© Taiteilijat / Artists ISSN 1796-587X www.kutikuti.com
Toimitus ja julkaisija / Editorial & publisher Kutikuti Päätoimittaja / Editor-in-chief Sanna Hukkanen
Taitto / Layout Väinö Sirén Toimitus / Editorial Zoras collective
Painos / Print-run 5 000 Kirjapaino / Printer Printall AS Mainosmyynti / Ad sales kutimagazine@gmail.com
Tässä numerossa / In this issue Daria Apakhonchich (RU/GE) Carla Besora (SP/BE) Enrica Camporesi (IT/BE)
Jonne Kauko (FI) Line Mertens (BE) Hannele Richert (FI) Maria Trautmann (DE)
ZORAS collective: Sanna Hukkanen (FI) Inez Louwagie (BE) Rona Kennedy (BE/GB) Silvana Mammone (DE) Charlotte Peys(BE)
Kansi / Cover ZORAS collective
Kuti-lehteä julkaiseva Kutikuti ry on vuonna 2005 perustettu nykysarjakuvaan erikoistunut yleishyödyllinen ja taiteilijavetoinen yhdistys. Voit tilata Kuti-lehden myös kotiisi. Suomeen neljä numeroa sisältävän vuositilauksen hinta on 20 euroa, ulkomaille 26 euroa. Teet tilauksen kätevimmin kotisivuillamme osoitteessa www.kutikuti.com. Kuti-lehden seuraava numero ilmestyy joulukuussa 2023.
Tämän Kuti-lehden on päätoimittanut monialainen ZORAS-kollektiivi, jonka jäsenet ovat kuva-, ääni- ja sanataiteilijoita. Yhdessä ajattelemalla ja tekemällä tutkimme yksittäisten taiteilijoiden ja aktivistien toiminnan yhtymäkohtia katalyyttinä muutokselle. Annamme arvoa sarjakuvan perinteelle ilmaisumuotona, jossa taiteellinen kokeellisuus koettelee rajoja ja kansalaistoiminta voi kukoistaa. Tuomalla yhteistyömme muotoja Kuti-lehden maaperälle pyrimme tutkimaan sarjakuvataiteen kautta, kuinka liikkua kollektiivisesti kohti yhteiskunnallista ja ekologista muutosta.
Kuljemme taiteidenvälisten käytäntöjen jalanjäljissä, jättäen jälkeemme uusia painaumia. Tästä Kutin numerosta löydät sarjakuvaa, kuvataiteita, kerrontaa ja musiikkiteoksia, toisiinsa sekottuneina ja kietoutuneina.
Osana tutkimustamme olemme esittäneet toisillemme ja muille “kutsuja” mukaan taiteelliseen työskentelyymme, pohtimaan kysymyksiä tai kokemuksia. Tuntuikin luonnolliselta kutsua tämän Kuti-lehden tekemiseen mukaan seitsemän tuntemaamme taiteilijaa ja aktivistia. Nyt haluamme kutsua sinut mukaan prosessiimme: kulkemaan, ajattelemaan ja sulattelemaan maailmaa kanssamme. Toivomme, että tämän universumin läpi matkaaminen on hauskaa, ja että saat siitä mukaasi jotain omaan elämääsi tai työskentelyysi.
Musiikki- ja ääniteoksiin pääset linkistä: soundcloud.com/zoras-collective tai skannaamalla QR-koodin teokseen liittyvältä sivulta.
“You need imagination to be an activist and there is also something activist about being imaginative.”
S.B. anti-racist activist and researcher
Rooting hope / This issue of KUTI magazine is edited by ZORAS, a transdisciplinary collective of visual and sound artists and writers. Through thinking and making together we explore the interconnectedness between practices of individual artists and activists as a catalyst for change. We appreciate the tradition of comics as a medium of artistic experimentation where boundaries are pushed and practices of activism can flourish. By translating our forms of collaboration into the fertile field of KUTI, we try to use the art of comics to explore how this could help us to collectively move towards social and ecological change.
We walk in the footsteps of transdisciplinary practices, while leaving new prints behind. In this issue you will encounter comics, different visual arts, narrative and pieces of music fused and entangled together.
Part of our explorations are invitations into our practice, a question or an experience. Therefore it seemed only natural to invite seven other fellow artists and activists to create this issue of KUTI with us. Likewise, we now wish to invite you into our process - to travel, think and metabolise the world with us. We hope you enjoy roaming through this universe and take something from it for your own life or practice.
To access the different musical/audio pieces go to this link: soundcloud.com/zoras-collective or scan the QR code on the specific page.
