W Poszukiwaniu Szczęścia 2008-2010: kwietnia 2010

Teksty krytyczne i utwory literackie 2009, część 4/ Critical and Creative Writings 2009, part 4

Przepraszamy, tekst na chwilę obecną dostępny tylko w wersji angielskojęzycznej.

As we are getting closer to the exhibition at the Arsenał Gallery in Poznań, we would like to look back into The Pursuit of Happiness Project's past. Every Friday starting from today we are going to publish on the blog one of the texts that were included in The Pursuit of Happiness publication in October 2009.

This week a text by Kristina Juntilla.

How is it to live in an old folks home? How can we exercise freedom while our lives are restricted?

For three weeks during the summer 2008 performance artist Kristina Junttila (1977) lived in the old folks home "Kajalakoti" in Pertteli, Finland. She lived the daily routine, shared stories and exercised freedom together with the people that lived there. The project was part of the environmental art exhibition and happening Hiidentie.

Kristina wrote a blog about her life at Kajalakoti and here are edited from this blog(www.pysahdykajalakodissa.blogspot.com). Maybe it has to do with the Pursuit of Hapiness? I know this is not critical writing in that sense, but if you are interested in some of the text, I can also send one or two images.

Arrival, Monday June 2, 2008

I arrived at Kajalakoti ten minutes after 2 pm on Sunday. At this moment of stepping into an unknown project I feel more distant to it and unsure of it as opposed to when I was planning it. I love planning, but we understand something by approaching it. This is an approach. The doors are always locked here. I lock myself in.

- A suitcase with printer, paper, laptop and underwear to fill the holes.

- A backpack with clothes, camera, sound recorder, table cloth, books, knitting wear and pictures of my grandparents.

- A handbag with fruits, money and my calender.

It takes time to feel at home and my way of approaching new places is to clean and move furniture. The furnitures in my room were quiet heavy, but at least I have the strength to move them.

Sleeping. In the middle of the day.

I dont have a pyjamas like the other inhabitants have and I dont have a worker costume, but I have a sign which says ”artist Kristina”. Moving into an old folks home is in many ways a lonely process.

A search for the everyday, Tuesday June 3, 2008

8 am Breakfast.

11:30 am Lunch.

2 pm Coffee.

4 pm Dinner.

6 pm Evening meal.

Just hanging around, Wednesday June 4, 2008.

Seems like the time before bedtime is more restless time than morning. The hallway has allready been walked several times and the painkiller has stopped working. You are searching for your room and still the room that is being told is yours, is not your home. Jelousy towards those that had a better day. The joy of always having people around to talk to, turns into bragging. Clapping hands and searching for your room while childrens TV is showing a purple dance. Kids and old people dont always do like they are told to. Why would they?

Just hanging around. During the nightshift the sounds are sharper. The body has a chance to rest and for those bodies that dont want to rest the sleeping medicine might help. The 10 pm routine check is on its way. Dreaming of places I feel free or running as fast as can be. The TV is still on, but this time there is dramatic music and empty tree houses. Also death is part of a routine. Why wouldnt it be?

Just hanging around.

Time, Wednesday June 4, 2008

I have only been here three days and still I am at times already loosing track of time. What day is it and what time is it? Anyway, there is light outside all the time. I still sleep well throughout the whole night, but others might get dressed at 3 am to go and have breakfast.

”Now it is night. Go back to your bed.” ”It is wednesday and it is already june.” ”Today is not a holiday, it is a normal weekday.” ”We are at Kajalakoti and this is your home.” ”Your room is on the other side.”

If I was to tell exactly what I do and what happens every day it would be a lot of repetition. The one major repetition that you always meet in institutions is to not waste, but to save money. I am still not into this institution enough to notice the saving here, but I have noticed that the people living here are good at saving. The woman folds their napkins carefully so that they can be used again. In a day full of repetition and being I start to learn to pay attention do details. At this moment two fasans are passing my window. I havent seen the rabbit yet today.

Today a coffin left Kajalakoti. A gathering and a small ceremony while the coffin leaves. Today is "Toivon päivä". It means the day of the hope.

Memory of a wish

8 years ago my friend Anna said that she wishes to live in an old folks home so she can get food served, lay down and just watch TV all day. Myself, I think I want to be the person that always walk back and forth with a rulator in the hallway.

What person do you want to be in the old folks home?

