Tuning in with the World - Knowing with Places
Minna Suoniemi & Marja Rastas
(this is an extra image, it can be left out if needed >) suoniemi_process_chemigram_2020.jpg
Caption: Minna Suoniemi: Exposures of the middle-aged body, (chemigram in progress), 2019
Alt text: two flies on a wooden table, analogue photographic paper in sunlight with a gel-like substance
Tuning in
You sit there, staring at these words and letters.
Your feet feel the floor beneath the table, your body settles into the shape of a chair, your back stiffens, perhaps.
Your breath flows in and out without an effort.
Suggestion: take a deep breath, in. As you let the air flow out, close your eyes for a moment. Then open.
We write this essay in a dialogue based on our pedagogical practice at Aalto University, Department of Art and media. During the past ten years we have come to know each other not only as colleagues in higher art education but also as friends with mutual interests in transformative pedagogies and feminist and new materialist approaches to artistic and pedagogical practice. In this essay we approach our artistic practices as the soil of teaching, intertwined in our thinking and shared discussions. The process of co-writing creates a shared place for us to re-think and find new understandings of our artistic-pedagogical practices.
As artists and art educators, we are interested in what happens between the work and those experiencing it. What the work of art "does" is not permanent to the work but recreated with each encounter with the piece. The material that the artist works with - matter, time, space, places, relations with other beings; ideas, theories, stories, histories; experiences, emotions, sensations - forms a perception of the world that seeks encounters with others. What makes these encounters meaningful, is a kind of resistance: each piece - regardless of if it seemingly relates to some other existing pieces - resists the already-known and creates its own place in the world. The what and how and why of artistic practice takes place in the in-between. In this essay, we look at this place from the point of view of artistic practice, knowing and learning. As Hickey-Moody and Page (2015), we see both pedagogical and artistic practice as “modes of thought already in the act” that invite us “to think anew, through remaking the world materially and relationally” (p. 1). Here, we look into our artistic and pedagogical practices through the act of tuning in with the world - as embodied ways of knowing and being.
In our essay Paikan pedagogiikka - paikka opettajana (Pedagogy of Place - Place as Teacher; Rastas & Suoniemi, 2025, in press) we were looking at our joint course Contemporary art education and asking, how pedagogical situations are reformulated when we think of places as active artistic and pedagogical agents. How do our human roles as art educators take shape when places are seen as active participants in the artistic process or as an actor similar to a teacher? Here, we shift the focus towards artistic practice as an inseparable agent within the pedagogy of place. We take a closer look into our artistic practices, and how places have guided the processes. The chosen artistic projects form two layers in this “text-place” - one layer consists of process images and images of artistic work, and another of notes and excerpts from our personal working process journals. The projects included are Butterfly News (ongoing from 2021) of Marja Rastas and Dense Water, O and Doppelgänger (work in process) of Minna Suoniemi.
So, what are we talking about when we talk about places? Place - topos - is 'omnipresent': human experiences are always attached to places. (see Malone 2017). According to Doreen Massey (2003), our entire living environment is constructed by places as specific concentrations of spatial and social relations - simultaneously as social, spatial, material and temporal events. The layers of places conceal their earlier temporalities and the stories told about them. As educational scholar Karen Malone (2016) notes, “seemingly an ordered and simple concept, place is also simultaneously complex and contested” (p.5). In this essay, our aim is not to search for definitions of “place”, but to ask what places do in artistic and pedagogical practice. How does the teaching situation take shape when air, water, earth, rock, sand, other-than-human beings, wasteland and its structures, the smells and odours of the environment, dust or mould in old buildings are seen as actors in the art pedagogical situation alongside humans?
