Author: Teo Ala-Ruona

Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture is an exhibition created by Teo Ala-Ruona and the working group exploring the modernist built environment through the lens of trans embodiment. Combining architecture, performance, and installation, the exhibition proposes five speculative scores for the architecture of the future.

The work was presented in the Nordic Countries Pavilion, at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, and commissioned by the Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki and curated by architect Kaisa Karvinen. 

Industry Muscle considers the trans body as a lens through which to examine modern architecture and the built environment, establishing a dialogue with the celebrated architecture of the Nordic Countries Pavilion, designed by Sverre Fehn and completed in 1962. By contrasting Fehn’s canonical work of
modernism against an alternative model for architectural practice that takes trans embodiment as its starting point, the exhibition will offer insights into the relationships between architecture, the body, and ecological collapse.

In Industry Muscle the audience is invited to consider the Nordic Pavilion, as well as architecture more broadly, as a stage for sociopolitical norms that are embedded in fossil-based culture. The staging of the exhibition places the visitor at the centre of an architectural experience where all participants are on display, enacting everyday performances. In Ala-Ruona’s interventions, the trans body crowbars its way into this structure and reveals the blueprint within.

Industry Muscle unfolds through five speculative scores that serve as critical prompts for future architectural practice. Scores are used in performance art as tasks, notations, and exercises that provide instructions for a performer. The exhibition brings this concept to the field of architecture, using the following speculative / theoretical themes:

Impurity: Questioning the modernist ideal of purity inherent in both architecture and lifestyle.
Decategorisation: Challenging practices based on categorisation and separation within the built environment.
Performance: Investigating how architecture and spatial design shape everyday performances of gender and identity.
Techno-body: Recognising the dynamic interaction between body, building, and technology, while advocating for bodily autonomy.
Reuse: Approaching the trans body as a form of reuse and a tool for ecological thinking.

Industry Muscle working group is a multidisciplinary team of collaborators including architect A.L. Hu, set designer and artist Teo Paaer, sound designer Tuukka Haapakorpi, dramaturge Even Minn, visual artist Venla Helenius, fashion designer Ervin Latimer, graphic designer Kiia Beilinson and performers Kid Kokko, Caroline Suinner, and Romeo Roxman Gatt. Each member of the working group has contributed their own artistic part to the exhibition.

Link to the essay ‘Bodytopian Architecture‘ written with A.L. Hu: https://admuseo.fi/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Bodytopian-Architecture.pdf

Working group:

Dialogue Architect: A.L. Hu
Spatial Designer and Artist: Teo Paaer
Sound Artist: Tuukka Haapakorpi
Visual Artist: Venla Helenius
Graphic Designer: Kiia Beilinson
Fashion Designer: Ervin Latimer
Dramaturge: Even Minn
Performers: Romeo Roxman Gatt,
Kid Kokko, Caroline Suinner

Curator: Kaisa Karvinen, Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki
Project Manager: Luba Kuzovnikova
Curatorial advisor: Suvi Saloniemi
Advisory board: Nick Axel, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Panu Savolainen
Commissioners: Carina Jaatinen, Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki, Finland; Yngvill Aagaard Sjöösten, The National Museum of Norway; Karin Nilsson, ArkDes, Sweden

Performances:
Baltic Circle, Helsinki, 2024
XS-festival, Kutomo, Turku, 2024
Vleeshall, Middelburg, 2025

Parachorale is a performance for one performer, choir of four people, tattoo artist and cotton candy. In the work, a solo performance merges with a performance by many. The structure alludes to the multiplication of the individual and challenges individual-centered psychology.

Parachorale explores the paranormality of trans experience. The performance unfolds a dark carnival, featuring tattooing of skins, choral singing, and eating and feeding the audience with cotton candy. The piece makes space for pain and collective pleasure through humour and absurdity, drawing from the experiences of living in a dysphoric body. The work also refers to teenage years’ experiences of cutting the skin.

Parachorale speaks to the experience of inner dissonance. At its heart lies the desire to share an under-the-skin world and to create a new understanding of the reality with the audience in the moment of the performance. Parachorale challenges the othering gaze that views transcorporeality as exceptional in society. It asks how private the experience truly is, and how many genuinely feel at home in their own skin.