- The one that always lay down and watch TV

- The one that always tries to escape through the front door

- The one that always is seated at the table twenty minutes before the food is served

- The one that is flirting with all the girls

- The one that gets blue marks from any minor lift

- The one that always walk back and forth with the rulator

- The one that talks to everybody

- The one that wants to be forced to join the others

- The one that gives candies to all the workers

- The one that tell stories about the beatifull past

- The one that tell stories about the painfull present

- The one that is expected to die any moment

- The one that gets visitors all the time

- The one that is the oldest in the house

- The one that

Opening, June 5, 2008

What do we actually need in life? In the institution we get what we need. The workers give it to us. Food, medicine, clean gebiss and the hat to protect for the sun. It is like keeping track of sixty children or spending time in a long school camp. Where there is place for even unexpected love stories. Is this a place where it is allowed to fall in love? What do we actually need in life?

BINGO, June 7, 2008

65 – 2, bingo!

Come and play,

you can win a lemonade

or a green apple.

We watch, we snatch, we match, we catch

Porridge, June 9 20098

In Finland there are many words for porridge and at Kajalakoti I am daily learning the taste of a new porridge. For breakfast I had porridge with dates, for lunch I had berry porridge and for evening meal I had potato porridge. Porridge seems to be easy to eat and it is good for the stomach. Since I had so much porridge they still havent given me medicine to get the stomach working

Even though my stomach works fine, my head has been like a porridge today. Nothing really motivates. Shoulders are stiff and my feet have only walked on hard floors. I guess my body is aging. Because of clouds, I havent put on my Anti-Age Sun Cream. Are we against age because we fear pain, death or wrinkles?

“What the Hell, is it the death, cause my throat is hurting so much”

Was the first sentence that met me today. Talking about the body is a main subject. Every body part is a possible enemy. While the workers have an extra busy morning because of sickness leaves, we have an extra quite morning. We wait. We look at the floor. We wait. I actually feel a bit stupid. Luckily the porridge tastes good.

The twelve porridges on this weeks menu: Jukolanpuuro. Luumupuuro. Perunapuuro. Ruishutalepuuro. Mannapuuro. Vispipuuro. Ohrahiutalepuuro. Jukolanvehnäpuuro. Kaurapuuro. Grahamvelli. Ohrahintalevelli. Uunipuuro.

Changes, June 10 2008

It is 10th of June, half past seven in the morning. I will go upstairs to wait for my porridge.

From next year onwards there will happen a lot of changes at Kajalakoti. New people will die and others will come. But the changes I talk about has started on a bureaucratic level and will find its way into the life here. As far as I can understand, they are making the institutions more effective. Who knows what will happen?

We can never know. I just know that I like to dream my own life and make decision based on that. I am a performance artist. The context and the place is usually my working tools. I am interested in art in the everyday and the much used participatory performances. Talking about art can be as boring as politics. If I was now to go up and do a performance I could:

* Put as many tables of top of each other as I manage, climb up and ask the others to come as well

* Ask who wants to have a ride on the steelbed (bed for corpses) and drive around with it and leave it in its fridge for a while

* Sing a lullaby

* Write on the chalkboard; Today is the day for us to love each other

* Give all the workers a big glass of digestion medicine

* See if all the people in the house are able to hold hands around in the hallway

Like that, June 14

Even if you today went to sit in your right chair for evening meal, you might forget your place tomorrow.

When someone goes to sit in a wrong chair because they forgot were they place is or maybe just wants to sit in a new place, there is always a moment of confusion. Some of us are waiting for an expert(someone that works here) to get the person on the right track, some are using the situation to have a small fight, one person leaves because of an uncomfortable situation, some people look down and others try to turn it into a joyfull moment.

Today I for the first time fell asleep in the rocking chair. The magic two weeks has passed and from now on I could start knowing how I would make Kajalakoti my home. If I was to do that, I wished that I could fall asleep many times in the common area and have enough time to make it my home before I was off to tomorrowland.

These are words that drown into the paper soup.

These are words that remain.

These are words that have wings.

I am packing.

O autorce:/ About the author:

Kristina Junttila jest artystką performance mieszkającą w Norwegii i Finlandii. Uzyskała tytuł magistra w dziedzinie live art oraz licencjat z wiedzy o teatrze na Akademii Teatralnej w Helsinkach. W 2005 roku uczestniczyła w programie wymiany studenckiej w Dartington College of Arts w Anglii. Tekst, który opublikowała dla projektu W Poszukiwaniu Szczęścia powstał podczas projektu performance zrealizowanego przez artystkę w domu spokojnej starości.

