ON THE BORDER (2022–2023)

Narva — Kreenholm Industrial Complex
NART Gallery (Joala 18)
Kogo Gallery, Tartu
Porvoo Art Factory
World Cities Culture Summit, Helsinki Opera

Part I of the Border Series (2022–2025)

On the Border was developed in Narva in spring 2022.

I arrived knowing nothing about the city. The war in Ukraine had begun weeks earlier. In the residency house lived Ukrainian refugees, Russian refugees, Russian-speaking Narvans whose passports were marked alien, and artists. I spent days driving people from the Polish-Ukrainian border toward Germany. It felt impossible to remain abstract.

Narva’s baroque city was bombed to rubble in the Second World War. A new population was brought in from across Russia. Near the factory stands a tank built from the stones of demolished Estonian homes. History is not distant there. It is layered into the ground.

In this condition a question emerged that was not political but bodily.

What happens to a human being when geopolitics passes through them.
What remains.

The Border Series began at a geopolitical edge. Developed between Estonia and Finland, the work examined how political structures register themselves in human perception. Rather than addressing borders as abstract lines, the installation approached them as lived conditions, pressures that pass through language, memory and the nervous system.

On the Border does not argue about territory. It listens for what remains in the body after geopolitics has passed through it.

THE WORK

Forty singers, Estonian, Estonian Russian and Finnish, were recorded individually. Breath, speech and sung fragments are distributed across a spatial field of loudspeakers.

Together with Jussi Mattila we composed a new version of Maamme, the national anthem shared by Finland and Estonia, originally a German drinking song. The melody remains recognisable but fractured. Distributed across forty loudspeakers inside the Kreenholm factory, no listener could identify who was singing what.

Fragments of the anthem appear only briefly before dissolving into texture.

Identity is not declared. It becomes audible as proximity.

After singing, each participant entered the studio alone. White background. Light. Camera. I asked them to find their favourite song on Spotify and play it. Then I left the room.

I did not know exactly what I was looking for. I wanted to lift these people into visibility beyond the shame of being labelled a Russian-speaking Narvan, beyond the noise of the moment.

One mother began to cry. She was not crying for me. She was crying alone, for her own song.

The work does not explain this. It holds it.

THE FIELD

The installation unfolds as a field rather than a narrative.

Visitors move between nearly forty speakers. Individual voices can be approached closely or experienced as a dispersed collective body.

The work does not stage opposition. It creates a condition in which co-existence becomes perceptible.

VIDEO DOCUMENTATION

Kreenholm Industrial Complex — 40-Channel Installation (2022)

Faces — Narva, Estonia, Finland

Movement — Industrial Hall, Kreenholm, Narva

NART Gallery (Joala 18) — Solo Exhibition Installation

ARCHITECTURE

At Joala 18, the installation occupied a former industrial building facing the Russian border.

Sound reorganized the body in space. Clusters of melody dispersed into breath and resonance.

The work does not resolve identity. It stabilizes attention long enough for layered belonging to become tangible.

CONTEXT

The work was developed during a three-month residency at NART in spring 2022 and later presented at Kreenholm, NART Gallery, Kogo Gallery in Tartu, Porvoo Art Factory and World Cities Culture Summit at Helsinki Opera.

The residency coincided with the early months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

On the Border does not offer reconciliation. It offers shared duration.

CREDITS

Sound Artist and Convener: Jaakko Autio
Music Composer: Jussi Mattila (after Fredrik Pacius, 1847)
Light Design: Pasi Pehkonen

Choirs:
Narva Music School Girls Choir
Narva Estonian Language House Tandem Choir
Narva Museum Folk Ensemble Suprjadki
Nomad Vocals Choir

Producers: Johanna Rannula, Aleksei Ivanov

Supported by SKR, TAIKE and Titanik Gallery