ON THE BORDER

Narva, Tartu, Porvoo, Helsinki · 2022–2023 · 40-channel sound installation · Part I of the Border Series · Suomeksi

Kreenholm Industrial Complex, Narva, Tallinn Music Week 2022.

Forty singers from four choirs: a Finnish choir, a bilingual Estonian choir, a folk music ensemble and pop and jazz students. Each choir was recorded separately, every singer on their own microphones. Breath, speech and sung fragments are distributed across a field of forty loudspeakers.

On the Border was developed in Narva in spring 2022. The war in Ukraine had begun weeks earlier. The work does not argue about territory. It listens for what remains in the body after geopolitics has passed through it.

Narva, spring 2022

I arrived knowing nothing about the city. 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 work

Together with Jussi Mattila I 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.

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.

Faces

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 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.

Joala 18

At NART Gallery, Joala 18, the installation occupied a former industrial building facing the Russian border. Sound reorganised the body in space. Clusters of melody dispersed into breath and resonance. The work does not resolve identity. It stabilises attention long enough for layered belonging to become tangible.

Context

The work was developed during a three-month residency at NART in spring 2022, which coincided with the early months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was later presented at Kreenholm, NART Gallery, Kogo Gallery in Tartu, Porvoo Art Factory and the World Cities Culture Summit at Helsinki Opera.

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