CANIS LUPUS
Canis lupus: (Re)searching Classification and Control, 4 minutes long video, focuses on the Categorization and classification as powerful means of control. It is difficult to narrow the control of life only to concern biology when its foundation for scientific thinking reflects to all areas of humanism. Scientific thinking that has resulted to binary research, and practices that are inherently violent causing suffering and despair, thus viewed as righteous actions. Classifications form groups of belonging, as much as they form zones of power and create space for colonialism. Colonized spaces have formulated systems of domination that bell hooks called the “culture of domination”, a power relationship between the classifier and the object being described and classified, regardless, if the organism is a bacterium, protistan, fungus, a non-human animal, or a human being.
ROOTS AND CANALS
Roots and Canals focuses on agential and anthropocentric realism of places, human and non-human belongingness and connection to land, and the cartographies, to the places and memories of them. Through video shooting and video interviews, I explore personal narratives of particular borderland places, homes, territories and lands.
This research project started by an interview of my grandmother, who served in the second world war, and whose home was left behind the Russian border in the aftermath of the war. I interviewed her to discuss her silenced memories, and wanted to value and honor the personal experiences. I use theories on feminist and indigenous research literature, along with critical anti-racist studies. The work is praxis of decolonial feminist research, actively intervening in the contestation between the sovereignty of the nation-state and Indigenous nations, and other territories occupied by settler colonialists. This includes questioning the assumed ontologies between life forms of human and the non-human.
BEING-ASIDE
Being-Aside is a 14 minutes, 37 seconds long video, from 2013. All of the material was recorded during my two years collaboration with Thomas Kaarni. The video shows Thomas and me on different days and in different situations. In the video, I examine the pedagogy that strikes a balance between ambitious ethical goals—that is, passivity, openness and vulnerability in front of the ‘Other’—and the counter-transference affects and defenses that inevitably influenced our behavior. In this video, that is part of my doctoral dissertation, I challenge the notion of knowing and rethink learning and pedagogy through the ideas of not-knowing and degrowth. The video views pedagogical desire quite differently than traditional understandings of academic hunger and a passion for knowledge. It becomes a necessity for me to visually consider some of my own pedagogical desires and fantasies of this collaboration and ultimately the video is a method for conducting visual research.