Parachorale continues Ala-Ruona’s series of works addressing the psychosomatic extremes of transcorporeality and paranormal potential. It is a sequel to his solo Lacuna (2021).

CREDITS

Concept, direction: Teo Ala-Ruona
Text: Teo Ala-Ruona, Even Minn, Tuukka Haapakorpi
Performance: Teo Ala-Ruona, Caroline Suinner, Anni Puolakka, Pauliina Sjöberg, Tuukka Haapakorpi
Choreography: Teo Ala-Ruona, Raoni Muzho Saleh
Dramaturgy: Even Minn
Sound design and composition: Tuukka Haapakorpi 
Costume and set design: Teo Paaer
Light design: Sofia Palillo 
Performance dramaturgy: Ami Karvonen
Featuring tattoo artist: Spider Nykänen
Costume designer assistants: Nour Ainasoja, Pauliina Sjöberg
Sound designer assistant: Linda Lazarov
Production: Baltic Circle, Teo Ala-Ruona, Even Minn
Supporters: Kone Foundation, Taiteen edistämiskeskus, Finnish Benelux institute
Residences: Ehkä productions, Kunstcentrum BUDA, SODAS2123, Tuo Tuo

Performances:
CHART Art Fair, Copenhagen, 2024
Organ Vida, Zagreb, 2024

Anabolic Spectacle is a text-based solo performance that draws inspiration from the language of men’s online magazines, transforming their words into feverish dream scenarios of a violent quest for self-mastery over the body.

It seeks to articulate a labyrinthe of fantasies, restless nights and the impact of the categorical gaze on a non-normative body, comparing the audience’s gaze to the scrutinizing stares in public spaces.

The performance sees the transmasculine body as an incompatible territory for hegemonic masculine narratives – a realm where the capitalist ideals of the optimized self begin to crumble. Anabolic Spectacle is a collaborative creation between performance artist Teo Ala-Ruona and dramaturg Even Minn.

Concept, text and performance: Teo Ala-Ruona
Dramaturgy: Even Minn
Production: CHART Art Fair, Teo Ala-Ruona
Premiere: CHART Art Fair, Copenhagen, August 2024
Supported by: Kone Foundation

Performances:
Kohta Kunsthalle. Helsinki. 2024
UrbanApa. Helsinki. 2024
Upcoming: My Wild Flag, Stockholm. 2025

New In Town is a monologue about a dentist who has decided to leave everything behind and move to a new city to become an artist. The dentist chooses to begin his first, half-improvised public art performance directly upon arrival.

The performance is a collaboration between me and artist Jaakko Pallavuo. It had its debut at Kohta Kunsthall in Helsinki, in June 2024.

Duration: ca 25 min
Text: Jaakko Pallasvuo
Performance: Teo Ala-Ruona
Costume: Ville Pölhö
Dramaturgical dialogue: Martta Jylhä

Performances:
Centrale Fies. Dro. 2023
Kutomo. Turku. 2023
ANTI-festival. Kuopio. 2023

In SLIT, the two performers play with imagery of athletic boy tropes. As they touch each other’s vocal chords by pushing their hands down their throats, the fingers are greeted with the grasp of the throat, unable to produce a sound.

Whether it be a plain song, a humming chant, a joyous warm expression, the performers produce a language of uncodedness, of vulnerability, of strangeness – a language of mirroring inner and outer selves for their audience. Cycling through soundscapes and shifting postures, they attempt to manipulate their surrounding people and space.

SLIT is performed by Teo Ala-Ruona and Artor Jesus Inkerö. The work is choreographed in collaboration with Eve Stainton. The sound design is made by Minna Koivisto and a sound assistant Juulia Haverinen. The costume design is made by Ervin Latimer.

Concept and performance: Teo Ala-Ruona and Artor Jesus Inkerö
Choreographic collaboration: Eve Stainton
Costume design: Ervin Latimer
Sound design: Minna Koivisto
Sound assistant: Juulia Haverinen
Technician: Irene Lehtonen
Production: Centrale Fies Live Works, Teo Ala-Ruona and Artor Jesus Inkerö
Residencies: Centrale Fies Live Works (Dro) and London Performance Studios (London)
Supported by: Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland, and Kone Foundation
Premiere: 30.6.2023 Live Works/Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy

Performances:
Kiasma Theatre. Helsinki. 2023
Vilnius Performance Art Biennial. Vilnius. 2023
Performa Biennial. New York. 2023.
Warehouse 9. IPAF. Copenhagen. 2024

Enter Exude is a cinematic auto-fantasy for three performers and a Chevrolet Camaro.

