Taru Elfving: TAKE A DEEP BREATH – The urgency of the impossible in the work of Terike Haapoja

TAKE A DEEP BREATH
The urgency of the impossible in the work of Terike Haapoja
Taru Elfving

The entrance to the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013 was a passage into another world, a moonlit garden where trees spoke back and the soil breathed. Here words about a fly became flickering flies on the wall and the waning of life was made sensible through radiant dying colours. On a closer look a landscape image was unveiled to be a tank of soil and weedy plants with an elaborate life-sustaining system of technology. The moon looming large behind the trees turned out to be a microscopic imprint of the bacterial life on the artist’s cheek. As the viewer stepped cautiously onto flagstones to cross over a pool of water there was a ripple effect, yet not on the immediate surface of the water but elsewhere. The steps suddenly had an impact somewhere beyond their assumed reach. These ripples were visible only through a spectral projection, as a haunting.

This was a garden dramatically unlike the surrounding Giardini di Biennale and its miniature world order staged both in the constellation of national pavilions and in the European garden tradition. The garden enclosed within the walls of the pavilion suggested a different way of organising chaos: the (hu)man no longer as its sole perspectival centre point and ruling principle. Rather than reproducing the power relations established through colonial histories and taxonomic sciences, Haapoja’s garden, a series of works under the title Closed Circuit – Open Duration, invited another approach to the matters of life and death. What has been deemed disorder, the ceaseless move towards diversification and transformation in the cosmos, may not be contained yet it may be listened to.

Through momentary framings in art a resonance can be extracted from chaos – not as a representation but as a multiplicity of sensations, as philosopher Elizabeth Grosz writes.ⁱ Images and words in the installation were thus no longer simply referential but also vibrant material elements in the shared time-space, in search of and open for various kinds of attachments and assemblages. Rather than making sense of things through self-reflection or interpretation, the viewer was invited into another kind of sensibility. The technologies of mediation were laid bare yet as such they unexpectedly left the coordinates for encounters unfixed. This was no longer simply a question of translation and further specification of tools. The colours corresponding to the cooling of the dead bodies did not merely give us facts of life although they did draw into visibility something otherwise imperceptible. The whistling of the trees made their response to the viewer audible but nevertheless untranslatable. The voices and images remained radically other albeit sensible. The mediations allowed the viewer intimacy with rather than access to them.

Take a breath, for example – the breath that calls for the trees to respond in Haapoja’s garden, or the breathing of the soil in the coffin-like glass cases. The trees breath back in their own way through photosynthesis and their whistling allows us awareness of this interaction in Haapoja’s work Dialogue.ⁱⁱ Yet their breath is radically different to ours and cannot be reduced to a mirror even though it does reverse the human process of oxygen consumption. What is at stake here is a much more complex entanglement of beings, bodies and flows, where interiority is enmeshed with the exterior. The breath always enters and exits, caresses and shares with others. The breath is one of the numerous life sustaining border crossings that reveals the unity of the human subject to be an illusion and the attempt to control its boundaries to be a toil that surely blurs all distinctions of rationality and irrationality. This does not imply the dissolution of the embodied subject, but suggests that interiority and singularity are possible in – or, actually founded on – plurality and entwinements of all sorts rather than based on detachment. Furthermore, this means that other beings and things may well have interiorities and minds of their own in all their entanglements too, as the artist herself has stated in relation to the work.ⁱⁱⁱ In this scenario I am more than one and have no longer exclusive ownership of exceptional mental agency or the privilege to externalise all unbounded materiality on to the bodies of others.

The abundant alien life that is an embodied part of the artist’s face bears witness to this. The expulsion of all these tiny others would not reinstate the unity of the subject but most probably destroy its face – and beyond – thus undoing the very foundations of its identity and being. Blown up from a microscopic image to refer to a planetary scale, the work gestures towards modes of cohabitation that permeate our existence. Moreover, it draws the rational scientific knowledge production into dialogue with the mythical associations of feminised moonscapes, the desires and fears projected onto the unknown and the uncontrolled, the human body as much as the cosmic.^iv

Irreducible responsibilities

Haapoja’s work raises here a number of acute questions also affecting the viewer’s position: What do communication and community mean in this complex world of co-existence and interdependency? In Haapoja’s garden, the viewer is invited not so much to immerse oneself in this world but to inhabit it. Or, more precisely, co-inhabit it with myriad other beings. This requires the viewer to let go of habits of reading and viewing, but does not offer readymade choices for participation. There are no buttons to press or images to insert oneself into. Yet it is possible to have an impact and this happens even when unaware of it as we – whatever this collective entity consists of – breath the same air. The question then drawn to the fore is, how to co-inhabit this temporarily shared realm responsibly, responsively.

