IHME Project 2018: THE BEETLE

The Hylochares cruentatus – in Finnish the halavasepikkä [literally: halava = bay willow, sepikkä = false click beetle] – is less than a centimetre long and lives on the old Mätäoja riverbed in Vantaa, Finland. According to the entomologist, Professor Jyrki Muona, the Hylochares cruentatus is an indigenous insect that has lived in the geographical region now known as Finland since the end of the last ice age. The beetle is named after its living environment: the setting for its entire lifecycle is a rotting species of willow, the bay willow (Salix pentandra). It also lives on the dark-leaved willow (Salix myrsinifolia), which is even more restrictedly a floodplain species. It is in this willow species that it lays its eggs, hatches out as a larva, and inside this willow that it pupates and then turns into a beetle.

Being a beetle, the life of Hylochares cruentatus lasts about a week. In Finland wild-growing willow forests have been systematically eradicated: they are tangled, wet and impenetrable. In the case of the bay willow, dark-leaved willow and Hylochares cruentatus a crucial factor in their decreasing numbers is that the flooding of rivers that they need to survive has been prevented, while their favourite areas have been cleared out and dredged. As a consequence the Hylochares cruentatus is now classed as being critically endangered, particularly as it is at present only known to live in part of Vantaa.

THE BEETLE billboards in the halavasepikkä’s own neighbourhood in Myyrmäki gave locals a chance to get to know their less-a-centimetre-long endangered neighbour.

Photo: Veikko Somerpuro

Henrik Håkansson met Jyrki Muona and the Hylochares cruentatus on his first background-work day in Helsinki in December 2016. As a result of numerous conversations during spring 2017, the Hylochares cruentatus was given the leading role in of the 2018 IHME Project. Filming of the material for the forthcoming moving-image work began in June-July 2017, assisted by Jyrki Muona. The film aims to show the beetle as being of its own definite kind, and presents the site and the beetle in terms of learned and experienced facts. The IHME Project acquired also billboards with film stills of the beetle sited near it´s native habitat in Vantaa and IHME joining the Louhela Jam in the end of May and beginning of June.

In choosing the Hylochares cruentatus as the starting point for his work, Henrik Håkansson links it with some major questions about climate change: species diversity, the relationship between humankind and nature. The IHME Project, the film entitled THE BEETLE, also has links with post-humanism, which explores boundaries between human and nonhuman, the separation of nature and culture, the special status of human beings in the world and the possibility of breaking away from this, and alternative ethical practices. In Håkansson’s thinking, nature and culture cannot be separated: there is a culture of nature and a nature of culture.

The soundtrack of the film THE BEETLE is a live act by Mika Vainio (1963– 2017), a pioneer in the field of experimental electronic music, also known as the other half of the duo Pan Sonic. “Vainio’s music not only speaks for itself, it generates another language,” Henrik Håkansson describes and continues: “This film includes excerpts from a live performance at Sonár Festival 2015, and uses a range of frequencies and beats to create an extremely subtle vibration, a voice of its own that might be the language of the insect portrayed: THE BEETLE.”

THE BEETLE can be watched in Yle Areena until May 25 2019 https://areena.yle.fi/1-4424485.