ARTISTS TALKING

Tea Mäkipää was born in Lahti, Finland in 1973. She studied BA Fine Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and she came to London to undertake an MA Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, which she completed in 2003. She recently moved to Weimar in Germany. Mäkipää works in a variety of media: installation, photography, public art, text, video and collaboratively with other artists. Recent exhibitions by Mäkipää include installation ‘1:1’, in Art Projects, Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami, USA 2006; ‘Catwalk’, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2006; ‘World of Plenty’, photo installation for EXPO 2005 in Nagoya, Japan 2005 and ‘Parasites-When Space Comes Into Play’, Museum of Modern Art, Vienna 2004. For 2007, she has been invited to contribute to the 8th Sharjah Biennial: Still Life – Art, Ecology & The Politics of Change.

The urban dystopia

Her work is driven by the urgency to bring to attention humankind’s exploitation of nature and its consumerist desire for material wealth at the expense of the planet’s finite resources. This drive in her artistic practice is expressed through engaging with art principally within the public realm. Her installations are intriguing dystopic metaphorical interventions that convey our relationship to the planet and our urban environment. 1:1 (2004) is an installation with sound by Tony Ikonen. It is a construction of the skeleton of a modern apartment displaying its piping, electrical cables, and ventilation shaft. The soundtrack is the ghost of human presence and inhabitance, recorded conversations and drama. The structure is at an angle, tilted as if it is being sucked into the earth. Its presence is formidable, with actual proportions of a house at 9x7x6m.

An earlier installation, Parasite (1997-98), again explores an urban metaphor of over-consumption. The parasite in question is a building; a small shack made from wood and galvanized iron, which is attached twenty meters from street level to a concrete high-rise block. The shack feeds off the high rise through electrical cables and drives a soundtrack again conveying an inhabited presence. These urban public art projects express the paradox of the urban environment – the infrastructure of luxurious living against the force of nature, the superstructures of contemporary western architecture against the basic subsistence of shanty-town shacks.

Anti-human?

Mäkipää’s works and her political position can appear pessimistic with its over-emphatic exposition of humans and scientific/technological progress as destructive and a threat to the natural world or ecology. The work could be read as being anti-humanist and anti-science. To pre-empt such points of view, Mäkipää wrote a paper called The New Humanism. The text is a spontaneous declaration of her viewpoint as a person and an artist, a manifesto that drives her practice artistically and politically.

The New Humanism

“The capitalistic interpretation of humanism secures for every living person the right to use or misuse the natural resources to the maximal amount possible during his/her lifetime. This does not only cover the resources of food and goods, but also experiences, travels and services.

As the winning and the only surviving ideology, capitalism is gaining more consumers around the world, limited only by their economical parameters.

This way of practice and thinking has brought the planet Earth towards a situation of an expanding ecological catastrophe. Fossil fuels, fresh water, clean air and fruitful land and an atmosphere friendly to life as we know it, is running out – not to mention the unique speed of extinction of flora and fauna, caused by man.

The very comfortable and liberating philosophy of consumerism must be replaced by a new humanism that will also take notice of the coming generations of human beings. This new, ecological humanism must also take into account the fact that we are dependent on our environment, physically and mentally. The coming human generations have equal rights to survive and to experience the diverse forms of life on earth – just as those individuals that live right now.

Another related issue is human dignity and an attempt to find a positive answer to the question of whether there is intelligent life on earth. Seen from the environmental point of view, the answer is no. This is very hard and uncomfortable to accept and even harder to change on the level of individual responsibility.

Consciousness is a complicated machinery connected to a variety of feelings, which creates pressure on an individual and her choices. The feelings of wrong and right are, or at least should be, the driving force of the choices in everyday life.

Up-keeping biodiversity must be introduced as the highest moral priority that guides our daily choices.

The processes of consuming natural resources are very complex and layered and therefore need to be more widely discussed and educated. This can also re-enforce the individual experience of being connected as a responsible member of the society he/she is living in. Consciously standing for non-life instead of biodiversity would be a perverse and an evil choice.

The feeling of global guilt connected to frustration and powerlessness, can be fought against by introducing the ecological viewpoint and integrating it in all kinds of education. To admit the feelings in this matter will be the first step. Feeling sad in front of the extinction of another species of animals or plants is the first step to new consciousness. Feeling sorry is the least we can do, but of course it must lead to action in daily life.”

