RE-BIRTH

Jaakko Autio
MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre
1–23 November 2025
40-channel sound and video installation

A shared breathing session becomes a space you can move through. A 73-minute recording is arranged across the room in eleven phases, with intensity near the centre and rest at the edges. These phases coexist: visitors can approach a single breath, lie beneath the sounding bowls, or sit beside the quiet sounds of the session’s end.

At the centre, Hilla Väyrynen’s recitation and sixteen channels of bowl resonances hold a steady musical presence among the breaths. Three headphone stations offer spoken introductions and the poem in Finnish or English. A generative video responds to sound in the room.

You are welcome to rest with the work.

Slow tour of the room, 1 min. The camera moves from the whole space to a single breath speaker in front of NIMITTA.

Moving through the recording

Each participant in the breathing session was recorded with a separate microphone. Listening afterwards, I found moments when two people’s breaths accelerated, settled or changed together. I preserved some of these relationships in shared loops and placed their speakers beside one another.

Different phases of the recording occupied different parts of the gallery. Moving through the room meant moving between moments of the original session. Independent loops continually changed the encounters between sounds, while the overall character of the room remained steady.

Near the entrance, a sofa offered somewhere to stay at the edge of the activity. A nearby speaker sounded only about once every two minutes: small, contented vocalisations recorded as participants rested under blankets after the session. Its sounds belonged to the release at the end of the process.

The most intense breathing occupied the area around the central bowls. Rest was already available at the edges, without having to pass through that intensity.

RE-BIRTH at MUU Helsinki: white breath speakers on stands and plinths around the room, a column of suspended speakers in front of a round purple projection at the centre.

A voice at the centre

Hilla’s voice came from a single speaker at the highest point of the central cluster. She recited Listen, in clarity, to silence, a text we wrote together, in Shindoku. Sixteen channels of sounding bowls formed a resonant column beneath and around the voice. Visitors could lie underneath it.

I had prepared music before entering the gallery, but it did not fit the room. During installation, I composed a new bowl structure around Hilla’s recorded recitation. Her steady voice became the point that held the surrounding intensity for me.

Water remembers the vessel’s shape.
And then, it continues onward.

Viola and piano also sounded in the installation. The headphone pieces shared the room’s harmonic material, maintaining a musical connection as the surrounding breaths receded and the spoken voice came close. The narration introduced the recording, explained the recitation’s origin and made the poem’s words accessible.

Shindoku: a spoken introduction to the recitation, on breath, form and flow, over images of NIMITTA, the speaker column and the room.

Listening to Silence: the full recitation with bowls and strings, set to NIMITTA as it gathers, unravels and returns to a sphere.

Close view of bare loudspeaker drivers hanging on cables at different heights, their shadows cast on the concrete floor.

NIMITTA

The generative image was projected onto a black wall, giving its luminous form the appearance of floating in space. A small microphone embedded in the wall connected it to the room’s sound. Low frequencies gathered the image back into a sphere; a visitor blowing directly into the microphone could produce a much larger transformation.

People lying on the floor of RE-BIRTH beneath suspended speakers, with the generative image NIMITTA spreading across the dark wall behind them.

At the opening, a child who was initially apprehensive about the room joined me in listening to the quiet speaker near the edge. I described it as shy: it only made a little sound every couple of minutes. She relaxed, began exploring and eventually discovered the microphone at the projection wall. We played together, her breath making the image expand.

NIMITTA, short excerpt. The image gathers, spreads and dissolves with the sound of the room.

Opening rehearsal (Voutilainen × Autio), 1 min. A performer lies on the floor beneath the speaker column while the image moves with the sound and finally gathers into a sphere.

Making the recording

The breathing session took place in a rented yoga studio in Turku with seven participants. I facilitated it, with Hilla recording and providing support.

The participants’ wellbeing set the limits of the recording. If continuing meant pushing through a frightening boundary, the choice was to stop or ease back. Much of the session unfolded with little guidance. The relationships that emerged between the recorded breaths became the starting point for the spatial composition.

Jaakko Autio, Hilla Väyrynen, Fredriikka Voutilainen and Noora Kilponen standing arm in arm in front of the RE-BIRTH wall text at MUU Helsinki. — Jaakko Autio with Hilla Väyrynen (in red), dancer Fredriikka Voutilainen and Noora Kilponen, in front of the exhibition wall text, MUU Helsinki, November 2025.

Installation layout

RE-BIRTH floor plan seen from above: a truss with a suspended speaker column at the centre, surrounded by a ring of breath speakers on stands.

View into the RE-BIRTH room: a person stands beneath the suspended column of speakers, surrounded by a ring of speakers on stands and headphone stations at the edges.

The MUU installation combined eighteen breath speakers, sixteen bowl channels, instrumental sound, a subwoofer and three headphone stations. Two headphone stations offered Finnish narration and one offered English.