Nowhere in Particular

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