Words into action

Mäkipää’s proposal for Sharjah Biennial 8 puts her ecological activism into practice in the most direct manner. She has created an artwork called 10 Commandments for the 21st Century, commissioned by Sharjah Biennial. During the Biennial the 10 Commandments will be displayed on posters and free postcards. Mäkipää and her husband, the curator Frank Motz embarked on their journey from Weimar on 3 March to Sharjah. Shunning any travel by aviation the couple will journey forth by train, bus, ferry and any other available public transport. After the opening at Sharjah the couple will return to Germany by a freight ship from Dubai via the Suez Canal. Their journey is currently documented on the website www.10commandments.de

Mäkipää explains: “Put into action, the simple rules displayed in 10 Commandments for the 21st Century could slow down and gradually restore some parts of the ecological disaster caused by the human population. If humanity succeeds in steering itself clear of the crash course with its environment, 10 Commandments for the 21st Century will have a different meaning. In the best-case scenario, the future viewers of the artwork will find our current problem, and these ten ideas to solve it, as laughable signs of a rudimental point of history around the year 2000. The aim of the project is to evoke discussion, and to appeal to viewer’s personal feeling of responsibility on the level of daily life and choices. The second aim is to relieve the confusion and frustration of facing ecological issues, by making the choices very simple. The project refers to current technical solutions, instead of better ideas and practices of the future. The art work is non-commercial, trying to be accessible to people of any culture, age, religion or social status.”

On-line diary

Mäkipää’s on line diary is an engaging read with a strong photographic narrative, starting off with idyllic pictures of the artist standing heroically before the Finnish flag, a beautiful picture postcard image of a Finnish landscape, and a fairytale-like frozen river that runs through her grandmother’s land. The images have a Nordic romanticism to them, but then the journey begins to read like a descent into Dante’s Inferno as the couple journey further south through Serbia – “superficially, life in the mountainous, beautiful Serbia looks pretty comfortable... Unfortunately, the signs of lacking or struggling waste management catch the eye. On the outskirts of Belgrade the heaps of rubbish sometimes resemble miniature replicas of exotic mountain ranges – to arriving at Tehran in Iran. Her diary entry dated 12 March 2007 reads: “We have been criss-crossing the city by foot, defying traffic death like devoted eco-evangelists should... Out in the streets it’s Motocalypse Now [a pun on the film title Apocalypse Now]. Moped maniacs, even three stacked on a single bike, drive on sidewalks and tightly crowded bazaars. Luckily these crazed road reapers don’t drive in hotel corridors... In the last twenty-four hours in Tehran we have experienced following symptoms: nosebleed, sore throat, smarting and redness of eyes, trouble of breathing, pimples and heart palpitations while crossing streets. Despite being nutcase drivers Iranians are very friendly.”

This subjective response to major complex issues regarding energy can seem reductive and simplistic in its thinking and strategy. There is a danger that artists from the West adopt a moral superiority over the subaltern worlds’ attempts to develop as advanced societies with the same privileges that the West takes for granted. Nuclear energy is seen is a viable alternative to fossil fuel in Iran, but that only opens up another Western fear of the proliferation of nuclear warfare and nuclear catastrophe. Are artists contributing to our climate of fear? Particularly the fear of advancement in non-Western societies?

Making a living

Artists need to make a living and for Mäkipää her eco-warrior stance doesn’t completely pay the bills. She describes her income as “very uneven³ I do carry with me some amount of fear of tomorrow. This can be recycled as energy and as themes for new works, when and if the money is there! I guess making a living is somewhat a matter of luck and organisation, not only artistic talent.”

Mäkipää would be happy to work with a commercial gallery if it could make her practice part of its programme in a successful way. She has in the past worked with the Finnish Galerie Anhava, and her installation 1:1 at the Art Basal, Miami Beach USA in December 2006.

Mäkipää is currently on a residency programme, currently on hold until autumn 2007, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art where she hopes to complete a new outdoor installation called Atlantis. The idea for the installation is “a small house standing in water but still hosting a stubbornly happy life inside. Through the sounds and lights streaming out of the building, human figures can be seen continuing their everyday activities inside the sinking dwelling, despite its’ apocalyptic condition [from Frank Motz’s text].”

Mäkipää’s craft as an artist, constructing large public installations with great attention to detail that depicts the struggle between nature and humankind and its urban and domestic lifestyles makes for a breathtaking experience, but her standpoint as a committed artist to an ecological mission conveys a deeply pessimistic outlook against human progress and development. Her epic photographic installation, World of Plenty (30x3m, 2005) which was shown at EXPO 2005 in Aichi, Japan is a fantastic panoramic idealist utopia showing humankind sharing the planet in complete equality to other living species. This vision of living at one with nature is Mäkipää’s hope for the future.

Radical positions

This profile was commissioned as part of
a-n Collections: Radical positions

Manick Govinda

Manick Govinda is Head of Artists Advisory Services at London-based Artsadmin, and a Board member of a-n. He researched and edited Future forecast: Curated space in November 2005 and directed the associated think tank. Formerly arts projects officer at the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, his recent projects include the deciBel/Artsadmin Investment in Artists and Curators initiative with Arts Council England, the Artsadmin artists’ bursary scheme, talent scouting for NESTA’s Creative Pioneers Programme and developing an action-research project with Creative Partnerships London East.