, or rather “a shallow dome » pushed up by magma pressure that became a laccolith some time ago, so to speak. I go inside an oversized sweatshirt and start mounting the exhibition, but end up outside of it as the relation of this place and “the nearly perfect sphere of hot plasma” up there, got hotter – at least so I felt.

Three yellow-black hoverflies make something on my feet – kind of without permission. I do not know how and what the feet mean-matter for them. For some reason, I immediately come to think that my feet might stink (or something else that is not so appreciated by human people), and that might be why the tiny but not the tiniest persons happen to be interested. I smell my feet and judge them fresh. There is something in and on my feet that I do not understand. Neither do I compass where they think they are. I put the feet back down on the ground and the flies disappear. Maybe they like to stay higher up in the air.

There is an option to try to find out: to listen, to speak with, to read, to move along, to be in company of and to live-with those who know – in one way or another. That is risky, but is there any other way to become more tender,…or strict or.. well, what is needed for…

A long thick hair clutched by jute. An emptyish mug sinks into a mole hole. Water approaches an office that is a studio. A loud frog. Some spiders and webs – not sure if the amount is equal. The cotton reminds me of Frankenthaler and makes me feel awkward and wanting to be elsewhere. I remain to think the possible grounds for that. We figure some.

I am still often holding Barad’s and Haraway’s, feminist posthumanists’ texts in my hands…carrying them, reading them, getting comfort and in troubles with them…sometimes I rest my head on them and take a nap. When I lift my legs back onto a concrete fence the hover flies come back, and so on. This continues in a place that has offered a wonderful location and allowed situatedness to be acknowledged – even embraced – in artistic practices and lives. Though my view on this is very subjective-objective.

If you come for a visit you will meet a steep up-and-downhill, some thin and thicker cotton, wax, cinder blocks, acrylic ink, polyester, brackets, layers, cuts, weights, pulls, industrial weaves, holders, stairs, printed and cut paper, sounds of flowing water… …partly depending on the categories you are used to, and (on your conception of) where you are. In ouoùouille I continue ‘my’ recent years’ work with paint and feminist posthumanism – seeking to care for not-alONEness, situatedness and un~~~~~stable grounds.

Jaana Laakkonen lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.

Project kindly supported by Kone Foundation and Frame Contemporary Art Finland