The Project in Progress: 2014-15-16
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further events
The BodyBuilding Project: An Introduction (2014)
The BodyBuilding Project: A Non-Conclusion (2015)
The Call of the Nonhuman (2015)
The BodyBuilding Project: Acclimatization (2015)
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Baltic Circle Festival – Nov 11-12 2014 – Helsinki
The BODYBUILDING PROJECT: an Introduction
Location: Katri Vallon Kalliosuojai, Kallio, Helsinki
We are caught in a vortex of politically, economically and environmentally precarious circumstances that are shaking the very basis of our planetary existence. The situation can be seen as a turning point that will either make us or break us: we can either continue spiraling towards the collapse of civilization or set out to reinvent our ways of being and living together.
The BodyBuilding Project is an attempt to figure out what kind of subjectivities and relational capacities we, as beings and as a species, would need to develop in order to survive the future. It encourages us to reimagine the qualities and modes of being currently identified as human, and to begin building bodies capable of incorporating forms of knowledge and existence that are beyond our immediate experience and understanding. The aim of the project is to develop a series of embodied practices that can be trained both collectively and individually and transmitted from one being to another.
The project in this new phase consists of a collaborative research process and a series of public events. The first event took place at the Baltic Circle Festival in November 2014, where we provided the public with an introduction to the general approach and a sequence of preliminary exercises that could be used to set the bodies of the future in motion. In 2015, we will set up a durational performance installation and a series of events at Galleria Augusta. The events will be a part of Frontiers in Retreat, a five-year project coordinated by HIAP.
Convener/Coordinator: Saara Hannula
Research Group: Outi Condit, Robert Kocik, Satu Palokangas, Alan Prohm and Tommi Vasko
Production: HIAP, Baltic Circle
Funding: Kone Foundation, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland
GETTING IT
GETTING OVER IT (US)
THE FUTURE IS BACK
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The BodyBuilding Project was originally initiated in 2006, in the context of a year-long course taught by Alan Prohm at the University of Art and Design Helsinki (now Aalto University), leading to a three-week artist residency at the Watermill Center on Long Island, NY in September 2007. During the residency, a highly international and interdisciplinary group of artists and art students researched and developed material in response to a first peak in the awareness of global warming as confirmed science. The basics of this approach were laid down in two essays self-published under the title “Enactivism: on Urgent Art for Social Climate Change” and in The BodyBuilding Book, the original research report of the project. Since then, the project’s basic premises and approach have only confirmed their relevance and urgency.
The artists in residence included Daria Faïn, Scott Elliot, Christina Guerrero Harmon, Saara Hannula, Robert Kocik, Elisa Laurila, Riikka Notkola and Alan Prohm.
Artists in the expanded revival since 2014 include: Saara Hannula (reactivator), Alan Prohm, Outi Condit, Tommi Vasko, Satu Palokangas, Robert Kocik, and others.
Alan Prohm 