Our questions reflect a posthumanist - new materialist approach that criticises the idea of learning and teaching as an exclusively human, linear process. The current phenomena related to globalisation and climate change have highlighted the need for new kinds of conceptualizations of place that take into account the global flows of people, other beings, things and matter and approach places from a broader than anthropocentric perspective. (Malone 2016; Hyvärinen 2014; Ylirisku 2021.) Western thinking traditions are penetrated by dualisms like human/nonhuman, nature/culture, subject/object, knowing/sensing. Posthumanist critiques of education challenge the prevailing narrow conceptions of knowledge and knowing, and of the knowing subject as a rational, self-directed and autonomous agent (see e.g. Lenz-Taguchi 2011; Perheentupa & Salmenniemi & Porkola 2023; Springgay & Truman 2016; Ylirisku 2021; Neimanis 2016)
Knowing with Places
“Bodies and things are not as separate as we were once taught, and their interrelationship is vital to how we come to know ourselves as human and interact with our environments”, Hickey-Moody and Page write (2015, p. 5). Our perception of pedagogy is based on understanding of the human body as porous and multi-directional, capable of receiving, staying with, and acting on a wide range of impulses from within and outside the body. In artistic practice and teaching knowledge is embodied and non-discursive - it is based on bodily acts and activities. When processes and events take precedence over outcomes, what is relevant to artistic thinking is not immediately articulated in words. Embodied knowledge remains as imperceptible movements in the participants' bodies and settles in new contexts of meaning.
1_rastas_luonnos_butterfly_news_perhosuutisia_2021.jpg (these two images could be next to each other, if fitting)
Caption: Marja Rastas: Butterfly News, 2021, found process material
Alt text: a dead Small Tortoiseshell and torn piece of nettle leaf
2_rastas_prosessi_perhosuutisia_butterfly_news_2021.jpg
Caption: Marja Rastas: Butterfly News, 2021, dyeing silk with nettle leaves
Alt text: nettle leaves rolled in moist silk fabric
Posthumanist feminist theories see knowledge and knowing as partial, ever-changing, socially and materially situated. Knowledge is produced in being and doing, in relation to other agents and circumstances, and is attached to affects, emotions, senses and experiences. (Haraway 1988; Barad 2019/2003; Koistinen & Savinotko 2021.) According to Karen Barad (2019/2003), the practices of knowing and being are not separable but rather mutually consequential. As Barad summarises, “we do not obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world.”
In artistic practice, the place and its materials form entanglements as active agents in thinking and working processes. Working together with places means to be exposed to their otherness and the physical and embodied resistances they offer. (cf. Tuovinen & Mäkikoskela 2020, p. 46.) Ylirisku (2022) writes of dense material learning and knowing whose practices stray beyond clear and definable knowledge and are present in both artistic practices and artistic and art-based research. To allow new thinking and knowing to emerge, it is important to keep the processes undefined and open-ended. (p. 167.) Ingold (2010) suggests ‘to follow the materials’ - referring to what Deleuze & Guattari (2004) call a ‘matter-flow’ - insisting that whenever we encounter matter, it is matter in flux. (p. 8). Similarly, we understand pedagogy as an entanglement of materials, place and bodies producing knowledge together within a teaching situation. Our role as human teachers is to tune in with the place and its participants, human and non-human, and ‘to follow the materials’.
Now, take a swim with me
You glide in a black, freezing stream, swimming forward but drifting backwards with the current. The water moves in eddies, and you scoop against it with your hands. Together, you form circular paths of motion. Through the water your skin looks rusty red, and you think of the fluids, salt water and blood flowing inside your body. Your body is driven by the living substances (bacteria, cells, salt water) flowing inside it.
In the flow, your body adapts to the temperature the skin cools down with the ice-cold water, and it arouses endorphins and pleasure. The water surrounds your skin and the cold drains through the skin. Your heart beats fast at first and then slows down to adapt. You desire to stay in the water longer – your watery body longs to be in the water.
3_suoniemi_O_still_2022.jpg
Caption: Minna Suoniemi, still image of O, digital pinhole video, 2022
Alt text: a woman swimming in black water, through a pinhole camera, snowy forest in the background
Working with places subtly stretches the boundaries of thinking, knowing, doing, and the boundaries of social being (cf. Elfving, 2021). Places have the ability to reorganise the ways bodies relate to each other and to the existing material and social structures. In the absence of pre-established hierarchies and predetermined patterns of action, places can invite bodies into new ways of grouping, approaching, distancing, emerging and hiding. Community is not given but is shaped by what becomes. It suggests the possibilities of joining, of being social in one's own terms or withdrawing.
