The new year has started with a bang. Our research group is still busy with two workshops, a seminar, and an exhibition at Katve galleries in Arktikum. Artists from around the world met, discussed, and worked together in Rovaniemi from December 5th to 9th, 2016. We had an international group of artists from Moldova, Estonia, Russia, Finland, the UK, and the Netherlands discussing how marginalities are produced and the politics of the margins. One of the major discussions during the workshop was about who defines the margin and how the person’s position reflects it.

The nature of artistic research is about long-term processing, where research questions are produced and discovered during the process, rather than having all the questions at the beginning. The workshop concluded with a one-day seminar where the artistic research process was reflected upon and discussed. The seminar themes centred on the materiality of making, the construction of expert knowledge, research methodologies, and constructing an artistic research process around these themes.

The above pictures are from the initial session that started the process in Rovaniemi. Artists were collaboratively working with felting. The felted piece was constructed around the arch of life. Each participant formed a symbol or shape that described a meaningful aspect of their lives and placed it in the arch of life. This formed a process of sharing and learning to know each other. After this, the piece was felted into an art piece over the first few days using the hand and feet rolling technique in smaller groups. During the Rovaniemi process, artists also worked on their individual artworks, which were exhibited in a joint exhibition called “Every Margin Tells a Story”.

Today, we were dismantling the exhibition. I’m still reflecting on the themes discussed during the workshop, seminar, and exhibition. In my artistic work, this process has set me up to work more with socially engaged work, personal histories, and collaborative processes. It is very inspirational to process, both collaboratively and individually, the themes and material contents of this research process. The start of the year is pushing me into a more analytical process of thinking about the value and content of the joint process, a journey and figuring out if I could use an artistic medium for this reflection.

By Satu Miettinen