Two dancers, Gesa Piper and Paula Kramer, spent thirteen days on site in Kilpisjärvi, February 2025. Two outdoor movement phases every day, two days with Venla Helenius and camera alongside. Moving with a somewhat strict regularity, always when the light comes streaming in and again when it leaves. Slowly growing familiar with and to this place, its rhythms, colours and forms, its embeddedness into the larger universe.
This text speaks of experiences, conversations and ideas from Gesa Piper's, Paula Kramer's, and Venla Helenius' collaborative residency and was written mainly during the ferry journey back home, from Helsinki to Travemünde, by Paula Kramer.
Deep winter in Sápmi, northern Finland, light recently returned. Two new residents arriving, beginning to practice. Going out every day, sometimes walking, sometimes skiing, sometimes using snowshoes. Finding pathways and places, staying on site for a long or short hour, plus a walk to and from site.
First we move here and there, also on separate sites. A bit up the mountain (Saana), among the birches, by or on the lake. After three days and helped by a skiing journey to the store that did not work out, we find a site to return to, a place we both feel a sense of connection with, a place full of variations. It’s a kind of mini-peninsula on the lake shore, land extending in a slight rugged curve into water. Boulders and earth, all covered with snow now, the exact shoreline is hard to see. About a kilometre’s walk from the station.
Every day we meet and are met by the softness of snow, the harshness of ice, the delicacy of colours, of forms. We are held by the spaciousness of lake and sky, the strength of fells and ice, the huge, large, open bowl that is this landscape. Carried also by the dark, unknown, expansive under-ice underbelly of the lake.
Photo: Venla Helenius
What we do could maybe be called: experiential, embodied exploration of the anatomy of land. Or: experiential, embodied exploration of geology, geography, astronomy. Or: being and moving among all that is present, at dusk and at dawn.
Moving with the moving bodies of the universe, for a few days this is one of our most prominent themes. We understand so viscerally that it is not the sun that is rising and setting (which of course we know), but that instead this constantly turning planet Earth dives into the sunlight and into the shadow of night. And we turn, travel and dive with it, always on the ferry Earth, always in movement, always being transported from one moment to the next, from one angle in relationship to the universe as a whole, to another.
Meanwhile the stars hold their positions and we travel under them, meanwhile the moon follows its pathway around Earth, becoming visible to us in relationship to the light of Sun. This is a huge scale to be moving with, unfathomable in a way, but at the same time so visceral, so simple, so straightforward, repeating itself over and over again with variations in the constellation. Here we are, constantly moving on this moving planet.
Other themes that emerge: the wild variation of colours, colours of morning, colours of evening, colours of midday, colours of night. Arctic blue in the snow, sundown rosiness on the fell-slopes, purple and deep blue steaks in the sky, all shades of white and grey, golden sun, rainbow in cloud – total abundance. Huge dimensions and volumes hosting the smallest berry leaves peaking through snow as well as mid-sized boulders transported here as the last ice-age receded. Three dimensionality abounds.
Wind and temperatures always changing, from wild rattling to total stillness, from piercing cold to dripping mild, snow melts imminently when temperatures rise above zero. Days with plus degrees are too many and it is scary. Our world is falling apart.
Photo: Venla Helenius
Is climate change the fever of the planet to get rid of the disease of the human? For the health of the planet I am quite willing to say: yes, just throw us out! May your wild green, blue, yellow, silver ways recover, return to abundance, revive, breathe, blossom. If only we humans were not so full of feelings and relationship, so full of love and longing, so exposed to also feeling pain and fear. If only we could go all of us together. To imagine the agony of one dying after the other, the slow and brutal withering of humankind in waves – this I find too much to fathom.
On site we continue to go out every day, on dripping and on icy days, morning and afternoon, paying attention to the land, moving with the turning earth into the light of day and into the shadow of night. We lie, we sit, we land. We walk, we stand. We move, we dance, we sing, we shout. In between conversations unfold, amongst us and in dialogue with the people that live here, work here, belong here on a daily basis.
The land directly around Kilpisjärvi used to be regularly touched by the nomadic movements of the Sámi and their herds coming in for the winter and moving out in the summer. Yet the Finnish government - this we learn from Hannu Autto, the station coordinator at the research station and Leena Valkeapää, a local artist with close connections to reindeer herding, the station and Bioart Society - never recognized Sámi rights as full property rights (ownership, right to sell etc.) in this region, but rather granted user rights (right to use the pastures etc.). This also entails that the land is easier to sell today than it would be had the land ever had official Sámi ownership.
Through conversations with Leena and Hannu we also come to learn about two major journeys of Sámi people from this region (Enontekiö) in 1925 and 1930 to various German cities, including Berlin, to which all three of us (Gesa, Paula, Venla) have links. These journeys were part of the dark tradition of exhibiting people and their ways of life in zoos and at fairs, practices that so fundamentally speak of an immensely skewed and hierarchical understanding of humanity. Yet the positions and experiences of individuals in these journeys were diverse and through conversations and readings we also learn to differentiate – to see not only lookers and onlooked, but also agency on both sides.
Photo: Venla Helenius
Clearly these are conversations to be continued. First texts we engaged with whilst still at the station were a Finnish article on the work of Veli-Pekka Lehtola, written by Mikko-Pekka Heikkinen in 2022, to which Leena pointed us, and Michaela Weißmann’s doctoral thesis Images of the Sámi (2010, in German). Reading and talking about these articles, looking at old photographs together, sharing family memories and translating texts for each other, we understand that these journeys (and other movements of people, like those of soldiers and scientists) link our families and cultural heritages in a wide and not always easy sense. “Might the tangents of our family lineages have touched somewhere else before?” – is one of the wonderings that emerges in our conversations. Between us we have German grandfathers who have been in Finland as soldiers and ornithologists, as well as a Sámi great-grandmother and grandfather that came to Berlin in 1925 and 1930, alongside other, more recent lines, leading into and out of Berlin, Helsinki, Enontekiö.
We started this journey with the intention to learn from the mountain, and much we have learned indeed. There is no way of creating an exhaustive summary of all we have been exposed to, but we know we have crossed paths with cultural and historical, as well as geological, astronomical, material knowledges and landscapes, having been touched by both the atmospheric and the material. We return with the abundance of this place inscribed into the memory banks of our cells, our bodies, our bones, our feelings and our dreams. Saana and Malla were with us wherever we went, as were the boulders dropped by moving ice and the fells all around. Rockbody strength and gentle slopes, folds and rounds from time long gone.
Unforeseeably, we learn from the mountain to befriend the lake, this vast and icy expanse carrying us all the way to Sweden. We learn what kind of clothing we need and to love the cold and dread the dripping waters of too warm. We get to know people and their working rhythms at the station, schedules in sync with ice thickness, data gathering sequences, seasons, visitors and more. We learn to sense the rotation of the earth and how the immense ferry of Earth carries all of us, always. We learn to arrive and land and how hard it is to go. We arrive excited and leave full of gratitude. Thank you. May we all meet again and re-turn, re-visit; sharing each other’s places, sites and spaces, histories, food and friends, urgencies, visions and potentials.
Our residency period was funded by the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation and the international mobility programme Culture Moves Europe, both of which we are very grateful for! We are also really thankful to Bioart Society Helsinki, the Biological Research Station in Kilpisjärvi and all the people involved for making this residency programme possible!
We are currently working on a small publication and will add information on it to this blog post once it is ready.
Photos on top: Venla Helenius