Usva, as we evaporate

 for mineral beings

Usva, as we evaporate is a performance project with and for mineral beings: the bedrock, rocks, cliffs, mountains and caves. We participate in becomings and movements with the mineral bodies, seeing them as emotional and affective beings, looking for ways to orient the body towards other-than-human materialities, temporalities, scales and emotional intimacies. The project unfolds into site-specific performances in stony places and landscapes.

The work deals with the sensations and affect of rugged and stark landscapes and rock as a vibrant matter (Benett 2011). We layer geological knowledge, new materialist ethnography, and practices of fiction and imagining. We look at the border of living and non-living through dwelling in the rocky landscapes, in the slowness and timefullness of geological rythms. 

Mineral beings are often casted in the role of a static background. They are not static, just slow and segmented. In our work we attune to the other-time-scale becomings of the mineral bodies. We look at the frictions and intra-actions (Barad 2007) between human and stone, two porous materials. We include emotional reflections ‘solastagia’, eco crisis-driven grief, as well as other affects, emotions and feelings of awe.

The performances stemming from the project are curated and choreographed assemblages of scores we have collected through our collective work with bedrock, mountais and stones. In the performances, we invite the audience to follow us to the imaginary, yet very real accounts of the movement and becomings of the mineral beings. We slowly transform into mountains and rocks and then back to a human form. We ask the rocks if they remembers us from houndreds of thousands of years ago and propose and perform scores for thinking and experiencing the place in a different way and through different temporalities. We speculate ourselves as humans being no more than mere flickering ghosts for the other-timely geological masses. We evaporate away, they stay for longer.

Alongside the performance oriented work, a collection of scores is being collected to be later published and shared.

Usva, as we evaporate is a collective multi-sensorial sensitization happening in a slow rythm, imitating and attuning into the geological deep time.

^{May 2024: BioArts Sociaty residency in Kilpisjärvi}

_{Sept 2022: Research demo, Old mine residency Outokumpu}