‘Jazz Factory’ — Group presentation organised by Sakari Tervo

JazzFactory

Organised by Sakari Tervo

works by

Arina Baranova
Hanna Hyy
Ville Kallio
Janne Kärkkäinen
Eeva Lietonen
Ristomatti Myllylahti

text by

Kim Modig

photographs by

Sakari Tervo

Photos taken in November 2019 at Jazz Factory,
a dance studio in Helsinki, Finland.

The Accidental Building of Desire City

We can create things such as artworks, but we can’t help the effect fog and other atmospheric agents have on how those works will be experienced. We can’t ask someone to not consider the feelings evoked by their standing in the rain as they browse our pdf file on their phone at a bus stop. Or can we?

We used to be told body language makes for a big chunk of how we’re read. Back then, we were still trying to heal the Cartesian cut. We needed to hear the body matters, too, not only the mind. Now that we’ve more or less regained our bodies (sometime around last century???), becoming fully aware how they carry meaning and life, it’s time we play with the atmospheric in order to reclaim situational agency. We’ve been talking about our emotions — and that’s a good start. But we must go further than mapping feelings. While the concept of affect looks at collectively shared emotions, thinking in atmospherics will lead us to understand what those affects do to us and vice versa.

Concepts surrounding the atmospheric helps us in the dream-like task of feeling our ways in situations where we have little idea what else is going on, which is to say almost all situations. For example, what we’d define us a singular situation might seem like nine, or zero, to somebody else. For others, our divisions might be meaningless, or worse, fatal. Then there are those in the situation of whose presence or agency we’re not even aware.

All of this unfolds, or stays folded, under an atmosphere. It yeilds different outcomes for everyone within. Rain means crops for one, flu to another. But rain can serve as a metaphor for the atmospheric only if your actions can the rain. Otherwise, it’s just rain. In 1992, Madonna performed Rain; what are you going to do?

Simply put, atmospheric thinking makes us a problematic we. Our unit comes alive as each of us senses, coordinates, and performs the ethics of a given situation. Each ‘I’ that makes up the ‘we’ will become, maintain, and mutate themselves through the situation. Being aware of such processes might lead you to question the foundations of your subjectivity. Maybe you’re an ‘I’ because the ‘we’ needs you to be one, or is it the other way around? Or is the fog to blame?

Maybe this is horseshit. But this atmospheric affair has been bugging me in a kind of dreamy way: I’m not sure if this is magic, logic, an epic, or myopic. The way I sense it, atmospheric is akin to improvised architecture: the halfaccidental building of Desire City. We’re not talking about Helsinki here, which is hung up on evoking emotions without ideas what do with them. Every feeling felt in public in Helsinki gets an exclamation mark after it, to make sure you can see how much fun we’re having here stuffing blueberry oatmeal porridge to our mouths. But even with Helsinki, there’s more than one of everything.

Let’s say the violence of the exclamation mark signalled the last century and the first two decades of this one. The upcoming atmospheric epoch requires something more open-ended. What do you think about ellipsis for 2020 . . . Ellipsis means those three little dots, but it also refers to a grammatical feature, a kind of shortening. (Example: ‘Thank you’, instead of ‘I thank you’ —we know it’s you who´s doing the thanking.) If the latter should only occur ‘when part of a clause is left understood and the reader or listener is able to supply the missing words’, as The Chicago Manual of Style advices us, then ellipses of all kinds test whether we have any shared understanding left.

In a city without ellipses, nothing is understood so everything needs to be spelled out. And rain really just happens on you, like a flock of exclamation marks hitting you from above; a Helsinki rain. In comparison, the dots feel soft and malleable; there’s so much more you could do—and be—with them.