ANNI PUOLAKKA: BB
12 June, 2019
Ziegrastrasse 11, 12057 Berlin
Photos by Billie Sarah Clarken / Project Space Festival 2019 and Berlin Art Institute
A one night only exhibition and performance in the framework of Project Space Festival Berlin.Whose body feeds whom? Who cares for whom?In Rumina (2017), the narrator explores her relationship to milk, the first fluid we drink and which we continue to consume in different forms as an adult. Suckling can be a banal act, or caring, greedy, painful, erotic and transgressive depending on who is feeding and who is being fed. Cows do not seem to mind being suckled by machines, perhaps they enjoy the relief of pressure on their udders. Our narrator feels closer to these animals by drinking their milk, she’s a cow writer – channeling their energies.Timanttimaha (Diamond Belly) from 2018 is an ode to the grey angels, these beings we cannot ignore, especially during the ‘nightless-night’ of the Northern midsummer: the mosquitos. It is a proposition for radical hospitality in which the human character accepts and facilitates their role as ‘a fleshy veiny baguette’ for the insects to feast upon. They talk as feeder and the one being fed, rather than as hunter and the hunted one, underneath a ceiling dotted with smeared remains. Whose blood is that on the ceiling? Mine, yours, the others, the mosquitos’? Perhaps we can delight in being food, providing nourishment. Do I taste particular? Am I delicious?Puolakka’s latest video work, 2 B Ur Own BB (2019), is the first part of a project where she looks at the notion of being your own baby in this era of climate change while questioning heteropatriarchal structures. Who will take care of us in the Anthropocene? We are our own babies making our own milk, rocking ourselves.The performance Suckling Animal Sibling ‘focuses on nipples as interfaces, milk as a political fluid, and mouths that sing and suckle other beings for nutrition, intimacy and sexual arousal’ (Puolakka). The music for Suckling Animal Sibling was produced together with Alexander Iezzi. The piece is performed with Marta Trektere.Anni Puolakka (born in Oulu, Finland) is based in Helsinki and Rotterdam and makes performances, videos, installations, drawings and texts in which situation-specific or documentary materials are incorporated into fictional worlds. The works play with the boundaries and potential of human animals as they seek meaningful and vibrant – sometimes drowsy or dirty – involvement with other beings, objects and surroundings....many thanks to the Project Space Festival Berlin team as well as to Morgana and Billy for the support!