Born from the anal canal of an automobile, the three techno-brothers derive pleasure from inhaling the spirit of the car – both a symbol of familial and trans narratives. Enter Exude takes the audience on an ominously erotic ride, unfolding on various time scales, blurring the boundaries between life and slow death. 

Enter Exude delves into contemporary notions of gender, technology, and ecology while crafting simultaneously a hypnotic and haunting experience of unfulfilled desires. The performance is simultaneously exaggerative and intimate, breaking the boundaries of the stage and creating a continuous interplay between reality and the imagined.

Enter Exude continues Ala-Ruona’s series of performances exploring the intertwining of environmental toxicities and trans-corporeality, with bodily transformations and complex sexuality forming an intense, mutually accelerating cycle.

Summoning, concept, direction: Teo Ala-Ruona
Choreography and performing: Raoni Muzho Saleh, Charlie Laban Trier ja Teo Ala-Ruona
Dramaturg: Even Minn
Set and costume design: Teo Paaer
Sound dramaturg: Kaino Wennerstrand
Sound design: Miša Skalskis
Lighting design: Heikki Paasonen
Producer: Sanna Ritvanen
Pre-production: Jonni Korhonen
Artistic dialogue: Remi Vesala
Promotional photo: Teo Paaer
Production Kiasma-teatteri, Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux, Viernulvier, Warehouse9
Supported by: Niilo Helander Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre, Wihuri Foundation, Oskar Öflund Foundation, Suomen Kulttuurirahasto, Kone Foundation, Finnish Cultural Institute of Denmark
Residencies: FABRIKKEN, Zodiak-laboratory, BUDA, Eskus-HIAP residency

Performances:
Vapaan Taiteen Tila. Helsinki. 2022
HAM-gallery. Helsinki. 2023
The Place. London. 2023
Organ Vida. Zagreb. 2023

Babymmalian is a feeding session where milk flows through the space and bodies, and sings. The two performers unite through fluid bonding, lactation and role play.

Babymmalian looks at the taboos around breastfeeding through human-animal-hybridity, and plays with both kink and old renaissance imagery of the baby and the feeder.

Working group: Anni Puolakka and Teo Ala-Ruona
Soundscape: Miša Skalskis
Dramaturgical support: Martta Jylhä
Sound technician: Linda Lazarov
Lights (in HAM): Kristian Palmu
Costume design (in HAM): Sini Saavala
Supported by: The Arts Promotion Centre Finland, The Finnish Cultural Foundation and Kone Foundation
Premiere: September 2022, ‘Parting With Return (You’re so Busy)’ at Vapaan Taiteen Tila, Helsinki
Commissioned by: The Focus Group

Performances: Baltic Circle -festival. Helsinki. 2021

Deep Time Trans is a performance traveling through time to the non-binary nature of prehistory and the birth of life.

The performers navigate deep in the depths of time, looking backwards from the present moment to four billion years ago, to wonder at the pleasure-filled foundlings of evolution.

The performance is about transformation, many returns to water, a love for protoplasm, symbiotic living, and breathing to the rhythm of underwater pulses.

Evolution is queer.

The members of the DTT working group have a background in performance, visual arts, and live action role-play. Their artistic endeavours traverse, e.g. trans and queer history, speculative fiction, ecology, somatics, and geology.

Through play, LARP, touch, and discussions, the group asks how we can comprehend evolution in a way that would dismantle cis and heteronormativity, and not conform to a binary perception of gender.

