I HEAR FOOTSTEPS – Aapo Korkeaoja

Performance on December 8, 2021, at 12:00 PM

The construction of the I Hear Steps installation began with a melody composed by Aapo Korkeaoja. Together with musician friends, the improvised music structures the seven stories of the installation into an almost two-hour-long whole.

For Korkeaoja, who has made social art and is known as a performance artist, creating a spatially beautiful work was a personal challenge. The beauty of the work is not based on integrity, but on a strange, skewed and upside-down balance.

At the heart of the installation are the stories, recorded by Korkeaoja using stream-of-consciousness speech techniques without a text-based script. The stories are set in a mental landscape, a subconscious, where the narrator character confronts his own past and values, his desires incarnated as men walking against him. In the stories, we walk because walking is part of thinking and a symbol of the journey we take towards the goal of wisdom, a horizon that can never be reached by escaping it with each step, one step at a time.

The characters in the stories include a father who is crushed by the pressure of the rush hour pushing two car wheels in a supermarket, a farmer tilling his fields, a young man who has lost his first love and is fleeing in morbid fear.

For Korkeaoja, a work made from natural materials is a natural way to make art. Korkeaoja, who farms an organic farm in Kokemäki, has been developing fibre hamburger production for the past decade, and in the work installed in Poriginal Gallery he has used the harvest from his own farm in different ways: as fibre and as whole stalks of fibre hamburger.

You can dive into the exhibition. You can touch things, sit on chairs covered with autumn leaves and fibre rugs or lie on the floor listening to a story.

The exhibition is supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland (TAIKE).

Translated with DeepL.com