No hope
“We’ll be lucky if we learn
That there is no nook
That there is no haven
whose secret hideaways could
ever erase what we once were,
Time comes afterwards”
Extract from Fernando Cabrera’s song El tiempo está después (Time comes afterwards)
Directing and writing plays share a unique component: detailed observation to an infinite degree. It is knowing how to wait in order to find; knowing how to look in order to perceive beyond simple knowing. To form a connection with that which we cannot see, but which exists and makes up this human landscape: this undecipherable universe that we are part of.
Observing without time
Together with Jussi Lehtonen and Satu Herrala, we are working on a theatrical project, Metsä Furiosa, that combines documentary and fictional elements in connection to the UPM Kymmene pulp mills in Uruguay. In 2019, I created a reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People and directed it at the Uruguayan National Theatre. In this interpretation, both the play text and the production were informed by investigative journalism into the pulp mill project. The premiere was on the principal stage in Montevideo, Theatre Solis.
The public voted on the ending of the play, seen from the point of view of three different characters. This fusion of realities was my interpretation of how fiction is in constant dialogue with the present, including with the theatrical auditorium that is also a living tribunal. In the dark, none of us knows the person we sit next to, and yet we clap, laugh, and cry, together. In this disjointed present that we live in, I believe that the presence of theatre performance is one of the oldest political and poetic vessels left to us; a form that is always reborn and does not lose its ability to break down barriers of language and to rebel without violence.
We exist and we are here
I met Jussi at Campo Abierto, an artist residence run by Tamara Cuba, situated in Uruguay in the district of Rivera, near the border with Brazil. We spoke, and Jussi invited me to think about this possibility: what if we created a production in Finland?
And here we are, putting our vision into practice. We are now in the process of collecting material. Interviews, books, newspaper articles, commentaries, opinions. We are collecting all this material both remotely and in-person; it led us to Paso de los Toros, (a town of 13,000 inhabitants), where another plant is being built by UPM. It will be one of the top five largest factories in the world, and the largest in Latin America.
We capitalised on Jussi and Satu being in Uruguay, and I made contact with veteran local activist Esteban Calone, who came up with a plan of action for meeting the locals.
We went for a walk before our Sunday lunch. We went to the Finnish neighbourhood, known as El barrio de los finlandeses. The landscape with its Finnish houses rises up from the river bend. We step out of the car (it is a nice area to walk around) and we take a few pictures. The guard approaches us and says “I know this is absurd and that it cannot possibly be forbidden, but you are not allowed to take photos. Please don’t take photos, or else I will be fired.”
We take a few surreptitious photos.
Why outlaw something that is not against the law? And to do it without impunity, as if you were above everything. Pretend that public space is private, even though it isn’t?
We walk further away and remark how the setting is like something straight out of sci-fi literature: a group of people arrive from the other side of the world, create their own ghetto, and claim the complete opposite: WE ARE INCLUSIVE.
We tend to generalise about people and categorise them based on their nationality. We say: Finnish people are like this, and Uruguayans are like that… And we repeat this until geography and culture define us to the extreme, to the point that we are conditioned, unable to make choices outside our language, educational background, social networks, economic situation, and personal happiness.
We believe that distance separates us, and that proximity unites us. Sometimes that is the case, but this is not an immutable rule. We went out looking for information on the factory and its workers, on its pollution; to meet local people, to listen to them. We attended a meeting where members of the previous government expressed their views. The head of the sex workers’ union was also present. We went to the whiskey bar, spoke to the girls, danced, and drank with them. We exchanged points of view, breathed in the air, and formed relationships in the express lane in a place where time has stopped.
Whenever I work on a theatrical project like this that involves documenting and collating testimonies that are then fictionalised on stage, I always end up in the eye of a storm: confronted by human complexity.
Colonisation and letting yourself be colonised can be a collaborative act, especially in the civilised world with its mutually accepted set of rules. However, this is no longer colonisation, it’s more like: I accept all your terms until you have exploited my land, my opportunities, my dignity and my hope to the maximum.
Translated by Kayleigh Töyrä.