Working group:

Concept, text and performer: Teo Ala-Ruona
Concept, text and dramaturgy: Even Minn
Text and performer: Camille Auer
Costume design and performer: Alvi Haapamäki
Set design: Eeti Piiroinen
Sound design: Satu Kankkonen
Performance dramaturgy: Emil Santtu Uuttu
Light design: Olivia Pohjola  
Larp-designer: Pihla Lehtinen
Producer: Riikka Thitz

Production: Baltic Circle, Even Minn & Teo Ala-Ruona, Uniarts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy
Supporters: Alfred Kordelin Foundation, Kone Foundation
Residencies: Ehkä-production / Kutomo, Saari residency  
In cooperation with: Mad House Helsinki

Performances:
XS-festival. Kutomo. Turku. 2021
Nocturnal Unrest -festival. Frankfurt. Online. 2021
Takomo theatre. Helsinki. 2022
Drifts-festival. Helsinki. 2022
VEGA Arts. Copenhagen. 2023
Institute of Contemporary Arts. London. 2023
Sequences festival. Reykjavik. 2023
Toaster/Husets Teater. Copenhagen. 2024
Fundacio Miro. Barcelona. 2025

Lacuna is an autofictional horror story that invites the audience into a void inside the performers body. It composes ghostly experiences into a verbal and musical incantation, while growing in time by playing with various images emerging from the past, that are being conjured on the stage through movement, speaking and screaming.

The performer speaks about bodily experiences, through which a portal is opened to the insides of the body: carnal visions, through the skin, entering the orifices and falling into an abyss. There, a collection of memories, abjects, trauma, and the possibility of rebirth, is preserved. Together with the audience, the performer moves in and out of his own body as if trying to fill and empty it at the same time, looking for a loving way to exist in it.

Performance: Teo Ala-Ruona
Text: Teo Ala-Ruona and Tuukka Haapakorpi
Sound design and composition: Tuukka Haapakorpi
Dramaturgy: Ami Karvonen
Light and spatial design: Sofia Palillo
Production: Ehkä-production, Mad House Helsinki and Teo Ala-Ruona
Supported by: Arts Promotion Centre Finland
Artistic dialogue: Camille Auer
Premiere: 3.12.2021 XS festival / Contemporary art space Kutomo, Turku
Language: English
Duration: approx. 60 min

Performances:
SIC space. Helsinki. 2020
Kutomo. Turku. 2021

“Little tentacles tickle me, I stare at the musty red mass of clouds as thousands of lovers worm in my body. Eat me, drink me. I’m being decomposed alive, nutrients release in the soil. I’m a bottom for you all. ”

My flesh is in tension, and I eat it is a performance about a bodily transformation that happens in a polyamorous and polysexual symbiosis with a swamp.

The swamp decomposes and preserves bodies. The swamp is a place, where an ecosystem turns into something else and where bodies integrate and transform under each other’s influence.

The performance is euphoric body horror. It talks about a desire to reshape together with the dirt, to decompose and to transform into a carbon vortex for the Earth.

Length: approximately 1 hour
Language: Finnish (a little bit of English)

Working group:
Text and performance: Teo Ala-Ruona
Dramaturgy: Ami Karvonen & Even Minn
Sound design: Satu Kankkonen
Costume design and scenography: Alvi Haapamäki
Mask: Teo Ala-Ruona & Alvi Haapamäki

Credits:
Vocal coaching: Sara Strömmer
Videos: Teo Ala-Ruona & Venla Helenius
Photo: Nova Kaspia
Production: Ehkä-production, SIC-gallery and curator Saara Hannus
Help with the lights: Ilmari Paananen

Games are produced in collaboration with Mad House Helsinki.
Place and time TBA.

Deep Time Transcestors -larp is a speculative fiction about evolution. The game opens up a multidimensional time-space continuum, in which participants can explore how it feels to embody their trans ancestors’ bodies in this time. A group of trans- and non-binary people have come together to invoke a pre-historic transcestor to take them on a deep time travel to the time when all multicellular life was still under water. They travel through the queer prehistory through somatic and fictive exercises. The aim is to embody the fundamental queerness of evolution, and display the source of life as trans and non-binary.

The player-chatacters study their prevertebrate, throbbing and watery bodies through sense and movement. As the game advances, they form protective hybrid trans ancestor symbionts in physical contact with each other.* The game is mostly non-verbal and centers on movement and touch.

Safer play and other game -techniques will be practiced together in the workshop that starts the game day.

The game is open for transgender, non-binary, and genderqueer players. We do not evaluate whether you are “something enough” – yes you are! 

There is room for 12 players. 

If the games fill up, and we need to choose players, we will prioritize those who belong to several culturally marginalized groups, to which you may identify upon signing up. Sign up opens up on the 21st of September and closes on the 26th of October. Everyone will be informed about the player selection on the 2nd of November. You will get your character information then too.

