INTER SERIES: HELD / SALATTU

20-channel spatial sound and video installation
Galleria Oiva, Ylivieska, 3–5 July 2026

SALATTU on paikkasidonnainen ääni- ja videoinstallaatio, joka rakentaa tilaan kuuntelevan kentän.

Teoksen lähtökohtana on Siionin virsi 100 (Salattu voima). Virsi ei ilmesty teoksessa sellaisenaan, vaan sen rakenne, hengitys, hiljaisuus ja sisäinen paine avautuvat tilallisena äänenä.

SALATTUssa salattu ei ole vain hengellistä. Se on myös ruumiissa.

Teos rakentuu neljän äärellä olevan voiman varaan: Raudaskylän sekakuoron paikalliseen ja hengelliseen jatkumoon, Anna Voutilainen-Veijosen saksofonin kuuntelevaan alkuvoimaan, Esa Ruuttusen äänen hengelliseen painovoimaan ja Jurmon kappelin vanhan polkuharmonin borduunaan.

Ääni ei toimi esityksenä vaan ympäristönä. Kävijän liike, etäisyys ja viipyminen muokkaavat kokemusta. Yhtä keskipistettä ei ole.

Teos ei pyydä kävijää astumaan nykytaiteen kieleen. Se pyytää astumaan huoneeseen, kuuntelemaan ja viipymään.

SALATTU kuuluu INTER-sarjaan, joka tarkastelee sitä, mitä tapahtuu kokemusten välissä: ennen kuin ne saavat muodon, nimen tai merkityksen.

THE INTER SERIES

The INTER Series is not defined by subject matter, but by a structural question: what exists in between, before experience becomes named, before meaning settles.

Each work constructs a perceptual field in which relations are experienced rather than observed. The work does not add a new layer to reality. It changes how relations within a place can be perceived.

The series takes its name from the Latin inter: between, among, during. Not as metaphor, but as an operational principle. Perception is not located in the individual, nor in the object, but in the field that emerges between them.

The interval is not emptiness. It is where relation, memory, body, and presence arise before they are fixed.

Where the RE Series investigated collective listening as shared presence, the INTER Series turns toward the interval itself: holding perception open rather than directing it.

SALATTU approaches this through interiority: concealment, collective voice, bodily knowledge, tradition, and the enclosed room. INTER Jurmo approaches it through exteriority: landscape, exposure, and environmental listening at the edge of the sea.

The material conditions differ. The operation is the same.

SALATTU

SALATTU is a site-specific sound and video installation that builds a listening field in space.

Sound does not function as performance, but as environment. The visitor’s movement, distance, and duration of stay shape the experience. There is no single perspective, no centre. Listening happens in relations: between sounds, between people, between body and space.

The sonic point of departure is Siionin virsi 100, a Finnish pietist hymn known as Salattu voima (Hidden Power). Salattu carries in Finnish what no single English word holds: hidden, concealed, sealed, something that exists before it can be spoken.

The hymn does not appear in the work as such. Instead, its structure, breath, silence, and inner pressure unfold as spatial sound.

What is concealed is not hidden from the world, but from the mind that tries to grasp it.

The work begins from rest. Not rest as conclusion, but as permission: the permission to be in a room without needing to defend one’s place in it. From that condition, deeper movements can begin.

A short vocal utterance opens the work: on salattu. What follows is not devotional calm, but a bodily rupture. Saxophone and choir enter together in a sharp, unstable opening that breaks the expectation of melody before it can settle.

The opening does not stand against the hymn tradition. It opens something already present within it: breath, pressure, intelligence, innocence, force, and bodily freedom.

Four Forces

SALATTU is built around four forces.

The choir forms the outer circle. Raudaskylä Mixed Choir is not treated as a neutral ensemble, but as a local body of voices shaped by generations of gathering. Founded by Anna Ängeslevä after she recognised the singing people of the local pietist meetings, the choir has carried hymn, village, school, family, funeral, celebration, and everyday life through voice.

