ANTI Contemporary Art Festival 2016: Winter

This curatorial practice research asks how performance makers and academics are exploring the personal, social and ecological concerns that connect individuals and communities to shared narratives and experiences of the weather with specific focus on winter. Produced by ANTI Contemporary Art Festival (Kuopio, Finland) in partnership with Tahko Wilderness Centre (Kuopio), the research presented four publicly sited outdoor performance works and one international seminar; the outdoor nature of the performance programme meant audience and performance negotiated and participated in the sub-zero conditions of North Eastern Finland’s February. In bringing together artists working directly with the creative affordances/limitations cold weather offers their specific set of performance-based enquiries with academics working in the related fields of performance studies, meteorological and atmospheric research, film and anthropological studies (Sámi culture) the international programme offered artists, public audiences and academics a participatory, discursive, framework to physically and cognitively inhabit the cultural resonances and creative potentials encoded in our relationship to winter. The performance programme presented: Terje Isungset (NO), Ice Music; Tomi Paasonen (FI), World Cup Bling Troopers; Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey (AU), Shriek: Other Spaces (FI), Winter Wandering. An international seminar, Weather and the Imagination (a homage to Lucian Boia’s book of the same name) asked to what extent is the space of our collective and individual cultural identity shaped by the climate we inhabit, visit or watch from afar, with contributions from Professor Carl Lavery (UK, Professor of Theatre and Performance, University of Glasgow), Dr. Eimear Dunne (IE/FI, Senior Research Scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Atmospheric Research Centre of Eastern Finland), Dr. Reetta Karjalainen (FI, specialist in Sámi and indigenous people’s film practices) and artist/researcher Tuija Kokkonen (FI, practice-based research on the relationship between performance and the non-human agencies of animals, plants and weather).

• https://antifestival.com/en/
• http://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/4084/
• http://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/4087
• http://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/4088