The work makes tangible how the effects of our co-existence may be audible and visible as responses yet may also take place out of sight, in unexpected places and ways – temporally and spatially removed from the event of encounter. The encounter, I claim, is the key here to the viewer’s position as well as the wider concerns resonant in the work. As philosopher Donna Haraway argues, there are no preconstituted entities prior to the transformative encounter: “the partners do not pre-exist their constitutive intra-action at ever folded layer of time and space. These are the contagions and infections that wound the primary narcissism of those who still dream of human exceptionalism.”^v Furthermore, this co-emergence is the basic condition of response-ability, because smooth predefined units “cannot touch, much less attach”, she notes.^vi “Response and respect are possible only in those knots, with actual animals and people looking back at each other, sticky with all their muddled histories.”^vii

The proximity or sensuousness does not, therefore, suggest something immediate or immersed as opposed to distance and meaning in the engagement with the work. Rather, Haapoja systematically challenges the dichotomies in her practice, carving out space for thinking and experiencing the thresholds, where the distinctions of nature and culture or matter and mind become unravelled. At the heart of this relentless labour can be found ‘the other’ – the desire to engage with the other while invested in challenging this very notion and wrestling it away from the binary logic of the same.^viii This implies the acknowledgement of irreducible difference and, consequently, responses that may come in unpredictable and untranslatable forms. Moreover, modes of response-ability are to be found beyond relationships of self-similarity.^ix

How to speak with the other and, most importantly, recognise the other’s response as something not reducible to what I already know and can identify with? How can we address the others, who do not have access to a recognised language or representation, and yet resist speaking on behalf of them?

Haapoja’s exhibition and political intervention The Party of Others tackled this problematic of representation and voice (as a vote) by performatively appropriating the tools provided by the parliamentary system. The installation consisted of a choir of human voices, discussing the possibility of such representation and rights for the unrepresented nonhuman others from a number of different disciplinary and personal perspectives. The ponderings of each individual could be listened to separately while a large projection edited out of the cacophony the themes and questions that the speakers mostly shared or disagreed upon. A common vocabulary and structures of thought began to emerge out of the apparent plurality. How might have the others themselves responded? Bound by and to the languages at our disposal – or, perhaps more accurately, the languages within which we have become speaking subjects – the challenge of giving voice to those without a recognisable (human) language seems insurmountable. Yet languages, with all their speculative and imaginative capacities, respond to their contexts and may be pushed towards the others, as Haapoja’s recent projects propose.

What happens when translating indigenous words and notions into Western languages that communicate radically different relationships between human subjects and their environment? What happens to language and, furthermore, thought in this transformative translation that reverses the colonial processes of violent assimilation and exclusion? Can the translations undo structures of thought from within through the inhabitation of language as a stranger while refusing mastery and control, which filmmaker and theorist Trinh T Minh-ha has proposed as a subversive strategy?^x The workshops organised by Haapoja and curator Pablo Ramirez with members of indigenous communities in the project Transmodern-Modern Dictionary aim at gradually building up a dictionary that does not complement or offer an alternative, but rather infiltrates and implodes the dominant languages that have set limits to our capacity to rethink (co-)existence. It does so through re-rooting language in different situated practices and eco-political situations, thus contextualising concepts.

The dictionary operates in a similar vein to the History of Others – an ongoing collaborative project of Haapoja with writer Laura Gustafsson that performatively appropriates the methods of historical narration and display. Both projects can be understood as subversive mimesis of apparatuses at the heart of knowledge production and power. They do not follow the route of corrective resignification as much as challenge the logic of representation fundamentally. The impossibility of giving cattle a voice through the available means of history writing and presentation becomes viscerally felt as identification with the main protagonists is simultaneously expected and denied. The black humour permeating this museum allows neither for cathartic tears nor laughter. Microhistorical counter-narratives do not seem to redeem us here. Rather, the History of Others proposes the question of how far these structures and boundaries of knowledge and understanding can be pushed? Can they allow for expansive inclusion, and if so, how may this transform the structures, the knowledge produced, as well as those included? Finally, on whose terms are these inclusions taking place?

Equal before the Law?

