Breathing, Lying, Sitting, Standing, and Walking: Finland's ANTI Festival

Abstract

Site-specific artwork developed out of the art world’s reaction against selfcontained modernist sculpture as a means of acknowledging the factors that are extraneous to the work of art, including environment, history, memory, and geography. Performance, which appeared in the art world at around the same time as site-specific art, was also concerned with reintroducing the extraneous into the hermeneutic environment of modern art through the agency of the artist’s body. Although site-specific art and performance share an intellectual and ontological genesis, there has been very little attempt to link them conceptually until recently. I propose to explore the implications of site for the performing body and vice versa in order to make a case for the centrality of the body as carrier, interpreter, and transformer of the meaning of the site through an examination of work made for the ANTI Festival, an annual event of site-specific time-based performance art that takes place in Kuopio, Finland. The ANTI Festival (Anti means “gift” in Finnish) is a unique festival that is premised upon site-specific performance art made outside of traditional institutions and spaces. Audience members who come specifically to attend the ANTI Festival become performers themselves as they traipse through the city and its environs in the wake of the performing artists. At the same time, the site marks the body of the artist in some way, so that there is a mutual exchange between the artist and the site. The first ANTI Festival, sponsored by the Arts Council of North Savo, took place in 2002. This festival was such a success that it has subsequently been held annually, with the most recent festival taking place in late September 2009. The ANTI Contemporary Art Festival was founded in 2005 and the organization of the festival transferred to the association. That same year, a seminar entitled Talks and Deeds, was held in April outside of the festival. Talks and Deeds was subsequently incorporated into the festival program itself, which has allowed for presentations by academics and artists to expand upon the theme of the festival that year. Although sited in Kuopio, which is about four hours north of Helsinki, the ANTI Festival has become an international event. The ANTI Festival was originally co-directed by Johanna Tuukkanen, a dancer and resident of Kuopio, and Erkki Soininen, a visual artist based in Helsinki. In 2007, Gregg Whelan replaced Soininen as co-artistic director. In the past three years, Whelan, a member of the successful British duo Lone Twin,