ANTI Contemporary Art Festival 2017: Water

Abstract

This curatorial practice research gathered international artists and performance makers with academics and actors working in the fields of public health policy, local and national governance and environmental and biological sciences to deliver a programme of publicly sited and participatory performance works and a seminar focused on the politics, poetics, aesthetics and ecological paradigms of water. Produced by ANTI Contemporary Art Festival (Kuopio, Finland) in partnership with the Finnish organisation Our Water Conscious Land, the research presented an interdisciplinary set of enquiries that, across creative and discursive frameworks examined how water, and the processes that enable and construct human interaction, are variously apprehended in terms of political and ecological crisis and danger (the human cost of waterborne migration, global warming etc.) and (allied to romanticism’s natural-world narratives and historical cultural/creative practices) as ‘life giving’ and the locus of ‘progress’, leisure, urbanism, civility and exploration. The performance works offered open engagement with, and reflection on, these propositions to a broad public audience of 11,000 people, with presentations including: Mark Požlep (SI), Island; Gwendoline Robin (BE), Cratère n°6899; Milla & Pertti Martikainen (FI), Global Flood; Anouska Samms & Sofia Pancucci-McQueen (UK): The Baths, Professor Minty Donald & Nick Millar (UK), Watermeets Kuopio; French & Mottershead (UK), Waterborne; River Lin (TW), Cleansing Service; Instant Dissidence (UK): Dancing With Strangers: From Calais to Finland; Alan Dunn & Jeff Young (UK), Music for the Williamson Tunnels: a collection of the sound of dripping water; Kaaos Company (FI), Pond. The international seminar Politics and Poetics of Water included presentations from programmed artists Milla Martikainen and Andrew Mottershead alongside: Antti Rautavaara, Senior Water Advisor, Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Tiina Arpola & Antti Kotimaa, Savonia University of Applied Sciences & Games for Health, and Simo Pehkonen, Professor of Environmental and Biosciences, University of Eastern Finland