Terike Haapoja: Everything comes back to the body

Our relationship with technology, nature and the nonhuman world has been the focus of my practice for more than a decade. The boundary that I have explored for so long has never been only about ‘interspecies connection’, but about connection in general. It has been driven by the question of how to connect with what is beyond myself; of how to relate to the beings and forces I live among.

Through which means do I understand that which I, ultimately, cannot? The question of the nonhuman has always been a personal, embodied one. It has gradually led me to look at society through structures of connection and disconnection, inclusion and exclusion, in ways that are more and more related to my own bodily being.

When you come close to your own mortality, all abstraction falls off from the question regarding existence. The ethical demand – how to live with others – becomes rooted in a heightened sense of vulnerability and exposure of your own bodily being. Instead of consciously thinking of others, you hear your own fears and desires and then expand that notion outwards, trying to grasp that these same depths live in every being. We fear for our bodies and reach out to connect with those of others’. That is all.

In order to navigate the question of how to live in this world, I find it necessary to reconnect with that bodily, direct, intimate way of being. I need to let my body tell me what moves me, what turns me on and what I crave. Our tolerance for complexity is vanishing, but complexity is where truth lays, and the particular experience of oneself is the path to that truth; a truth that doesn’t settle and yet allows understanding. Everything comes back to the body.

The photography series Gravitation was born out of an urgency where only creation mattered, and where creation was the manifestation of being alive, of the vitality of pain, fear and desire. In more ways than one Gravitation saved me. It carried me to an other side and to a place where the abstractions of theory feel important but remote. It also encouraged new approaches and engagement with new mediums.

Once I had a desire to give away my own will and cradle in the safety of someone else’s rules. In our society freedom is everything, the ultimate goal. Yet our freedom is conditional, subjected to rules we’ve internalized so well that guarding them becomes who we are. Void of true agency, freedom becomes a burden where all responsibility lays on the individual. The dream is that captivation frees us from that burden. And the tragedy is that as free subjects we cannot give away our freedom. It can only be taken from us in force by others. Those outside this law are perhaps only – yes – wild animals. Studies on Freedom, the participatory gesture created for ANTI Festival, approaches this condition.

In August 2017
Terike Haapoja

The writer is the 2016 winner of ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art and returns to Kuopio with a series of new works, Studies on Freedom I-II and Gravitation.