These questions may be best addressed in the courtroom. The Trial by Haapoja and Gustafsson was a performance that took place in the Consistory Hall of the University of Helsinki as a re-enactment of a wolf poaching court case. Entering the space as a member of the audience I was directed to take a seat as one of the jury members. The sudden position of power did not so much exhilarate as terrified me – difficult decisions were ahead for certain, but also pressures of performance. There were no rehearsals before being thrown into this role of a juror, no prior material to read. I was to use my rational and moral judgement – powers and prejudices – on the spot, based on the information given to us all equally during the trial session. Equal before the law. Or, trial and error. Having served numerous times in juries for residencies and grants, yet never as a juror in court, the sense of impossibility of getting the judgement right was not new but definitely even more daunting here. The anxiety about how to perform well merged with a deep-seated concern about rights as something so easily, or perhaps always, compromised.

As the piece unfolded, the complexity of these questions became ever more acutely felt. Some are more equal than others: Who can speak? Who gets to be represented and by whom? Where or what position one gets to speak from? Who can and will listen? Trial and error, indeed. In order to be able to – or to be allowed to – make judgements, considerable amount of information needs to be gathered, processed and delivered. The work made me painfully aware of how this is always partial. Furthermore, the information on the case itself is practically irrelevant, if one does not know the legal structures and curiosities of laws that bind the judgements. The case in question here revealed how these two are integrally woven together as it focused on the notion of legal persons, which is the organising principle of who can be represented in court. While clearly demarcating the limits of law – to be applied only to humans and human creations such as corporations and communities – it actually does not protect the rest from rampant exploitation but legitimises this lawlessness. Meanwhile it also made clear how the expansion of rights throws into question the very legal structures that could thus be pushed against their limits. Who is a person and what is a property? Is our legal system just another side of the coin of the so-called law of nature – naturalising human exceptionalism?

The whole discourse on rights was drawn into the spotlight in the performance. While placing faith in the promise of law – not unlike many activists and thinkers currently in urgent search for means to halt the escalating destruction of biodiversity and liveability of the planet^xi – the work also made its deeply engrained anthropocentric logic uncomfortably felt. The law could not offer final solutions but rather increased complexity that the viewer as a witness became implicated in. As a member of the jury, but also simply as a member of the audience, I was complicit in the judgement and, one could argue, also the crimes addressed. In the face of increased open racism and the consequent media-induced polarisation in the Finnish society, there have been calls for the “sensible” middle-ground and tolerance. Yet this non-commitment to any sides of a conflict has throughout history given quiet legitimisation to genocides – and ecocides – of horrendous proportions. When do the stances become dogmatic in themselves and close off any possibility of dialogue in disagreement? What is a witness to do?

While placing the viewer in such an impossible position of power, The Trial simultaneously initiated a subtle decentring – of the functions of the legal apparatus, the significations within its language, the perspective of the viewer and, ultimately, the (hu)man as the measure of everything. Could this mimesis – understood as a playful repetition or critical inhabitation – of a dominant discourse and the machines of its reproduction lead beyond the very logic of representation?^xii Could it allow for a move towards what Haraway calls “nonmimetic sharing”, that is “performing the epistemological, emotional, and technical work to respond practically in the face of permanent complexity not resolved by taxonomic hierarchies and with no humanist philosophical or religious guarantees.”^xiii This may well be at stake both in the invitation to enter enmeshed co-habitation as posed by Haapoja’s garden and the response-ability demanded by the trial. It may mean withholding judgement – not avoiding taking a stance but rather becoming accountable for where one stands: the complex relations, beyond and including human interdependencies, together with their entangled histories and futures that form the ground under my feet and my thought.

On the Edge

When empathy as identification or altruism becomes impossible, or even irresponsible, there may be room for compassion as a contagion – that is, “the contact of being with one another in this turmoil”, as philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “the disturbance of violent relatedness”.^xiv Transformative to all the parties involved, this mode of compassion allows for an appreciation of contagion as the very foundation of being – that is being-with, or co-existence. It ruptures the aggressively guarded illusion of human self-containment grounded on the exclusion and exploitation of others. There is, however, no happy multiculturalism or harmony between all species behind the floodgates opened by this rupture. This is what Haapoja’s work is always careful to remind us even while persistently toiling towards this unknown.

What does it mean, then, to be decentred? If this suggests decolonization rather than diversity, it implies not expanding inclusion within the shared centre, but rather allowing others to be centred while the previously hegemonic is decentred and repositioned in the margins.^xv As Haapoja and Gustafsson’s most recent project the Museum of Nonhumanity makes a strong case for, the ongoing history of dehumanisation has not given all humans equal access to the centre and, therefore, no decentring of the anthropos can be on equal terms either.^xvi While this can be argued to apply to all modes of representation, what are the alternatives?

