EN / FI
Jaakko Autio is a Finnish sound and media artist based in Oulu. He builds spatial listening architectures: large multichannel environments where collective attention can settle and reorganise.
The works begin from breath, proximity and shared presence. Rather than delivering messages, Autio composes the conditions under which perception can settle. Meaning emerges through duration, embodiment and relational awareness, and environmental rhythms such as wind, water and voice gradually become perceptible within the space.
His approach is informed by more than two decades of contemplative practice rooted in the Theravāda tradition. It enters the work not as doctrine or imagery but as an embodied understanding of attention and impermanence. The works have emerged from border regions, religious and vernacular traditions, care environments, archipelagic communities and situations of cultural displacement.
His current multi-year INTER series extends this inquiry into relational and ecological contexts. Recent works include INTER, Jurmo, a site-specific listening work in the Finnish Archipelago with the John Nurminen Foundation; INTER, Held, a 30-channel sound and video installation in Ylivieska; and Arrival / Saapuminen, an Oulu2026 project with choir and movement. The series follows the RE series (2024–2025), which culminated in RE-BIRTH at MUU Helsinki in 2025. Earlier works include OWLA (Oulu Art Museum, 56 singers, 2023), Harmony in Displacement (2024) and On the Border at the Estonian–Russian frontier.
In 2027 Autio opens INTER, Kristinestad, a permanent outdoor sound installation commissioned by Community Art in Kristinestad Dux, and continues his writing at the Väinö Tanner Foundation’s Mazzano Romano residency.
MA, Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki (2013). BA, Metropolia (2008). Seventeen years of sound design for theatre.
