Interview with Remi Vesala and Rakel Jylhä-Vuorio
showroom #2: hot minds invites you to desire, challenge and critical embodied thinking. In an interview with the event's curator Remi Vesala and artist Rakel Jylhä-Vuorio, who will perform at the event, they will open up the themes and background of the event to be experienced on the Mad House stage on 7 February 2025 at 19.00.
Photo by Jade Kallio
Mad House:showroom #1 was presented in November 2023 as part of Mad House's in collaboration with Baltic Circle. At that time, the theme was queer horror. How were the themes of desire, challenge and critical embodied thinking selected for this year's showroom and how are they reflected in the works?
Remi Vesala: The best thing about my work as a curator is the opportunity to gather and combine ideas and things in an open-minded way. My work is often guided by some sense that these things belong together, but I don't yet know why. I want to create a space where understanding and not-knowing can coexist.
The themes of upcoming showroom took shape during this ongoing process of gathering, which includes both confusion and insight. I always have to thank the artists and writers whose thinking has quided me towards something new.
When planning the evening, I first turned autotheory, a genre of literature in which the writer's own personal experience merges with broader societal or communal exprerience, and is critically examined through their own position and lived bodily experience. I have worked on this subject before, for example, when collaborating with kolya kotov on their solo exhibition in Lou Gallery.
Around the same time, I read Kathy Acker's "New York City 1979", translated into Finnish by Sini Silveri, which, together with the afterwords written by Silver, sparked movement in me. Autotheory as such began to sound dry as a theme, while Acker's texts contained direct desire, unapologetic corporeality, and fragmentary – worlds I wanted to dive deeper into. Acker led me to more chaotic, as well as more precise, questions about body's relationship to writing and writing's relationship to life.
My discussions with Rakel Jylhä-Vuorio on gender and life also strengthened the direction of what I fel important at the moment. Rakel speaks wisely and passionately about (trans)rights and the possibility of reimagining them.
Critical embodied thinking unites all the artists in the showroom. Desire and challenge are its by-products, strategies, visions, ultimately the core of it all.
MH: You say that the themes also seep beyond the boundaries of the screen. What does this mean?
RV: showroom is a concept that combines both moving image works and live performances or interventions in space. This time it means a collection of video works, a performance by Rakel Jylhä-Vuorio & Mia Wennerstrand, and a kolya kotov artwork in the space. "Leaking" can therefore be understood literally, as we watch works projected onto a screen together, but the themes also continue through the evening's performance and in the space itself.
The intention behinds mixing different mediiums is to create an experience where works meet the audience in a shared, common space. On the other hand, the evening's themes can best "leak" into our lived experiences – beyond the screen, stage and performance space.
MH: Is it too personal to ask what happens in your body when you engage with these works and their themes?
RV: My work is always, by default, personal, so this question is very relevant. When I talk about critical embodied thinking, my own relationship with my body and trans experience is inherently central to this thinking. I have never had the possibility of non-critical engagement with my (trans)body or gender, or its societal expectations. The existence of the trans body is itself an intervention in relation to many normative space and systems. Accepting this opens the possibility to refuse them. Refusal can be wonderful, and challenging evokes both desire and a desire to challenge more.
And then when you are surrounded by incredibly smart trans and queer people who want the same thing! It stirs up excitement in the body, shared, powerful energy - hot thoughts and burning minds.
Photo by Rakel Jylhä-Vuorio
MH: You’ve written critically about legal structures and gender self-determination rights. You are also making a performance for the showroom. There is often talk about how language becomes embodied in us, for example, through laws. In your experience, how do bodily actions become linguistic? Or, what do you think about how corporealities are put into language?
Rakel Jylhä-Vuorio: What an intriquing and complex question, thank you so much. I'll answer question "what do you think about how corporealities are put into language?" The content of my answer is shaped by the kinds of norms that form the framework within which corporealities can be articulated. I believe such an examination requires some understanding of how language first becomes embodied in us–or, how it embodies us.
I am influenced by Judith Butler in the sense that I view the embodiment of language as a normative process that creates bodies along the axes of recognizability (natural) and unrecognizability (unnatural). From the very start, language embodies within heteronormative frameworks, initiaiting an ongoing process of gendering. This process conforms to binary notions of gender and anatomical essentialism. My own corporeality was articulated through this grammar for about twenty years.
In other words, language embodied, and corporeality was rendered into language according to the norm:
maternity ward, baby boy, Henrik, teenage boy, dude, bro, uncle, bull, boyfriend, bachelor, just a man, quildmaster, almost-lawyer (lakimies) - and oh yes, of course, that one very narrow closet, at the bottom of which someone had carved those pulseless words through which corporeality could then be expressed through language. I couldn't even imagine being the guildmistress.
Language, however, can also become embodied in ways that dislocate embodied experiences from heteronormative frameworks, sparking new ways of putting corporealities into language. At least for me, I became trans through books, touch, dancing, glances, kisses and community. And I can't wait to keep being exposed to all the other ways in which trans can be transmitted. Mapping the infectors:
Trans caught on—and continues spreading—through Judith Butler, Paul B. Preciado (Tutkijaliitto made me trans), Jules Gill-Peterson, Paul Schreber, Susan Stryker, Hannah Baer, Marquis Bey, Eva Hayward, McKenzie Wark, Luce de Lire, Jack Halberstam, and Kathy Acker. Right now, trans feels and sounds a little different from yesterday thanks to Simon(e) van Saarloos’s words. Something new is infecting me again—just like when trans broke out at a techno party in Tallinn. Trans spreads effortlessly with every beat and thrust. Trans spreads through the tracks of Kuopus, pus! Trans spreads in the soundscapes of Exploited Body. Trans spreads through communal practices of undoing violent structures. Trans spreads with all kinds of trans allies. Trans spreads on the couch of Trans Library Helsinki. Trans spreads from the sauna benches at Sweat and Tears events. Trans spreads at Queer Dance Group classes. Trans spreads through the texts of the pink_187music account. And lady justice, justitia, aka Mia Wennerstrand is one of the most contagious figures of all. When my tongue slides, wet, across all these surfaces, I become exposed to the idea that transcorporeality is a messy relation, not a fundamental property of selfhood. By tomorrow, trans will have infected someone else's body.
I respond to the question by posing more questions: How does re-articulating trans corporealities in unexpected ways shift our understanding of who we are and what we are about when we demand trans rights? Who should we turn to when pursuing trans rights? Is the right to exist always something we must defend, demand, and prove before the law? Can the state grant the right to be the most contagious trans? Is it even possible to demand such a right, or is it instead about exercising those rights in spaces where transcorporeality does not need to be articulated in relation to the norm?
For me, speaking about trans corporealities becomes truly meaningful once I’ve been able to refuse everything that seeks to deny all that makes life livable. And I believe Remi’s practice speaks for these kinds of possibilities, granting the right for trans to exist in transitions.