Kristina Junttila is a performance artist based in Norway and Finland. She recently obtained her MA in Live Art and Theory at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki, Finland. In 2006 she received a BA Degree in Contemporary Theatre at that institution. In 2005 she was studying at the Dartington College of Arts, as an exchange student. For The Pursuit of Happiness project she proposed a text created during her performance project implemented at the old people’s home.

Montaż/ Exhibition Making

Teksty krytyczne i utwory literackie 2009, część 3/ Critical and Creative Writings 2009, part 3

Zbliżając się do wystawy w poznańskiej galerii Arsenał chcielibyśmy przypomnieć o powstałych w ramach projektu W Poszukiwaniu Szczęścia tekstach. W każdy kolejny piątek bedziemy zamieszczać na blogu jeden z tekstów, który był opublikowany w publikacji w The Pursuit of Happiness w październiku 2009.

W tym tygodniu publikujemy tekst Adama Goodwina.

Przepraszamy, tekst na chwilę obecną dostępny tylko w wersji angielskojęzycznej.

As we are getting closer to the exhibition at the Arsenał Gallery in Poznań, we would like to look back into The Pursuit of Happiness Project's past. Every Friday starting from today we are going to publish on the blog one of the texts that were included in The Pursuit of Happiness publication in October 2009.

This week - a text on happiness by Adam Goodwin.

You can very rarely go beyond the beyond in life. Of course people may be inclined to try and this is reflected most in our childhood and teenage years where dreams of flight and other such impossible, yet fanciful thoughts, can be found dominating a young mind. As age takes its inevitable hold these dreams are transported into the more normal modes of life that most people recognise as everyday; New Years resolutions that never last longer than two weeks or radical career changes that one imagines will bring fortitude to an otherwise shaky existence. Perhaps the most unlikely culprit of all this, the motivation that we are told to embrace, is happiness. Happiness is the ultimate in frustrating objectives, it’s supposed transcendental properties only serve to confuse and obscure that which it is trying to rise above. Happiness is the beyond, it is the eternal earthbound goal of humankind and it scares us. Throughout life happiness clings to, and dominates, the mind. It is the foundation from which our dreams are built and it is the graveyard in which we hope our dreams will lie. Yet although it seems like such an innocent and altruistic ambition, something that we should all try and achieve, it leads to confusion and chaos. Constructing a happy life is impossible when the definition of the word is wrought in such futility.

Daily life is wrapped up in and completely engulfed by happiness. This sole objective courses through the veins of nearly every living human being in the developed world and seeks solace in the everyday activities of these people who try and maintain regular normality with society in the hope that others will perceive them as being happy. The day has been complicated by the petty achievements of man, we are far too concerned with how well we are doing and how far we have come, to see that thought cannot truly exist until you remove all of the trappings of a society filled with people who are devoid of the ability to better themselves from within. They assume that happiness should be their ultimate goal; you will not be able to convince them that in many ways it is evil and it is poisoning our society. For most people happiness is measured by what others think, they have become too attached with professing a sense of achievement through comparison with those around them. One can compliment another, and in this way make the person happy. It is a sort of self-convincing technique that we are all guilty of because when someone is perceived to be happy, they feel happiness themselves and this being the ‘ultimate’ goal of our society they stop striving for anything more. Their head becomes filled with the links between them and those around them, their brain can no longer comprehend a host of more important questions and actions because they have stepped into a quagmire created by man to keep man on the straight and narrow. Happiness is measured through the interaction with others rather than themselves. It drives people in completely the wrong direction; they forget their own thoughts in place of thoughts for others. They fight to maintain equilibrium in society by filling their heads with the immediate desire to be happy. They forget themselves entirely and base their lives on what others have built before them.

In a complete paradox the night provides a calming bastion of progressive thought. The association of the night with evil serves to transcend the pursuit of happiness and instead forces people to search for reason and truth. However far from being evil and neglectful it allows for thought to flow freely without interruption from all the mental and physical demands that the day brings. The night enables one to unfold their brain into the world without risking the danger of polluting their thoughts with those of the people around them. The world is at peace in the hours of darkness that serve to shroud man’s achievements in a calming veil. Whilst cities lay sleeping one can appreciate the true beauty of human kind through inflection of thought. These hours are no longer a motivation for development and success but for clear and rational thought that has the ability to destroy perception and strip back all the insecurities that define our society and the way we live our lives. The darkness, the inactivity, the quiet, the barren; all these things catalyse lucid thought and enable a different state of mind where one can forget about their fellow Man and instead concentrate on themselves. One can almost gain a kind of power of perceptive vision that enables them to see through the shroud and appreciate life in an entirely different state of mind. A state of mind that doesn’t require the compliments of others to achieve greatness or solidarity within themselves. A state of mind that doesn’t strive for happiness as people perceive it today, but instead strives for the ability to build a strong foundation from within, a foundation that cannot be rocked or shattered by the useless comments of those who fight so vainly to maintain their reputation amongst others.

Happiness is not some unachievable magical aspiration however it is so amazing and impossibly fantastic that the brain can’t entirely comprehend it. It shouldn’t necessarily be ingrained in us that happiness is this all-encompassing necessity of life. Perhaps a better solution would be to remove the importance of it so that it is merely an unexpected by-product of our actions, serving to reward our good decisions rather than frighten our fragile thoughts.

O autorze:/ About the author:

Adam Goodwin (ur. w 1985) studiował historię ze specjalizacją w historii społecznej. W Manchesterze był organizatorem licznych eventów łączących muzykę i sztukę. Obecnie mieszka w Londynie i zajmuje się pisaniem tekstów krytycznych. Adam pracuje również nad książką dotyczącą debaty społecznej, która będzie zbiorem krótkich historii.

Adam Goodwin (b.1985) graduated from university in History, specialising in social history. After organising a number of events combining music and art in Manchester he moved to London to pursue a career in the creative arts whilst focusing on critical writing. He is currently writing a book on social discourse and compiling a publication of short stories.

Malarstwo i Tekst/Paintings and Text

Wystawa W Poszukiwaniu Szczęścia jest z założenia intermedialną.

The Pursuit of Happiness Exhibition is intended to be the Intermedia one.

Oprócz wideo isntalacji czy instalacji interaktywnych znajdą się na

niej również prace wykonane w bardziej klasycznych technikach, nie zapomnieliśmy również o malarstwie.

Apart from video installations in interactive installation works pursued in more conventional techniques will be included in the show. We haven't forgotten about painting.

Tinsel Edwards jest artystką zainspirowana kulturą D.I.Y. (Zrób to sam), duchem rebelii, punka i lo-fi. Ukończyła Goldsmiths University of London.
Jej prace są promowane przez Stella Dore Gallery i były pokazywane jak
dotąd w Wielkiej Brytanii, Irlandii i Niemczech.

W swoich pracach Tinsel używa sloganów, zestawień słów
układających się w krótkie anegdoty i komentarze do ogólnych
przemyśleń na temat rzeczywistości. Kolor i figuratywne elementy
kompozycji pozostają tu czymś wtórnym, acz nie pozbawionym
znaczenia. Jaskrawe barwy i ostre kontrasty stają się jej cechami

charakterystycznymi. Obrazy artystki to jednocześnie osobiste
narracje i społeczne komentarze.

Tinsel podoba się idea robienia prac, które stawiają wyzwanie dla
ludzkiego strachu lub sugerują społeczną zmianę. Niedawne
realizacje artystki prowokować mogą właśnie do stawiania pytań o
źródła strachu i o to, co powstrzymuje ludzi przed działaniem.

Na wystawie W Poszukiwaniu Szczęścia pokarzemy dwa obrazy

Tinsel z 2008 roku "More Urgency" i "Paint Stuff".

Paulina Płachecka jest malarką zafascynowaną kiczem i
odwołaniami do popkultury. Absolwentka Wydziału Malarstwa
na ASP w Poznaniu w 2005 roku. Mieszka i pracuje w
Poznaniu. Zajmuje się przed wszystkim ekspresyjnym

malarstwem łączonym z rysunkiem. Często wykorzystuje
w swoich realizacjach ręcznie wpisywane fragmenty
sloganów i wymyślanych przez siebie wyrarzeń.

Na wystawie W Poszukiwaniu Szczęścia, oprócz wideo i
instalacji pokarze specjalnie namalowany na tę okazję
kolorowy mural, który zawiśnie na zewnątrz galerii.