Can collaboration dispel the ghosts of colonialism?
The Forest as a Geopolitical Stage - Part 1
THE ORIGINS OF THE PROJECT
The Forest as a Geopolitical Stage is a documentary Finnish-Uruguayan art and research project initiated by the visit of Uruguayan artist Tamara Cubas to Finland in the spring of 2019. Cubas is an internationally renowned artist and a director at the PROAC civil association that produces socially engaged art projects. The reason behind Cubas’s visit was forestry industry giant UPM-Kymmene, who is building one of the world’s largest pulp mills in Paso de los Toros, Uruguay. “UPM is sucking the lifeforce out of Uruguay”, says Cubas. She questioned whether Uruguayans could work together with the Finns on collaborative projects that furthered social and artistic equality. Could we work together without repeating colonialist and extractive power dynamics?
During their trip to Finland Cubas and her manager, Julia Asperska, met local artists, members of various associations, and architects. They were especially interested in creative work undertaken in Finnish prisons, as PROAC has spent many years inviting artists to work in the Carancho prison located in the city of Rivera. I connected them with Jussi Lehtonen, the then Artistic Director of The Touring Stage (Kiertuenäyttämö). Lehtonen has long-standing experience of running different art projects with inmates and ex-inmates. Things moved fast. Lehtonen visited Uruguay in the summer of 2019 to learn more about Cubas and the work of PROAC; the trip was partly funded by grants from the Swedish Cultural Fund (Svenska Kulturfonden) and the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taiteen edistämiskeskus). In the Autumn of 2019 Lehtonen and I wrote a funding application to the Kone Foundation who decided to support the project.
THE WORK IN URUGUAY COMMENCES
The Forest as a Geopolitical Stage project encompasses both the creation of works of art as well artistic and curatorial research in Uruguay and Finland. The first phase of the project commenced with a field research trip to Montevideo and Rivera by project members, as well as a theatrical workshop in the Carancho prison in December 2020-January 2021. At the time, the COVID-19 pandemic situation in Uruguay was relatively stable so we were able to travel to the country under a special dispensation from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. As well as myself, Cubas, Asperska, and Lehtonen, the project group included journalist and non-fiction writer, Maija Salmi, who worked as a dramaturg and an interpreter at the workshop, musician and music teacher, Ernesto Donas, and photographer and film director, Gabriel Bendahan. Jussi Lehtonen directed the theatrical workshop that was attended by eight people currently serving sentences at Carancho; he tested a workshop method where the participants’ stories were placed in dialogue with improvised music by Ernesto Donas. The workshop also included dance and movement practices directed by me, as well as camera work – the footage was then edited into an experimental short film by Bendahan and Lehtonen. At the end of the workshop, the film was shown at the Carancho prison, and it can be seen on the PROAC website.
A journalist with the Finnish Broadcasting Service (YLE), Johanna Pohjala, visited the workshop in January 2021 and wrote an article about her experiences.
READ THE ARTICLE The article is in Finnish only.
Pohjola and Salmi also produced a radio-show about Carancho for the series World Politics Everyday (Maailmanpolitiikan arkipäivää, YLE), which can be accessed via the same link.
THE PERFORMANCE AND DOCUMENTARY FILM
The continuation of the global COVID-19 pandemic slowed down the next phase of the project by a year and forced us to shift its focus. Originally, we wanted to do a public performance with the inmates at a theatre festival in Montevideo, but instead we decided to create a documentary film detailing our process in Carancho. We returned to Uruguay and the Carancho prison in October 2022. This time Lehtonen and I travelled to Uruguay alone. The project team was joined by Donas and the documentary film director and producer, Juan Alvarez Neme. A group of local university students studying English acted as interpreters. We worked with four people currently serving prison sentences over a period of three weeks, during which we put on a performance based on their own personal experiences and writings that incorporated theatrical performance, dance, and music. It was a moving experience to observe the participants slowly learning to trust themselves, each other, and the project team, and how openly and courageously they threw themselves into the artistic process. The collaboration culminated in a performance that other inmates and prison staff were invited to. The performance incited an enthusiastic audience discussion and a spontaneous party erupted during which performers and audience members sang, played instruments, and danced together. Alvarez Neme followed the process throughout the entirety of the three weeks and interviewed the participants. He used this material to create a documentary film that is due to be completed in 2024.
URUGUAY’S PRISON SYSTEM
Uruguay is a developed democracy when it comes to things such as the separation of Church and state, women’s rights, or liberal drug laws, yet the prison system is an affront to human rights. The country is ruled by a punitive culture and even minor infractions can incur long prison sentences. Punta de Rieles is a Uruguayan prison that had been noted internationally as an exception to this rule, yet even the Punta de Rieles prison regressed once the current right-wing government came into power and the progressive prison director, Luis Parod, stepped down in June 2020.
