JAAKKO AUTIO

Contemplative Sound Art
Spatial Listening Architectures

BIO

Jaakko Autio is a Finnish sound and media artist working within the field of contemplative sound art. He builds spatial sound architectures that invite collective attention into clarity.

His work emerges from collaborative listening practices and from a sustained inquiry into how shared perception organizes itself within sound, space and community.

Autio’s immersive multi-channel environments begin from warmth: breath, proximity and shared presence in space. Rather than delivering messages, he composes the conditions under which perception can settle and reorganize. Meaning does not arrive through explanation. It emerges through duration, embodiment and relational awareness.

This work is not immediate. It depends on sustained attention, repetition and the ability to remain within unstable conditions without forcing resolution.

Beneath this experiential warmth lies a long-term investigation into the structure of lived experience. Autio explores how attention stabilizes, dissolves and re-forms within shared environments. Breath, resonance and spatialized sound function as experiential components rather than symbolic devices. Environmental rhythms — wind, water, resonance and collective presence — gradually become perceptible within these spaces.

The works are not devotional. They are research-based explorations of embodied perception and collective presence, where listening becomes a way of sensing how humans and environments co-organize experience.

Although the works often draw on silence, ritual and contemplative attention, they are not detached from social, historical or communal conditions. Autio’s projects have emerged from border regions, religious and vernacular traditions, care environments, archipelagic communities and situations of cultural displacement.

Autio’s installations have been presented in museums and festivals across Finland and internationally, reaching over 75,000 visitors in 2024. Recent highlights include OWLA (Oulu Art Museum, 56 singers, 2023), Harmony in Displacement (26 Ukrainian and Finnish performers, 2024), and the ON THE BORDER series (2022–2025), developed at the Estonian–Russian frontier.

In 2024–2025, Autio realized the extensive RE series, exploring return, resonance and embodied listening as modes of reorganizing attention. This cycle culminated in RE-BIRTH (MUU Gallery, Helsinki, 2025), a 40-channel installation combining breath choir, spatialized piano, tactile low-frequency sound, poetic headphone monologues and generative video.

His current multi-year INTER series expands this inquiry into relational, ecological and multispecies contexts, exploring how environmental rhythms — wind, water, ice, voice and shared presence — become perceptually tangible within human experience. Recent and current works include INTER – Jurmo, a site-specific listening work in the Finnish Archipelago in collaboration with the John Nurminen Foundation; INTER – SALATTU / Held, a 30-channel spatial sound and video installation presented in Ylivieska; and Arrival / Saapuminen, an Oulu2026 project developed through spatial sound, choir and movement.

In 2026–2027, Autio’s practice continues through site-specific commissions, writing and international publication contexts. He has been selected for the Community Art in Kristinestad Dux residency and commission, and his Border Series has been shortlisted for full audio paper submission and peer review in Seismograf Peer’s Aesthetic Alliances issue. In November 2027, he will continue his long-form writing project Spatial Listening Architectures at the Väinö Tanner Foundation’s Mazzano Romano residency.

Educated at Metropolia (BA, 2008) and the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki (MA, 2013), Autio is based in Oulu, Finland.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work develops spatial listening architectures.

I build immersive sound environments where collective attention can settle before intensity gathers. Through breath, voices, low-frequency resonance and multi-channel composition, the installations form perceptual fields rather than narrative structures. The work is not a message but a field — meaning emerges through time, shared presence and embodied duration.

This process is not immediate. It depends on sustained attention and the capacity to remain within conditions that do not fully stabilise.

At its core, my practice investigates how experience organizes itself in space. Listening becomes both method and medium.

The installations do not require belief systems. They construct conditions in which perception can reorganise on its own.

Rather than producing effects, the work distributes attention.

These environments do not represent, but operate. They function as perceptual conditions in which understanding emerges through direct experience — not through explanation, but through being inside the field itself.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Spatial listening architectures, immersive multi-channel installations and perceptual environments.

Based in Oulu, Finland

jaakkoaution@gmail.com
+358 44 069 1113
instagram.com/jaakkoautio

PRACTICE

Jaakko Autio creates large-scale spatial sound installations that function as perceptual environments. Often built with 20–40 channels, his works form architectures for collective and durational listening, inviting sustained attention, embodied presence and shared spatial awareness.

The practice unfolds through long-term series, each developing a distinct spatial and relational condition over time. Rather than treating sound as playback or atmosphere, Autio approaches it as a way of structuring attention, proximity and experience in space.

INSTALLATIONS AND EXHIBITIONS

RE SERIES

2025 — Aine Art Museum, Tornio — Snowball Effect / RE-VERB, Chapter II
2025 — MUU Galleria, Helsinki — RE-BIRTH
2025 — Galleria Aski, Turku — RE-SOUND (with Akasaka)
2025 — Möhkönvirta Contemporary Art Exhibition — RE-DITUS
2025 — Galleria Villa Suruton, Savonlinna — RE-FLORIS
2025 — KITA Galleria, Joutsa — RE-VERB, Chapter I

INTER SERIES

2027 — Kulttuuritalo Laikku, Studio, Tampere — INTER – Breath Room, 14 August–26 September
2026 — Valvesali, Oulu — Arrival / Saapuminen, Oulu2026 project
2026 — Galleria Oiva, Akustiikka, Ylivieska — INTER – SALATTU / Held
2026 — Jurmo, Finnish Archipelago — INTER – Jurmo, in collaboration with the John Nurminen Foundation
2025 — One-to-One Festival, Oeiras, PT — INTER-WITHIN
2025 — One-to-One Festival, Oulu — INTER-WITHIN
2024 — Taidekeskus AHJO, Joensuu — Urbana Hortus / INTER-WITHIN