You don’t need to have prior experience on larping, and the game doesn’t require a lot of preparation. The characters dress in present day clothes, and the fantasticity of their bodies are not  expressed through masking.

Every character has 3 contact characters, for example friends, siblings or partners. We encourage the contact character players to chat briefly about their relationship before the game. When you get your character, you will get easy instructions also on how to do this.

There is a photographer in the game. Being in the photographs is voluntary.

Languages: Finnish and English.

*The game includes touch on the areas of hands and arms. Parts where there is touch, will be played with face-masks on. If the corona-situation in December is more severe, the parts touching mechanics will be replaced with mechanics that allow a safety distance to other players.

Larp design: Teo Ala-Ruona, Even Minn, Pihla Lehtinen
Sound design: Satu Kankkonen
Costume design: Alvi Haapamäki
Artistic and theoretical counsel: Camille Auer, Eeti Piiroinen
Dramaturge for dialogue: Emil Santtu Uuttu
Producer: Riikka Thitz
Photography during larp: Nova Kaspia

The pre-game workshop 11:00 – 14:30 (including lunchbreak)
The game: 15:00 – 17:30
Debrief: 18:00 – 19:00

Tickets: pay what you want. The working group will donate all the ticket income to Black Trans Travel Fund

Deep Time Transcestors -project is funded by Kone Foundation.

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Pelit järjestetään Mad House Helsingin kanssa yhteistyössä.
Aika ja paikka ilmoitetaan myöhemmin.

Deep Time Transcestors -larp on spekulatiivinen fiktio evoluutiosta. Peli avaa moniulotteisen aika-avaruuden, jossa osallistujat voivat tutkia, miltä tuntuu ruumiillistaa trans-esivanhempien ruumiita tässä ajassa. Pelissä ryhmä trans- ja ei-binäärisiä ihmisiä ovat kerääntyneet yhteen manatakseen esiin historioiden takaisen trans-esivanhemman, joka vie heidät syväaikamatkalle aikaan, jolloin kaikki monisoluinen elämä oli vielä veden alla. Teos matkaa läpi queerin esihistoriallisen ajan somaattis-fiktiivisten harjoitteiden avulla. Tavoitteena on ruumiillistaa evoluution perustavanlaatuista queeriyttä, ja osoittaa kuinka elämän alkuperä ilmenee trans(ina) ja ei-binäärisenä.

Peli on suurelta osin ei-verbaalinen ja keskittyy liikkeeseen ja kosketukseen. Pelaajahahmot tutkivat esi-selkärankaisia, sykkiviä ja vetisiä ruumiitaan aistien, tunnustellen ja liikkuen, sekä muodostavat hybridejä trans-esivanhempi suojelussymbiontteja fyysisessä kontaktissa toisiinsa*.

Turvallisemman pelaamisen- ja muut tekniikat opetellaan yhdessä pelipäivän aloittavassa workshopissa.

Peli on avoin trans, ei-binäärisille ja sukupuolisopeutumattomille ihmisille. Emme arvioi onko kukaan “tarpeeksi” jotain: kyllä olet!

Pelissä on 12 pelaajan paikkaa.

Jos kaikki ilmoittautuneet eivät mahdu mukaan, osallistujien valinnassa priorisoidaan ihmisiä, jotka kuuluvat myös muihin/useampiin yhteiskunnallisiin marginaaleihin, joista voi halutessaan kertoa ilmoittautumisen yhteydessä.

Ilmoittautuminen avautuu 21. syyskuuta ja sulkeutuu 26.10. lokakuuta. Kaikki ilmoittautuneet saavat tiedon pelaajavalinnoista 2.11. Samalla saatte oman hahmokuvauksenne.

Osallistuminen ei vaadi kokemusta larppaamisesta tai suurta ennakkovalmistautumista. Hahmoille sopivat aivan tavalliset nykypäivän vaatteet, eikä kehojen fantastisuutta ilmaista maskeerauksella.

Jokaisella hahmolla on 3 lähihahmoa, esimerkiksi ystäviä, sisaruksia tai kumppaneita. Kannustamme lähihahmojen pelaajia keskustelemaan etukäteen lyhyesti hahmojen suhteesta. Saatte tähän hahmojen mukana helpot ohjeet.