In Evo Forest, a temporary community is created by the place and the people there, as well as by other species. The awakening ants become part of our human community, as do the river flowing beside us in the freezing cold, the tree trunks in the snowy forest, carved by beavers, the birds whose sounds we hear. Three days stretch the time of the place. Artistic processes are interwoven with the place and its activities, cooking as a shared gesture of care, bathing in the sauna and working side by side.
Artistic work and pedagogy take place in direct interaction with the place. A student works with ants still awakening from their dormant state, another runs around the lake as an artistic method, one student photographs birds without disturbing them and finds solace in their existence.
I swim in the icy stream, again and again, and film swimming upstream with a digital pinhole camera. The circumstance creates the beginning of a new video work that could not be created as such anywhere else. Teaching becomes a parallel working together with the place, the current, the light, the camera and a student working next to me with the materials they collected on site.
4_suoniemi_luonnos_doppelgänger_varjosielu_2024.jpg
Caption, Minna Suoniemi: Doppelgänger / Varjosielu (working title), still image of a digital pinhole video, 2024
Alt text: double pinhole of a figure crawling in shallow blue water
In the narrative above, the place invites participants into a shared process of artistic work, exploration and thinking. The pedagogy of place emphasises coming together and participation - forging bonds and creating community through shared artistic activity. In socially engaged art, the communities involved are understood as permanent and local or, on the other hand, temporary groups of people gathered for each project (Kantonen & Karttunen, 2021). The open community in pedagogy of place consists of several nested, transient communities open to the randomly encountered human and non-human. They emerge as place-situations and stay in the state of becoming. As Elfving (2021) writes, participation means sensitivity to the ecosystem as an ethical stance and a recognition of the limitations of one's own perspectives (p. 265).
You have the ability to weave unique, strong, shining fibre from your tiny body. There are other moths doing the same, but you seem to be special.
Your co-existence with us humans, called sericulture, began in China thousands of years ago. Nowadays, it’s your only existence. You exist only for human needs.
You entered Europe and us Europeans fell in love with your silk. It was soon everywhere in the hands of those who were able to afford it, and it still is.
In my wardrobe, too.
Due to a long period of domestication, your wings are too small and weak for flying. Easy for us humans to keep you in order.
As a larva, you are called silkworm, kept in highly controlled circumstances and fed with White mulberry leaves several times a day. You grow bigger and bigger, and finally weave a fibre cocoon around your body, to keep the pupa safe. We humans don’t want you to break out of the cocoon by cutting the fibre into parts. We want efficient processes and perfect silk fabrics. That’s why most of you are boiled dead inside the cocoon before completing the metamorphosis. A few of you are chosen to produce the next generation.
We humans want straight lines.
I have never encountered you face to face, but I have some questions for you. Do you have a face? Are you sentient? Does it matter? What should I think of your life and death and all of this? Should I, as some fellow humans, have you as a pet, to learn more about you, with you?
entwisting, entangling paths of knowledge and thought
entangling lines in time and space
lines of writing, letters running like tiny black insects
text, textile, texture
Community could also be seen as a starting point for the construction of knowledge. As Perheentupa et al. (2023, p. 22) summarise, “a community of people and matter can collectively know a lot". Indeed, community can be seen as a connection to other-than-human rhythms and temporalities: rhythms of places, rock, soil, water, plants, weather, and even human-made artefacts and structures. Pedagogy of place means tuning in our bodily rhythms to each other and the materialities of places. Sensitivity to the multiplicity of co-existence can lead to an ethical and ecological reflection and reorientation of one's own and others' actions. Arlander & Elo (2017) highlight Isabelle Stengers' (2005) concept of "thinking through the environment" as the ethical basis for site-specific artistic practice and research. When general principles cannot be found to support artistic solutions, one must take time, open one's imagination and be as observant, attentive, and discerning as one can. (pp. 10-11.) Becoming sensitive to the specificity of places is becoming responsive to the ways of artistic activities they suggest. Artistic thinking emerges in the rhythms of apparent passivity and active bodily exploration.