BORDER SERIES

2024–2025 — NART Galleria, Narva, EE — Possible Worlds
2024 — Demolition Art Exhibition, Helsinki — OrigiNation, Part IV
2023 — COMPOSTER Festival, Tallinn, EE — OrigiNation, Part III
2023 — Tampere-Maja, Tartu, EE — OrigiNation, Part II
2023 — Joensuu Art Museum, M_itä Biennial — OrigiNation, Part I
2022 — Porvoo Art Factory — On the Border, Part V
2022 — World Cities Culture Summit, Helsinki Opera House — On the Border, Part IV
2022 — KOGO Galleria, Tartu, EE — On the Border, Part III
2022 — NART Galleria, Narva, EE — On the Border, Part II
2022 — Tallinn Music Week, Narva, Kreenholm, EE — On the Border, Part I

PARALLEL WORKS

2025 — ARS Kunstilinnak, Tallinn, EE — Mirror
2024–2025 — Tartu Art Museum, EE — The Secrets of the Leaning Building
2023–2025 — Oulu Museum of Art / care homes — The Song of Time
2023 — Oulu Museum of Art — OWLA
2022–2025 — Table for Two — various locations, including Annantalo, Helsinki

GRANTS & COMMISSIONS (SELECTED)

2026 — Community Art in Kristinestad Dux — residency and commission
2026 — TAIKE — Visual Arts Working Grant, 4 months
2026 — TAIKE — Project grant, INTER – SALATTU / Held
2025 — TAIKE — 6-month working grant
2025 — Oulu2026 — Arrival / Saapuminen, group grant
2024 — TAIKE — Project grant, Possible Worlds / Narva
2023 — TAIKE — Regional funds, North Karelia; Northern Ostrobothnia & Kainuu
2023 — Kimmo Kaivanto Foundation
2023 — EVL Foundation for the Support of Science and Art
2021 — SKR — Residency grant, NART
2020 — AVEK — Intimacy
2019 — AVEK — From the Same Tree
2019 — SKR — Grace

RESIDENCIES

2027 — Väinö Tanner Foundation, Mazzano Romano, IT — Writer’s House residency
2026 — Community Art in Kristinestad Dux
2025 — AARK Residency, Korppoo
2025 — Tornio Museum Residency
2024 — Haihatus Residency
2024 — Old Mine Residency, Outokumpu
2023 — AARK Residency, Korppoo
2022 — NART Residency, Narva, EE
2018 — Gjesteatelieret, Vadsø, NO

COLLECTIONS

2025 — Aine Art Museum, Tornio — RE-VERB, collection acquisition

SELECTED COLLABORATIONS

2025 — RE-SOUND, with Akasaka
2024 — Meeting Point, with Akasaka
2021 — Waiting Room — dir. Haapoja & Gustafsson
2019 — Waiting Room — Zone2Source, Amsterdam

SELECTED THEATRE WORK — SOUND DESIGN

2007–2026 — Selected sound design, sound dramaturgy and composition for theatre, dance, performance and radio drama

2014–2015 — Kokkola City Theatre — Head of Sound, resident position
Selected productions: Onnellinen perhe, Säikky, Metsäjätti, Marian lapset

2024 — Body Notes – Special Edition — Tanssin talo, Helsinki, dir. Lindahl
2019 — Vihainen leski / Angry Widow — Helsinki City Theatre, main stage, dir. Virtanen
2017–2025 — Helsinki City Theatre — sound design, selected productions

2017–2026 — Body Notes — MimoArt Company, dir. Lindahl
Sound design / sound dramaturgy for an award-winning touring production. Premiere at Stoa, Helsinki, 2017; selected presentations include Macedonian National Theatre, Skopje, 2019, Best Piece Award; Theatre Olympics, 2023; Tanssin talo, Helsinki, Special Edition, 2024; and Stoa, Helsinki, Taidetestaajat programme, 2025–2026.

2017 — Vakavuusongelma / Gravity Problem — Kouvola City Theatre, dir. Linnapuomi

Selected collaborations with choreographer and director Mirva Mäkinen, 2018–2020

TEACHING (SELECTED)

2026 — University of Lapland — sound art and environmental listening
2026 — Uniarts Helsinki, Theatre Academy — course on sound design and dramaturgy
2025 — SAMK, Kankaanpää — media art course
2023 — Uniarts Helsinki, Theatre Academy — guest lecturer

TALKS & PANELS (SELECTED)

2026 — AVARA Art&Tech, Oulu — panelist, “Sound as a Spatial Element”; shared listening session

WRITTEN WORKS

2026 — INTER – Jurmo: Field Notes from the Archipelago — artist book / field notes publication, connected to the site-specific work INTER – Jurmo, John Nurminen Foundation

2026 — ON THE BORDER / Border Series — audio paper in development for Seismograf Peer, Aesthetic Alliances; shortlisted for full submission and peer review

2026 — Spatial Listening Architectures: Writings on Practice, 2008–2026 — long-form writing project on spatial listening, perceptual ecology and sound as architecture, supported by TAIKE

2013 / 2026 — Sound Without Fixed Meaning / Ääni ilman valmista merkitystä — revised edition of MA thesis on presence, Jerzy Grotowski and the inner work of sound design

2008 — Space, Time, and Silence in Theatre Sound Design — BA thesis, Metropolia

MEMBERSHIPS

AV-Arkki
Teosto
Gramex
Kuvasto
MUU ry
Teme / SVÄL
Nordic Artists’ Union

EDUCATION

2010–2013 — Uniarts Helsinki, Theatre Academy — MA, Sound Design
2003–2008 — Metropolia University of Applied Sciences — BA, Film Sound Design