Photography by Daria Akimenko from the set of documentary film ‘Chronicles of Wind and Stillness’ (2015)

“Women Living on the Edges of the World” is an international research and art collaboration among various global artist communities, with the goal of studying how art empowers women in marginal conditions. The art and research explore concepts of marginality, which in this project is defined by conditions of isolation and migration. This unique cross-continental collaboration explores and presents the art and research processes of women working in diverse situations across various continents, while facing the challenges of isolation and marginalisation. Central to this study are women artists who may transition from one role to another (such as spouse, mother, researcher, professional, teacher, artist, maker, and friend), continuously shifting between identities to enable their becoming within communities, while navigating their marginalities.

The members of this research group, Satu Miettinen, Melanie Sarantou, Tarja Wallius, Daria Akimenko, and Nuno Escudeiro, will share this problematic position by occupying dualistic roles, simultaneously being both artists and researchers. Apart from exploring their own individual art and research projects with marginalised communities in Finland, Ireland, Namibia and the United States, this group will also work as a team to make, discuss, exhibit and share art with marginalised communities from Rovaniemi in Lapland, Murmask in Russia and Port Augusta and Oak Valley in South Australia.

Art is a medium that enables the shaping of identities of marginalised women, while it also serves as a tool to process relationships within the communities they live in. Artists and makers negotiate and sustain their identities and existence through their practices, despite the challenges they face. Their narratives will reveal how qualities of life and work environments impact their art practices. Just as art making offers ways to ‘work through’ their particular life challenges, narratives provide ways to make sense of difficult circumstances. This research project will demonstrate how art and narratives function in social realms and suggest that stories play a crucial role in socially sustaining artists and their making practices. Women’s stories of empowerment and care for one another and themselves, which emerge through art practices and making, will be some of the outcomes this project aims to achieve. Such outcomes offer a means of coming to terms with and coping with the marginalities that women encounter.

This innovative research and art project offers the participants the opportunity to orchestrate and design interventions according to their choice and how they envisage the execution of the art projects within their communities. This approach allows for a more balanced situation to emerge, where both participants and researchers have to cope with the familiar and the unfamiliar. Taking into account the project’s focus on making the participants’ voices audible, this approach will ensure this outcome, as the researchers’ input will be to record, document, and contextualise their stories. The research team will share their thoughts in group discussions while using fieldwork diaries, along with a variety of other tools, to explore narrativity in different forms, such as video, audio, written documentation, and texts. These narrative forms will make the research processes and outcomes more accessible and audible to a broader audience.

Project vimeo channel

The project is funded by Kone Foundation