For this choir, Siionin virret are not only repertoire. They have been a way of beginning: lessons, rehearsals, and gatherings opened through hymn singing and breath. The choir’s sound has been remembered as soft, balanced, and communal, sometimes almost too soft. In SALATTU, that softness is not weakness. It is the sound of continuity.

The choir sings mostly without words: on open vowels, on breath, on sustained tone. The text surfaces only in the recurring phrase on salattu.

In the Ostrobothnian pietist tradition, singing is not primarily performance. It belongs to situations where people gather without needing to be seen, and where voice is not organised primarily through status or virtuosity.

Within this circle are three inner voices.

Anna Voutilainen-Veijonen’s saxophone opens a bodily and intelligent force inside the work. Its sound carries the memory of an empty church: resonance, solitude, listening, and freedom. It does not enter the hymn tradition as an external provocation. It sounds from within it, opening something the tradition carries but does not always name.

Esa Ruuttunen’s voice brings another kind of weight. He is one of Finland’s major baritones, and his work has long moved between opera, sacred music, and the hymn tradition. His relation to pietist song is not external. It is lived from within.

Ruuttunen was born in Nivala and comes from Padinki, a small village on the border of Ylivieska and Nivala. His voice for SALATTU was recorded there, close to the house where he grew up. He does not enter the work as an outside soloist. He carries the same ground as the choir and the harmonium.

In SALATTU, his voice does not enter as authority alone. It enters as a body that has carried this music for decades and still stands before what remains hidden.

After the opening rupture of saxophone and choir, Ruuttunen’s voice draws the work into a more pietistic and self-examining register. He does not explain the hymn. He allows its weight to become audible.

The fourth force is a drone played on the old pedal harmonium of the Jurmo chapel. Its age is uncertain. In the work, it becomes a ground: a breathing, time-worn resonance beneath the voices. It brings another place into the room, not as quotation, but as depth, distance, and continuity.

Together these forces form the listening field of SALATTU: choir as local continuation, saxophone as bodily freedom, Ruuttunen as spiritual gravity, and the harmonium as ground.

The Image

A generative video projection covers the floor. Its forms move like mycelium, tissue, soil, and otherworldly growth: networks without a centre, gathering at the edges.

The image responds in real time to the movement of people in the room. It does not follow an individual performer or a musical score. It registers the collective field: the way bodies enter, remain, hesitate, pass, and gather.

The image is not composed as a fixed sequence. It is authored as a system, but appears through the room.

The Encounter

Ylivieska is where I was born. In 2026, Herättäjäjuhlat brings thousands of people to the town. For a few days, Ylivieska fills with greetings, conversation, recognition, movement, and reunion.

SALATTU opens a quieter room inside that gathering.

Galleria Oiva becomes a place to rest, listen, and remain near the sacred without needing to explain one’s relation to it. It is not a church, but during the festival it may hold something chapel-like: coolness, quiet, attention, and permission to stay.

The work is built for this encounter. It requires no prior knowledge of contemporary art. It asks only for the willingness to remain in a room with others, and with what cannot quite be named.

Rest is not the final state of the work. It is the condition that allows the deeper questions to move: May I be here? May I belong without being measured? What in me is still hidden, even from myself?

The work does not answer these questions. It builds a room in which they can be heard.

Working Group

Raudaskylä Mixed Choir
A local choral community rooted in the Ostrobothnian pietist singing tradition.

Choral direction and compositional work with the choir: Olena Mikhailova.
Vocal solo: Esa Ruuttunen.
Recording direction, saxophone, and choral arrangement: Anna Voutilainen-Veijonen.
Pedal harmonium recorded in Jurmo chapel.
Sound and video installation: Jaakko Autio.

Anna Voutilainen-Veijonen has collaborated on earlier works in this practice, including Harmony in Displacement and OWLA.