Thus, I had two butterfly species, a wild one and a domesticated one, living in opposite parts of the globe, in opposite conditions. They both connected to specific fibres: Nettle feeding Small tortoiseshell larvae and Bombyx Mori larvae extracting silk fibre from their bodies. There was also a thread between deaths of the two, caused by human activities: A slow death of Small Tortoiseshell as a species, caused by the degradation of their habitats, and sudden destruction of Bombyx Mori pupae, as a result of the sericulture process. The line between them emerged for me as real as the scientific way of classifying the two beings to the same entomological category “Lepidoptera”.
Altogether, what did I have? There was a web of lines, threads, fibres, two butterflies, their lives and deaths, and a human, entangled with this meshwork. The sudden “epiphanic moment” of seeing the connectedness was fundamental to the process. It suggested something that was not obvious yet but would become visible - like imagining something that suddenly turns out to be real. From this messy intersection I would proceed somewhere, not knowing how and where. My conclusion was combining silk and nettle, in one way or another, as substitutes of the beings themselves.
5_rastas_accessories for butterfly encounter_2021.jpg
Caption: Marja Rastas: Accessories for Butterfly Encounters, human-scale clothing made of nettle dyed silk, 2021
Alt text: a hooded overall made of nettle dyed silk
Places and Times
In the context of artistic practice and art education, both the teacher and the student have to embrace side-tracks, repetition without a clear goal, chance and the unexpected as part of the process. Pedagogy of place distances itself from a linear, forward-looking concept of time. Future is not something assumed to be given, but something that can be imagined together. Instead of defining learning by assumed individual future skills, pedagogy should be about richer and more diverse understanding of the present (Lenz-Taguchi 2011; Ylirisku 2021, p. 201).
It began with my grandmother, born in 1924. This woman, unfitting to her own time and rural community, unintentionally broke her family, and herself. Something of her exists in me.
The material is filmed with an old super 8 camera from 1972, the same year I was born. Battery acid has leaked in it, there are short circuits, the film slows down or stops rolling. The film is also expired and faded. We are both ageing.
In spring 2021 we spent three weeks in isolation, and these rooms became a cage for us two, the world inside the windows. I began documenting us imprisoned behind these walls with a pinhole camera made of an iPhone box. I developed the negatives in our bathroom with coffee, vitamin-c and baking soda, and fixed them with dense salt water.
When my son had the virus, I rinsed his nasal passage with salt water. I thought of the salty water inside our bodies, his, mine, my mother’s and grandmother’s. In the darkroom the dense salt water crystallised in two days as the water evaporated. Inside us the water flows. What if something of my grandmother still flows in me.
6_suoniemi_with_sankyo_from1972_2021.jpg
Caption: Minna Suoniemi: With Sankyo from 1972, pinhole photograph developed with caffenol and fixed with dense salt water, from the exhibition Dense Water, 2021
Alt text: a blurry figure holding an old super8 camera in front of her, a black and white pinhole photograph.
For Springgay & Truman (2016) “politics of slowness" means creating spaces for hesitation and resistance, which in turn produce new ways of being in relation. Like many posthuman scholars, they call for dismantling the subject-object-oppositionalism of learning and ask what we might learn with the world, rather than trying to learn about the world. (p. 5.)
The summer of 2021 was exceptionally warm and dry. We were delighted by the swarms of butterflies, showing themselves around the cottage yard and nearby. On sunny afternoons, the curious, colourful insects joined our outdoor meals, attracted by the odours of our bodies and our food. They landed down around us, and we saw them folding their wings over their hairy bodies. They walked on our skin, exploring us with their antennae and proboscis, and allowed us to observe them closely. Staying still, we were able to sense the touch of their six tiny limbs moving tenderly on our arms, and their spiral-like proboscis stretching out for tasting our sweaty skins.