“Ollakseen aktivisti on omattava mielikuvitusta, ja mielikuvituksellisuudessa on itsessäänkin hieman aktivismia.” S.B., rasisminvastainen aktivisti ja tutkija
ZORAS collective: Common ground
“To be militant about joy means being attuned to situations or relationships and learning how to participate in and support the transformation rather than directing or controlling it.”* / The more you inhabit a place, the more it inhabits you. / *Joyful Militancy - Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, carla bergman & Nick Montgomery
Inez Louwagie, in conversation with Stefanie: Trainstopping
In 2002 the USA invades Irak. With thousands of people worldwide we take to the streets to protest. Nothing changes, it is business as usual.
The Belgian government says it doesn’t support this war. Strange, we keep seeing freight trains full of American weapons heading to the Middle East.
It turns out, all you need to stop a train full of weapons is a large torch, a piece of red plastic and a dozen activists.
It only sinks in when we are in the police cell. We did it. We stopped a train full of weapons. Even if we don’t stop this war, we can definitely disrupt business as usual.
ZORAS collective & Sanna Hukkanen: Reflections from a collective mind Kindness is political. / We will not live in a world we cannot exist in! / We must refuse! / How can you plant trees while knowing that the bulldozers are ready to rip out their roots? / Build communities and feed their resilience! / Weave their life lines together. / Imagination is a shared consciousness. / Meaningless talk about hope makes me most hopeless. / It is not hope that makes us do this. / Rather despair. / We need to act if we want to exist. / But for the time being, think like mushrooms!
Hannele Richert: Lehdistö / Press
Charlotte Peys: Break down the walls
Break down the walls in your head (now you are able to look outside - insight and horizon) Build steps with the debris (bannisters are superfluous)
Imagine hearing a multivocal choir surrounding you & above all: remember that everything is part of someone else’s everyday life
Can you just walk in somewhere, inhabit what was previously deserted, take your place at a non-existent table, on an imaginary chair & fill the emptiness with echoing insights that nobody asked for?
ZORAS collective: Radical fragility
I wish I could write the book of a thousand fragilities. Of the accidental watery blotch that mingles every colour on the paper, letting them travel to unpredictable places…
Rona Kennedy: Arctic hare Manifesto¹
I sit on a cluster of cold granite boulders in a forest. It is spring. The booming comes from all directions. Its pitch changes as an F16 fighter plane rips the sky open. Three arctic hares come from behind a shrinking pile of dirty snow. Three witches, casually chewing, casting spells. They are whispering that other voices are present, here on this rock: we are arctic hares, forest, undergrowth and root systems. We are herbal medicine practitioners, anti-racist activists, queer adoptive parents and commoners from squatted autonomous zones. We beat, with our long limbs, the boundaries of the places we love and want to protect from the violence and machines of capital and war. We are witches of the edges and half-light. This is our manifesto:
1. We are angry. How could we not be? Our anger is not all we are, but there is agency in anger as a force that moves us. / 2. We are fierce: rooted enough to bring love and compassion to our anger. And then we act. / 3. We are each other. We will take care and thrive. / 4. We try to be strategic, creative and not take ourselves too seriously. / 5. We need both a NO and a YES: / “two entwined strands:…protest and proposition, resistance and creating, fighting and building.”. ²
²We are nature defending itself: entangling Art, activism and autonomous zones, Isabelle Fremeaux & Jay Jordan, p63
6. Yes, it is urgent and this urgency can press down on your chest and stop you breathing. / But time is not linear and change happens in quantum / leaps and tiny shifts. / 7. You can have a big impact by working on a small scale. / 8. There is no one way to resist. We can build new worlds while remaining in and resisting the old ones. People have always and will always resist and create alternatives. / 9. It takes courage of a very ordinary kind to choose to disrupt the logic of powerful systems, / to question and to create alternatives together. / 10. Even when the results are not visible, we know that change is for the long run, for generations to come.
Daria Apakhonchich: Georgian alphabet
1 “mgeli” - a wolf 2 One day, my six-year-old son and I were returning home and a dog ran up to us in a dark alley. My son was very frightened and tried to hide behind my back. 3 Two young men walked past, they saw my son’s fear and told him: “Don’t be afraid, you’re a boy, you must be like a wolf! Strong and brave like a wolf!” 4 My son did not answer anything, but as we walked home he kept asking me: “Why should I be like a wolf? I don’t want to be a wolf”
“giorgoba” - St. George’s day 2 Saint Giorgi is one of the most beloved saints in Sakartvelo (Georgia), temples are dedicated to him, boys are named after him. 3 St. Giorgi’s Day is celebrated twice a year. I learned that the first giorgoba is the day when the saint was subjected to terrible torturewheeling, and the second giorgoba is the day the saint was executed. 4 I thought for a long time why the story of Giorgi turned out to be so important for Sakartvelo and I realized that Georgians are not only proud of him, but also sympathize with him very much and regret what happened to him.