Pelissä on mukana valokuvaaja. Valokuvissa mukana olo on vapaaehtoista.

Kielet: Suomi ja englanti.

*Pelissä kosketetaan muita pelaajia käsien ja käsivarsien alueelle. Kosketusta sisältävät pelikohdat tehdään kasvomaskit päällä. Jos joulukuussa korona-tilanne on vakavampi, kosketusmekaniikat korvataan välimatkan sisältävillä mekaniikoilla.

Larp-suunnittelu: Teo Ala-Ruona, Even Minn, Pihla Lehtinen 
Äänisuunnittelu: Satu Kankkonen
Pukusuunnittelu: Alvi Haapamäki
Taiteellinen ja teoreettinen neuvonanto: Camille Auer, Eeti Piiroinen
Dramaturginen dialogi: Emil Santtu Uuttu
Tuotanto: Riikka Thitz
Valokuvaus larpissa: Nova Kaspia

Peliä edeltävä workshop: 11:00 – 14:30 (sisältää lounastauon)
Peli: 15:00 – 17:30
Purku: 18:00 – 19:00

Osallistumismaksu: Maksa mitä haluat. Työryhmä lahjoittaa osallistumismaksut kokonaisuudessaan Black Trans Travel Fundin toimintaan.

Deep Time Transcestors -projektia on tukenut Koneen Säätiö.

Teo Ala-Ruona & Venla Helenius
Titanik-gallery, Turku 2019

“I want to sing for my friends, here and now, sing so hard that my heart melts down. I want to break myself, and sacrifice everything for them.
I want to be broken and just as scattered as I am, and just keep on singing.“
– Ala-Ruona & Helenius

You bring the light is an autofictive ceremony of love dedicated to friends, reaching out from teenage years to infinity. We want to show friendship love as the biggest love of all. It is a fundamental power that supports life, and can accompany you through whatever: the darkest fears, traumas, pain and changes. We couldn’t go on without each other. But then again, we think that friendship can be a harrowing lovestory that includes heartbreaks, possessiveness and fear of losing someone.

You bring the light -exhibition consisted of a love ballad, karaoke-video of the love ballad, photographs, latex sculpture and a video.

“…to try to treat my friends more like my dates — to give them special attention, honor my commitments to them, be consistent, and invest deeply in our futures together.”
– Dean Spade, For Lovers and fighters

TWAH(=These Worlds Are Here) was a project realised during my stay in Los Angeles in the summer 2019. The project consisted of two consecutive parts, starting with a four-day long writing workshop for trans, non-binary, queer people and women, held in NAVEL. The workshop culminated in an intimate audio and text installation within a mobile Gas gallery.

The workshop allowed participants to LARP (live action role play) queer worlds as they wrote, asking them to experience and embody these imagined worlds at the moment of writing. In the workshop we asked how can we consider writing to be a political tool for naming, re-naming, making visible, audible and felt the dreams that we care for. How can writing be a vehicle—how can it move, touch, orient and re-orient us?

A chorus of words, both written and spoken, by workshop attendees was the basis of the exhibition in Gas’s truck gallery. Listen to the sound piece HERE.

CREDITS:

The written and spoken words of the work:
Teo Ala-Ruona
Angi Brzycki (website)
Jessica Fee (website)
Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai (website)
R. Kauff (website)
Arin Krausz
Julia Mande (website)
Renée Reizman (website)
Bridgid Ryan (website)
Daviel Shy (website)
Soffia Stiassni 
Kristof Trakal
Annabel Turrado (website)
Udita Upadhyaya (website)

Curation: Ceci Moss (website)
Production: Gas (website) & NAVEL (website)
Zine cover desing & animation: Anni Puolakka (website)
Sound assistance: Scallion Chloe (website)
Production assistance: Saara Hannus (website)
Documentation: Larin Sullivan (website)
Supported by: Frame Contemporary Finland, Suomen Kulttuurirahasto & Poets and Writers

Performances:
Wonderlust-festival. Helsinki. 2019
Lichen Fest. Mustarinda. Online. 2020

Clay Erotics is an on-going project by Teo Ala-Ruona, Ami Karvonen, Anni Puolakka and lots of clay.