Small tortoiseshell was the most common of our non-human companions. My enjoyment of their presencewas mixed with sorrow and anxiety, being aware of the human impact on their life conditions.
Utopias of obscure places
The word utopia comes from the Greek word u-topos - a place that does not exist. Haapalainen (2018) examines participatory practices in contemporary art as utopias of everyday life. According to her, utopias are built on the formless loss and longing experienced in the present, and the simultaneous hope of reaching that loss - a change "towards something more complete" (p. 43). Our pedagogical utopia of place is about practising mutual responsibility and equal agency - it is committed to the view that no one thinks, knows, or learns alone. In this place, it’s not essential to focus on individual performances, but rather on what each can bring to the mutual situation.
We are writing at a time that anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) describes as "the end of global progress's easy summer". Tsing asks how we can maintain a sense of hope and a faith in life in this strange new world, characterised by a pervasive mood of instability and precariousness. (2015, pp. 2-5.) In the students' artistic work, one can often recognise the states of mind that emerge from the experience of instability that Tsing describes. Underlying the artistic practices of pedagogy of place, we recognise the desire to create spaces for sharing and unpacking these emotions. We share Tsing's idea of imagination and curiosity as coping strategies that can help us to collectively find new paths and to discover unpredictable encounters and new ways of living.
In this essay we propose that working with places - when it is based on ethical attentiveness to others - can open radically new ways of knowing and being together in the world. As Haapalainen (2018) suggests, art should not represent or communicate what is already known or what others should know, but rather operate in the midst of everything, sharing and generating knowledge. Art should be about receiving and sharing that puncture naturalised logics with alternative models of acting and knowing. (p. 157.) Indeed, pedagogy of place calls for attentiveness, imagination and curiosity as alternative ways of knowing. As university teachers we are highly aware of the diverse needs of our students and our responsibility to create and maintain learning situations that are felt safe and accessible. We want to believe that pedagogy of place has potential to interrogate the predetermined relationalities and identities and in doing so, to create spaces that are not only safe and accessible, but also brave, curious, joyous, and attentive to our shared world.
Pedagogy of place is in dialogue with many others attracted to places of art, teaching and learning and to embodied connectedness with materiality. Its ground is the diverse places that have welcomed us as teachers and artists. It suggests places and their materiality as co-teachers, regardless of what the place: studio, gallery, museum, classroom, island, meadow, wasteland, water, body – or this text as a place.
Imagine icy water against your skin, salty blood rushing in your veins. Inside the body boiling steam, evil witch leaking.
Dear dear cold water, come,
come on the skin, lay me down, stroke me,
silly,
sigh,
sigh,
sigh under the skin,
under the skin body, muscle body, cartilage body, bone body, water body
7_suoniemi_process_image_2024.jpg
Caption: Minna Suoniemi: process image, 2024
Alt text: person underwater, mouth open, eyes covered by water bubbles
LITERATURE (Bibliography)
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Barad Karen, ‘Posthumanistinen performatiivisuus: Kohti ymmärrystä siitä, miten materia merkityksellistyy’. Translated by A. Arlander. In Tero Nauha, Annette Arlander, Hanna Järvinen & Pilvi Porkola (eds.), Performanssifilosofiaa: esitysten, esiintymisten ja performanssien filosofiasta performanssiajatteluun. Helsinki: University of the Arts, Theatre Academy, 2019. https://nivel.teak.fi/performanssifilosofiaa/
Elfving Taru, ‘Paikantuneiden käytänteiden ekologiaa. Tahmaista osallisuutta monilajisissa yhteisöissä Seilin saarella’, in Lea Kantonen & Sari Karttunen (eds.), Yhteisötaiteen etiikka: tilaa toiselle, arvoa arvaamattomalle, Helsinki: Academy of Fine Arts, 2021.
Haapalainen Riikka, Utopioiden arkipäivää. Osallistumisen ja muutoksen paikkoja nykytaiteessa 1980-2011, Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2018.
Haraway Donna, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies 14(3), 1988, pp. 575–599, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
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Ingold Tim, ‘Bringing Things to Life: Creating Entanglements in a World of Materials’, ESRC National Centre for Research Methods, NCRM Working Paper Series. 5/2010
Kantonen Lea & Karttunen Sari, ’Johdanto’, in Lea Kantonen & Sari Karttunen (eds).Yhteisötaiteen etiikka: tilaa toiselle, arvoa arvaamattomalle. Helsinki: Academy of Fine Arts, 2021.
Koistinen Aino-Kaisa & Savinotko Pieta, ‘Tuottava hämmennys ympäristökriisien ajan utooppisena käytäntönä’, in Aino-Maija Elonheimo, Sari Miettinen, Hanna Ojala & Tuija Saresma (eds.), Intersektionaalinen feministinen pedagogiikka, Tampere: Vastapaino, 2022.
Lenz-Taguchi Hillevi, ‘Investigating learning, participation and becoming in early Childhood Practices with a Relational Materialist Approach’, Global Studies of Childhood 1/2011, pp. 36-50.
Malone Karen, ‘Place’, in M.A. Peters (ed.) Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory, Singapore: Springer Science+Business Media, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-588-4_440
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Neimanis Astrida, Water and Knowledge. In Christian, D. & Wong, R. (eds.) Downstream: Reimagining Water. XXX: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017, pp.xx
Perheentupa Inna, Salmenniemi Suvi & Porkola Pilvi, ‘“Mikä tahansa on mahdollista tässä talossa”: Arkipäivän utopioiden materiaaliset järjestykset’, Tiede & edistys 48(3/, 2023, pp. 9-27.
Porkola Pilvi, Ylöstalo Hanna & Salmenniemi Suvi, ‘Feministiset utopiat ja kuvittelun pedagogiikka’, In Aino-Maija Elonheimo, Sari Miettinen, Hanna Ojala & Tuija Saresma (eds.), Intersektionaalinen feministinen pedagogiikka, Tampere: Vastapaino, 2022, pp. 229-237.
Springgay Stephanie & Truman Sarah, ‘Stone Walks: inhuman animacies and queer archives of feeling’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2016. ISSN: 0159-6306 (Print) 1469-3739 (Online)
https://walkinglab.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Stone-Walks-inhuman-animacies-and-queer-archives-of-feeling.pdf https://walkinglab.org/
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Ylirisku Henrika, ‘Tiheikön kanssa: Yhteisen ajattelun tunnustelua’, Kasvatus & Aika, 16(3), 2022, pp. 163–171.https://doi.org/10.33350/ka.111743
Biographies:
Minna Suoniemi (she/her, b. 1972) is a Helsinki-based artist and University Lecturer at Aalto University, Department of Art and Media. Her artistic practice draws from embodied experience and feminist knowledge production, and she has worked on themes such as control, body, class and family. Her latest projects examine the materiality of the ageing body and transgenerational bodily experience of being in-excess and excessiveness. Her academic interests include transformative, arts-based pedagogical practices, questions of class in arts and education, embodied and feminist approaches towards knowing and researching. She enjoys collective writing processes and her co-written texts have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Research in Art and Education and Origins - Finnish Studies in Art Education.
Her work has been exhibited internationally in Europe, United States, South America and Asia and her work is represented in Finnish collections including EMMA Espoo Modern Art Museum, Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, and the Finnish State Art Collection. She has been nominated for trustee positions i.e. The Finnish Arts Promotion Center and has worked as an artist, curator, and pedagogue with various Institutions.
(Marja’s bio not final!)
Marja Rastas works as a Lecturer of Art education in Aalto University, Department of Art. Her major academic interests include transformative, arts-based pedagogical practices, embodied knowledge building strategies and issues of visual arts curriculum in the context of contemporary art. Her background as art educator is in non-formal adult education. She has strong networks in Finnish field of art education and has had several positions of trust in the national field of teacher education and curriculum development initiatives.