Haapoja’s work testifies that the reversal of the centre-margin positions through performative interventions into representational systems does not necessarily leave the oppositional logic untouched. On the contrary, novel unexpected voices and strange significations may begin to emerge as there is no longer a sole centre from where to speak but rather a multiplicity of positions and modes of speaking and listening. This is where the exhilarating risk lies – the danger and the promise in the yet-unheard, the unseen, and the unknown that may not be at all like the other, which has been posited as the negative mirror of the norm.

In a double move Haapoja’s work makes tangible the invisible and the unnamed both within the hegemonic and the excluded – the unnamed orders and that which they exclude: The unrecognised ideologies, patterns of language, and technologies of representation that govern the bounds of our imagination become malleable once unveiled and give way for all that has been supressed under their reign. Notably, Haapoja does not attempt to simply give voice or representation to the suppressed after all, but calls attention to the ethical encounters where they may emerge. Revealing the violence hidden within the normative structures – whether manifested in the museum, the courtroom, the pictorial landscape – the work makes it possible to begin to reckon with the ceaseless transformative encounters that also take place within these structures yet remain imperceptible. Take a deep breath and you are viscerally entangled in this indeterminacy of communication and contamination that we – I, the trees, the soil, or the other viewers – never really pre-exist the encounter nor leave from it untouched. This is beyond our full control yet posits, nevertheless, enormous responsibility on us.

“It is not only species that are becoming extinct but also the words, phrases, and gestures of human solidarity,” wrote philosopher and psychotherapist Felix Guattari.^xvii “We need new social and aesthetic practices, new practices of the Self in relation to the other, the foreign, the strange.”^xviii Haapoja’s work addresses this urgency to rediscover and reinvent notions, sentences and modes of response-ability. Yet what unfolds through her oeuvre over the past decade is a powerful claim for the necessity to consider human solidarity as integrally enmeshed with affiliations and affinities beyond our species, and vice versa. Community is an expanded notion in her work: not one of uncritical embrace but in constant production through the insufficient means of the languages, representations, and technologies at our disposal.^xix It comes to being through entwined processes of becoming and dissolution as in the work aptly titled Community. Moreover, it is a matter of life and death, and calls for a rethinking of these notions without an assumed exterior – nature, matter, other – where to distance all that is beyond rational containment.

In the microcosm created in the Nordic Pavilion one gained heightened awareness or sensibility of the entanglement of life-sustaining technologies: the distinction of natural and cultural became here frankly pointless. Meanwhile the human attempts at careful climate control to sustain life within this enclosed garden appeared simultaneously as earnest caretaking and the cause for the climate gone out of control. This can be reflected against the current concerns about the Anthropocene – the concept proposing that our species has become comparable to a geological force on the planet – and the risk that what was sounded as an alarm will turn into a re-affirmation of the human technological and scientific powers that fuel investments into geo-engineering as a solution to the climate crisis.^xx Rather than being decentred, the Anthropos may gain new support for its unchallenged reign.

This reminds me of Haapoja’s work The Edge of the World, which for me as a viewer was an experience of intense isolation, of being detached from the external reality as well as to some extent from my own senses. Wearing headphones and a head-mounted display that was sensitive to infrared light, the navigated darkened space became strange and my relationship to it warped by a sense of loss or at least confusion of coordinates. Is this a taster of the techno-utopian escape from the destroyed planet Earth – a possible future adventure in a post-apocalyptic toxic landscape, an expedition into new inhospitable terrains, or a leap into a virtual realm liberated from the burden of embodied, multisensory engagements all together? Or, does this bubble-effect actually correspond to the heightened sense of disconnection and consequent depression felt today in advanced capitalism and its persistent phallogocentric order?^xxi

In tune with Terike Haapoja’s artistic practice as a whole, the work draws attention to the partiality of fields of vision and points of view, bound by various technologies of representation. Yet it also gestures towards different ways of experiencing and negotiating the simultaneous embeddedness in the world and always necessarily limited access to everything – the co-habitation with others while equipped with situated knowledge and shifting frames of perception. Facing the urgency of climate crisis, do we have the luxury of time now to wander in the other-worldly gardens, wondering at the yet-unknown? Or is this a necessity now more than ever? As Haraway claims, nonmimetic caring “means becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity”.^xxii The requirement to know more is thus associated not with power but with care, the possibility and necessity to be responsible and responsive. It may also mean treasuring the state of wonder that preceeds any attempt at understanding or possession,^xxiii and lingering in this yet-unmapped space of transformative encounter.

Are we, here and now, on the edge beyond which no world exists? Or, do we find ourselves on a threshold where different worlds can come together?