First outcome of the project was a partly improvised, partly planned and thoroughly enjoyed consensual, erotic, sexual and playful performance, that was performed in Wonderlust-festival 2019, in All That Swag -night.

The second outcome of the project was an audio drama Clay Erotics: Forest’s Lap. It is an improvised speech act which fantasizes about clay as a lover. The work was part of Mustarinda online Lichen Fest 2020.  Link to the work (in Finnish).

Working group: Teo Ala-Ruona, Ami Karvonen & Anni Puolakka

Performances:
Asbestos Art Space. Helsinki. 2019
Human Resources. Los Angeles. 2019
Mad House Helsinki. 2019
Tehdasteatteri. Turku. 2020

“Ages ago, about exactly one week after having Nexplanon removed from the inner side of my left arm, under the skin, I felt how my shoulders widened.

Nexplanon is a birth control implant that releases progestin. It contains 68 mg of the active substance etonogestrel. Synthetic progestin mimics the actions of progesterone, a naturally occurring hormone.”

toxinosexofuturecummings is a bodyfiction about pleasurable sex on a polluted planet. It’s a speech performance of a body making itself with words.

In the performance sex is seen as an evolutionary and developmental process. It opens up a world in which materials and multispecies bodies infiltrate each other, giving and receiving pleasure. The world is thoroughly polluted, but possible, queer and trans.

toxinosexofuturecummings is a performance about an anticipatory and transformational state.

Duration: approximately 50 min.
Premiere: 2nd of March 2019, Asbestos Art Space, Helsinki.
Finnish documentation by Jaakko Pallasvuo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIe76N8XIgw&feature=youtu.be

Working group:
Teo Ala-Ruona (text & speech)
Alvi Haapamäki (costume & mask)
Satu Kankkonen (sound design)
Even Minn (dramaturgy)

Production assistance: Saara Hannus
Promo photos: Nova Kaspia
Documentation: Jaakko Pallasvuo, Saara Autere
Featuring voice: Eeti Piiroinen

Work has been supported by Taike.

Performances: Vapaan Taiteen Tila. Helsinki. 2018

”This is the site. My elbow is holding the floor as if I were underneath it and not on top. This isn’t true, I’m already halfway in a fiction.

Come, darling, come. In certain light, we are here.”

Nowhere in Particular (NIP) was an hour long speech performance, a community of parallel worlds created by writing. NIP was an assembly of transient scenes, landscapes and visions, that came together in a heterogenous stream of words: overlapping, interlacing, amplifying and echoing each other. These words took a form of speech, and were listened by others than their writers. In NIP listeners were invited to traverse through a variety of spoken, fragmented worlds, as well as create new ones in their own imaginations. NIP could be considered both as a demonstration, a frontal performance and a proposal for other kinds of worlds to exist.

The words spoken in NIP had been created in workshops with women, non-binary, trans- and queer people exploring the words’ world-making potential; how can the world of writing be feminist speculative fiction in practice?

Concept and coordination: Teo Ala-Ruona
Words by: Teo Ala-Ruona, Alvi Haapamäki, Venla Helenius, Anni Kaila, Satu Kankkonen, Leena Kuusisto, Milka Luhtaniemi, Daniela Pascual, Gesa Piper, Iona Roisin
Performers: Teo Ala-Ruona, Alvi Haapamäki, Venla Helenius, Anni Kaila, Anna Kankila, Satu Kankkonen, Leena Kuusisto, Inna Lampinen, Nadja Leham, Milka Luhtaniemi and Gesa Piper
Dramaturg: Milka Luhtaniemi
Sound designer: Satu Kankkonen
Lighting designer: Johannes Vartola

2016 – 2017

Garden of Others was a collaborative project initiated by Teo Ala-Ruona and Shelley Etkin. It combined both gardening and performance, offering practices for being together, in a squatted garden space near Vantaa river. The garden was made by, framed by and inhabited by the working group and others: rabbits, deers, mosquitos, birds, slugs.

Coming from lineages of guerrilla practices and urban gardening, Garden of Others asked, how can gardening be a feminist practice? What is the role of caring, tending, and stewarding without placing humans at the center? Who constitutes the ‘other’? How might this inform our practices of solidarity, sanctuary, and alternative notions of ownership and influence?