The Carancho prison felt like a pressure cooker set to explode. The number of inmates in October 2022 exceeded the capacity of the prison facilities by over a half, which led to serious failings in both infrastructure and prisoner well-being, as well as to continuous violence. Participants in our project spoke bravely and directly of problems at the prison and in Uruguayan society as a whole: about their shocking living conditions and the coping mechanisms they had developed. As a team we feel a sense of responsibility when it comes to sharing their stories, but the challenge is to share them in such a way that would lead to a constructive conversation about prisoner conditions in Uruguay without endangering the prisoners themselves, or their loved ones’ privacy or safety. This is one of the key challenges facing Juan Alvarez Neme’s documentary film project.
THE COLLABORATION WITH THE FINNISH NATIONAL THEATRE
The second part of the project will take place in Finland in collaboration with the Finnish National Theatre. This includes the production of Metsä Furiosa (Furious Forest) – a play written and directed by Uruguayan theatre director and playwright, Marianella Morena, which will be performed for the first time on the new Taivassali-stage of the Finnish National Theatre on 5.3.2024.
Read Marianella Morena’s blog post.
Morena is known in South America and Europe for her politically and socially engaged productions. For her Metsä Furiosa piece, Morena collected testimonies on how the forestry industry impacts peoples’ lives in both Uruguay and Finland. Lehtonen, Morena, and I visited Jämsä in November 2021 to meet ex-UPM staff from a paper factory UPM had shut down. Lehtonen, Morena, and I also visited Paso de los Toros, Uruguay in October 2022 together.
Read more about the visit in a blog post written by Lehtonen.
Morena’s work shines a light on the many layers of colonialism and how these elements tie in with the various hopes and disappointments experienced by the local towns and villages, seduced by promises of a better standard of living. Colonialism exists not only within the very structure of society but in language, mind, and body too. Through her Metsä Furiosa play and the process of making it, Morena aims to shine a light on the manifold and complex nature of colonialism and to find ways of dismantling it through collaboration, listening, and sharing.
The third phase of the project is a public event, bearing the same name as the project itself, that will take place on March 8-9, 2024 in Helsinki in collaboration with the Finnish National Theatre. The event will look at the role of the forest in the global world and its political, economic, ecological, and spiritual significance. It will ask what role art can play when it comes to investigating industrial land use and its cultural, social, and ecological impact. What can art make visible? How can art potentially intervene in controversial practices? How to operate ethically within complicated processes that have intersecting interests, and who gets to define those ethics? What opportunities can embodiment and community-centred work provide? How to be in tune with the forests, the land, and water and learn how to listen to different environments? How can we recognise lifeforce? How can it be conserved and reinforced in different ecosystems and their social counterparts? I will be curating the event and it will form an artistic component of my doctoral thesis for Aalto University, entitled Embodied Curating as a Methodology for Ethical Intra-Action — Assembling conditions for art to summon collective and transformative agencies.
My doctoral thesis asks how artistic and curatorial work that is anchored in the body and attends to a multitude of bodies can strengthen the agency of art and artists in society. The research looks at artistic and curatorial processes using feminist theorist Karen Barad’s Agential Realism, especially their concept of intra-action, as well as cultural theorist, writer, and teacher, Astrida Neimanis’s Hydrofeminist ideas regarding the human body as a body of water. More information about this event will be published on this website as well as the Aalto University Art & Media department’s channels.
WATER IS LIFE
Discussions about forests, water reserves, and the connection between the forestry industry and drought seem especially poignant and timely right now as Uruguay is gripped by the worst drought in 74 years. At the same time as water is running out in the capital of Montevideo and residents are forced to buy bottled water, large corporations such as UPM have free access to the country’s water supply for pulp and paper production. Both the cultivation of eucalyptus trees and the production of paper pulp require vast amounts of water.
“Water is life” is a slogan, often used by indigenous activists and water conservationists, that was popularised during the struggle of the Lakota and Dakota first peoples against the Dakota Access oil pipeline in the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. The protest was joined by indigenous peoples from around the world, including Sámi people who joined the protest camp to support local activists, and the event garnered widespread global media attention. The protest ended with the victory of the Sioux of Standing Rock when the oil pipeline was closed in 2020.
As climate change droughts intensify and various water-related natural disasters proliferate, water is quickly rising to the geopolitical centre stage. Uruguayan forests and water reserves are connected to Finland and Finnish people specifically through UPM, as major UPM shareholders include Finnish retirement funds, banks, and foundations. If “UPM is sucking the lifeforce out of Uruguay”, then what must we do? Do we let Uruguayans face thirst as our pension pots accrue money? The scenes unfolding on the geopolitical stage affect us all, one way or another.
The Forest as a Geopolitical Stage project and my doctoral thesis have been funded by the Kone Foundation. The project has also been supported by the Uruguayan Ministry of Education & Culture.
Translated by Kayleigh Töyrä.
