Real action blog

the wheel

2008-11-28T07:27:00.000-08:00

?

2008-11-28T07:22:00.001-08:00

Taping

2008-11-28T02:06:00.001-08:00

Marking

2008-11-28T02:03:00.001-08:00

Peep inside

2008-11-28T02:02:00.001-08:00

The space

2008-11-27T16:16:00.000-08:00

So, this is the space where we are building our setup.

Playing games

2008-11-26T01:29:00.000-08:00

Stalking Kekkonen like theres no tomorrow

2008-11-21T11:35:00.000-08:00

There is so much Kekkonen in my life right now that I am surprised if i don't dream of him when I go to sleep.

Besides all the work with the aprons and the buttons etc and the Kekkonen inspired music I've actually managed to meet some relatives of U.K.K.

Not only did a friend of mine Maria Kekkonen (related to the late president) taught us how to climb trees like U.K.K. himself did.

But I actually got to meet some more of Kekkonen's relatives and they told me really interesting stories about their family.

Listening to Anarchy in the UKK while working

2008-11-21T10:50:00.000-08:00

Today we have been making aprons for our group. And of course these aprons would be nothing without Kekkonen. While transfering the prints to the Aprons we were listening to LTJ-29 "Kekkonen - Anarchy in the UKK". Anarchy in the UKK is a compilation that has versions or tracks inspired by J.O. Mallander's tracks "1962" and "1968" which are based on the counting of the votes in finnish presidential election. The winner was of course Kekkonen, who served as president of Finland for 25 years. The compilation was released in 2005 as a limited edition of only 120 copies. Obviously it was sold out, but we managed to get one.

Preparing for the festival

2008-11-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

This week we have been making all sorts of props for the demo for example buttons with Finlands former president Urho Kaleva Kekkonen.

U.K.K. was born in September 3th 1900 and passed away August 31th 1986. He first served as Prime minister of Finland twice 1950–1953 and 1954–1956 and later as President of Finland 1956–1982. Kekkonen was the longest-serving President of Finland.

Some treeaction

2008-11-20T13:51:00.001-08:00

Former Finnish president Urho Kaleva Kekkonen seem to pop out quite often in our project. UKK was definitely a man of real action, or atleast portrait as one by the media. There is one specific photo, that all finnish people remember: Kekkonen climbing a palmtree in Tunisia back in 1965.

Photo was taken by press photographer Martti Brandt. We do not know if the situation was spontanios, or if it was arranged. There have even been speculations if the photo is complitely faked.

Regardless of how this particular photograph was made, it definitely have helped UKK to gain his position as a man of real action.

We thought we should try the treeclimbing ourselves, so we desided to contact Maria Kekkonen. Maria was just the right person for this particular job for two reasons: she teaches poledancing, so she knows a lot about climbing, and she is also related to Urho Kekkonen.

So first we started from the UKK monument, just to get to the right feeling. UKK monument also has some poles in it, so Maria tried climbing those first.

And then we continued to the trees.

Maria Helping Rakel to the tree

The pie issue

2008-11-18T08:50:00.000-08:00

One of the key terms when thinking about real action is definitely food. Eating it, preparing it are both very important forms of real action. We approached the issue throught one example: the karelian pie.

Karelian pie is one of the most traditional finnish foods. It originates from Karelia, area that no was given in to Russia after WW2. We bought a bag of contemporary industrial versions of the theme, availlable in all supermarkets here, and had a nice piknik in Asematunneli, the shopping area beneath Helsinki Railway station.

These pies are very popular in Finland, even thought food industrys versions are very far from the original. Soviet union took away karelians land, and made it a soviet province, and now the food industry took away their pie and turned it into this.

We wanted to try to meke some pies ourselves as well. We got some traditional incredients like rye flour, butter and greasy milk (unfortunately you can not get greasy enought anymore), and started cooking.

Well we did agree, that things like sushi seem more familiar to us that traditional finnish cooking, even thought Rakel has taken a course at some point on the subject. Still we did manage pretty well.

Hanging out at Kekkonen monument

2008-11-11T04:38:00.000-08:00

Photo by Maria Kekkonen

kekkonen

2008-09-23T11:09:00.000-07:00

When Danske bank bought finnish bank Sampo, they had severe problems adjusting to new IT-infrastucture. This ment that none of the systems: internetbank, cards or customer service did not work at all for quite some time.

Thousands of customers left the bank, systems are still not not working properly, but now we can have kekkonen on our debitcards.

Kekkonen

2008-09-16T09:13:00.000-07:00

Since this project started we seem to run into Finlands former president Kekkonen everywhere.
When Vladimir Putin saved a film crue from a tiger Helsingin Sanomat made a list of other heroic acts of leaders. Kekkonen was obviously on that list.

I also recently found out that friend of mine is related to Kekkonen. She has kindly promised to help us if we need material of Kekkonen climbing in a tree. The very next day I ran into a shop window that had a giant picture of Kekkonen.

Also a finnish bank Sampo has launched a series of debit cards that are decorated by photos of finnish heroes. One of them obviously is Kekkonen.

It seems to me that we must include Kekkonen to this piece someway.

Working hard

2008-09-16T06:01:00.000-07:00

We allways work hard on our projects, but we also have fun at the same time. In the left photo there are me and Rakel painting collective paintings and in the right side there are me and Anna year 2008 studying contemporary iconography.

Nature of real action

2008-09-08T23:00:00.000-07:00

When I think about real action, first things that come to my mind are all archaic manly things, like hunting, fishing or woodchopping. If I think about the subject any further, I realize that this sort of activities do not have any real meaning in the life we live today.

Average finn feels most real when spending the summer vacation chopping wood for the electrically heated summercabin and dipping TV-shop lures in the lake. Rest of the year is spent feeling unreal in the technological rat race.

We live inside technological rat race, so why do we search the realness from such distances?

Why is chopping wood more real than updating computers? Is it biological, are our brains just constructed this way? Is it species-specific behavior, or have we just spoiled ourselves with culture that emphasizes archaic heroic myths?

Well we do not know, we just started our journey. We will do our best to answerr these questions soon, or possibly just produce more questions.

But about the photos: In the left photo there are Anna and Rakel printing posters old fachioned way for an exhibition we did back in 2000. In the right photo there are Rakel and Anna, year 2008, studying postmodern representations of fishing.

Action painting with Rakel back in 1998

2008-09-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

Back in the days me and Rakel were both deeply influenced by abstract expressionism. We did different kinds of experiments on the subject, and at some point we ended up doing a performance. This photo is from our first public performance. The work was titled "War of sexes" and it was done at Läsnä-rock, Pieksämäki year 1998.

For us it was a big thing to come out from the studio and face the live audience, a thing that painters seldom do. Although one can of course question if it is real action or not, but for us it definitely did represent it.

We were really young back then, not even in the artschool yet. I stopped all painting soon after I got into one, Rakel graduated as a painter, even thought most of her work has been something else.

Our aim

2008-08-26T22:54:00.000-07:00

We are to plunge fearlessly into both real and unreal, true and untrue action, also observing the cultural and historical conventions of these actions.
It is not yet known where the process will lead us and there is no specific goal. However, the journey shall be documented as precisely as possible.

Is updating your computer real in the same way as chopping firewood used to be in agrarian society? Was former president of Finland, Urho Kaleva Kekkonen climbing a palm tree a real or a fictive act in order to create modernist heroic myth? How about Jesus as a carpenter?

Our crew

2008-08-26T22:13:00.000-07:00

Antti Ahonen, Rakel Liekki and Anna Pöllänen have known each other since they were teenagers. They share an ambivalent urge to create art, but in a way that differs from the traditional.
Antti and Rakel have painted and performed together in the end of 1990's, and the group was first founded in 2000 to produce Merkillisiä kuvioita -exhibition.
After this the group scattered to specialize in different forms of art on their own.
Experiences during the past ten years inside and outside art have matured an understanding, which will materialize for the first time in Malmö.
Long friendship of the group makes it possible to work in a warm collaboration that every now and then effortlessly creates art.

Antti Ahonen is a multifunctional artist currently based in Helsinki. His primary instrument is a camera, with which he has documented enormous amount of various events and performances.
He is the artistic director of the Association of Experimental Electronics and is one of the organizers of the Pixelache Festival. He has also taken part in a multitude of different groups and productions in performance art, VJ culture, sound art and social art.

Rakel Liekki is a visual artist. She graduated in 2001 with painting as her major, though she has focused on conceptual and performance art.
Porn is an essential theme in her work. She has studied it thoroughly, for example by working in the industry. She plays with the boundaries of art and popular culture as well as the boundaries between a work of art and the artist, to objectify the artist in a piece of art. Therefore Finnish people also know her as a porn star.
In addition to her work in as an artist, she also works as a journalist. In her free time she collects Japanese candy wrappings and campaigns for animal rights.

Anna Pöllänen is a lighting designer. She graduated from the Department of Lighting and Sound Design in the Theatre Academy of Finland in 2008.
Anna uses light as an instrument of dramaturgy on stage. She is inspired by the aesthetic experience, beyond conceptual thinking that the intensity and the quality of light can cause. She has mostly worked with contemporary theatre and dance.
In her spear time, Anna dreams of kites and other weightless things.