Within the frame of Garden of Others project the working group made one performance action in the garden area, took part in Pixelache Empathy as Resistance project as well as facilitated a lunch event in the Pixelache Festival 2017. The event was called Lunch as a Temporary Autnonomous Zone, and it included three courses made from the ingredients from the Garden of Others. The lunch was offered for approximately 20 guests.

Working group: Teo Ala-Ruona, Shelley Etkin

Performances: Under the bridge of Hakaniemi. Helsinki. 2017

Ksenos was a two week long performance installation taking place in Helsinki, under the bridge of Hakaniemi, inside and next to a parked caravan in August 2017.

Ksenos was: resting, idling and dreaming about possible future visions, giving the central stage for worn-out fossil-capitalist bodies. The work inhabited a caravan: a surplus of heteronormative and capitalist family narrative.

Ksenos is a word that stems from Greek word Xenos, that refers to a ”stranger” and a ”guest friend”. Stranger refers to something unknown, whereas guest is something that is an expected visitor who is being treated with hospitality. Ksenos thus combines love of the uncanny and expectation towards the unknown.

The performance installation consisted of two parts: the other was a durational and daily performance taking place inside the caravan, and the other a one-hour-long performance taking place outside the caravan, on seven evenings. The performance inside the caravan included two human bodies resting and humming, a video, texts and plants. The performance outside the caravan was a manifest for a future, performed by two performers.

Ksenos performance installation preceded a year and half -long research period focusing on questions around resource thinking and post-fossil speculations. This research period included a reading group and a workshop for public.

Credits:
Working group and production: Venla Helenius and Teo Ala-Ruona
Supported by: Niilo Helanderin Säätiö and Helsinki University of Arts

Vimeo-link to KSENOS documentation: https://vimeo.com/306561928

2016 – 2017

The Nonhuman Island was a two-year performative research project that approached nonhuman beings as potential performance makers. In the project nonhuman beings were considered both as collaborators and as independent performers and performance creators. The project asked how can performances happen in nonhumans’ terms, and what kind of performance structures and methods nonhuman beings propose and generate. What kind of changes of perception do these kind of performances create in human beings? Who and what are the audience of nonhuman performances? Can performance happen without any presence or intervention of humans?

The project consisted of three phases. In the first phase, nonhuman beings were approached as equal collaborators in performance making; in the second phase, the working group asked can performances be initiated by nonhumans; and in the third phase, the performances happened (or did not happen) without any human interference.

The research process was shared with audience in monthly events, which included discussions, performances and sharing of working methods and exercises. Events were open for anyone.

The project culminated in a two day seminar in May 2017. The seminar included presentations of artists working with nonhuman performance, discussions and two performances.

Project website:
http://www.todellisuus.fi/ei-inhimillinen-2#etu-ei

Credits:
Concept and coordination: Saara Hannula
Working group: Teo Ala-Ruona, Saara Hannula, Luka, Minja Mertanen, Linda Priha, Kati Raatikainen, and other (non)human beings
Production: Reality Research Center

2014 – 2016

The BodyBuilding Project is a shared inquiry into the sensibilities, subjectivities and relational capacities we, as interdependent beings, might beneficially develop in response to the planetary urgencies we currently face. It encourages us to reimagine the propensities currently identified as “human,” and to begin building bodies capable of prefiguring life beyond our collapsing horizons.

The project consists of a perennial artistic research process and a series of public events created collaboratively by a growing body of artists, theorists and practitioners. Our aim is to develop a series of embodied practices that can be sustained both individually and collectively and transmitted in a variety of ways.

Credits
Project coordination: Saara Hannula
Working group: Teo Ala-Ruona, Outi Condit, Daria Faïn, Saara Hannula, Ilpo Heikkinen, Robert Kocik, Satu Palokangas, Alan Prohm, Tommi Vasko, Carmen C. Wong (2014–2016); Daria Faïn, Christina Guerrero-Harmon, Scott Elliott, Saara Hannula, Robert Kocik, Elisa Laurila, Riikka Notkola, Alan Prohm (2007–2009)
Visual Material: Saara Hannula and Tommi Vasko
Documentation: Tani Simberg, Christopher Hewitt, Salla Lahtinen and working group
Production: HIAP, Baltic Circle, Kiasma Theatre
Funding: Kone Foundation, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland