Introduction
Instructions on how to walk with this exposition
This exposition is meant to be both serious and playful. It is made up of a written script, three audiotracks and three illustrations. You can examine all of them, or only some. They are iterations, different and yet the same. The idea behind such diversity of material is to propose that form is not insignificant or trivial. If you want to engage with only one thing, my proposal is that you listen to Track two.
If you decide to listen to some or all of the audiotracks, I recommend you go walk outside while listening to them. You can try to walk and breathe in the same rhythm. The order of the tracks does not matter.
The first track, Walking Postscript, was recorded on May 4th, 2020. It is a response to five peer reviews, and it explains some of the issues that I had not been clear about previously. I recorded the track between 9am and 3pm, while walking, or rather stumbling, in a forest in South Finland. It contains a speech, and after that 10 minutes of walking sounds. It is not essential material, but if you like to hear my thoughts on artistic research, you can find them here. This track is also an instance of walking autoethnography, in which the practice of walking, reading and writing are intertwined.
The second track, How I Learned to Love, is a mix of different recordings. It contains sounds from a march with Finnish cadets in September 2018 and sounds from the military base of Santahamina in Helsinki recorded in October 2018. The speech in this track was recorded based on a lecture performance I gave at the Carpa 6 Conference in 2019. At the end of this track, you can hear us marching at the conference. This track was also played at the EISA 2019 Conference in Sofia. The purpose of this audio is to create an instance of spoken autoethnography which plays with vocal expression and the power of affect in storytelling. This track is a condensed version of the written part of this exposition.
The third track, Sounds from Santahamina, is the same as number two without the spoken word and the marching sounds from the Carpa 6 Conference. It is focussed on sounding knowledge without words or explanations. It consists of sounds of walking, mundane sounds from the military base, and sounds from the cadets’ ‘warrior education’ class. It includes some spoken sentences in Finnish from the march with the cadets. The track is sound art as well as documentation of human and other-than-human sounds in a militarised world.
The illustrations you will find in this exposition have been made by Julia Järvelä based on photographs taken by me at Santahamina (Cadets in the sea) and at the march (Cadets by the grave and Cadets from behind).