1 “utskhoeli agenti” - a foreign agent 2 One day I had to go to the Russian embassy and draw up paperwork, because the Russian Ministry of Justice declared me a foreign agent because of my political position and therefore I had new bureaucratic obligations. 3 The taxi driver asked where I was going, and although I usually do not tell strangers about the reasons for my emigration, that day I spoke very briefly about it: about how I worked as a teacher, about arrests, searches, status as a foreign agent, flight. 4 When I finished the taxi driver was crying. For the first time in my memory, an adult began to cry like a child in five minutes. He said: I see that you are a teacher, it is immediately obvious, and you know, what the Russian government is doing with us - with Georgians, is terrible, but understandable, but what it is doing with you - Russians, I cannot explain it.
“ena” - language 2 In the summer in Tbilisi, my children and I often go swimming in the lake. There are always a lot of children on the mountain, and often these are children who speak different languages and try to find a way to communicate. 3 Once on the lake we met our friends from Kharkiv, the children were delighted to find that they had the same swimming circles in the form of donuts. 4 At some point, a Ukrainian girl asked my son: “Are you from Kharkiv? No? And how do you know Russian then?”
Improvisation teaches to play when we thought it all so serious. / It is difficult to talk about improvisation as a technique or to describe our process with a clear beginning or end. However, it is also too easy to say „just see what happens“ because what happens, we believe, is not random. / The aim of our conversation was to meet on eye level, to share what would emerge naturally in the process, musically and also in conversation. We were amazed to find a common ground quite effortlessly. / We truly believe that working with improvisation opens up a dialogue on many different levels; and that it teaches mutual trust and respect to finally let go of habitual patterns of control. / If we think how improvisation can support artists and activists, we imagine it as an entry into diverse facets of dialogue and as a tool to explore collective processes, their inherent harmonies and tensions.
Tuning dissonance / Start together at the same time. Make/play one specific sound. From there go step by step, trying to find the „middle sound“, which is a sound that has qualities of both the sounds you played. Each step consists of playing one „middle sound“ simultaneously. Do that until you arrive at the same tone or sound. Take it from there and improvise freely, always listening. / Holding space or Gravitational Pull / Start together at the same time. Improvise until you find some harmonic resonance together. This will be your centre. Gradually move away from that centre, separately from one another, yet always returning alone or together, holding the centre space. Find an intuitive ending together. / Energy in motion / Voice or play any emotion (or energy in motion). Gravitate slowly towards each other, gradually attuning to each other’s sounds. Improvise further from there or find a natural ending together. / Try and explore these improvisations for yourselves Follow the QR codes or the link on the introduction page to listen to the narrative musical piece that was created from our dialogue and a recording of one of our improvisations.
ZORAS collective: Show me the way to the Mountain Hall is there a place for my love? / and i / am alone / it is an illusionary place in my head / there is too much room for fears / but still / you are not alone / so much space i need to create for myself / within myself / yet there is no space / yes / a / place
*Tämän Hetken Periaatteet ovat interventioita elämän logiikkaan ja monimutkaisuuteen. Ne voivat auttaa sinua eläytymään maailmaan. Kopioi nämä periaatteet. Vie ne kävelylle yksin tai ystävien kanssa. Tee niihin lisäyksiä. Jätä niitä julkisille paikoille tuntemattomien löydettäviksi... Kiitos.
Enrica Camporesi & Line Mertens yhteistyössä ZORAS-kollektiivin kanssa
*These Principles For Now are interventions in the logic and complexity of life. They can help you relate to the world. Copy them. Take them for a walk alone or with friends. Add to them. Leave them in public places for strangers... Thank you.
Enrica Camporesi & Line Mertens in collaboration with ZORAS collective
I wish I could write the book of a thousand fragilities. Stories of permeable membranes, feathers involuntarily traveling across an ocean, holes in nets that let the salmon escape. Eggs cracking to let life continue to the next chapter. Beech leaves, dry and crinkled, holding on to their thin branches way beyond autumn, making music together, calling spring. Tender vocal chords of husky voices telling stories that sound so much more thrilling exactly because. Of rough textures allowing for fifteen different mosses to grow. Of the accidental watery blotch that mingles every color on the paper, letting them travel to unpredictable places. Of limping minds and fractured hearts that stop trying so painfully hard, starting to joyfully, slowly live into change always already presenting itself to our hungry imagination. Cracks in walls that look like veins that look like roots that look like lightning. And those creatures in the walls fearing collapse, dreaming of collapse.
blind spot
I wish I could write about places that embraced me most warmly and tightly exactly when I had almost faded away. Wild places or never fully tamed places that have always been my home. I wish I could write about my addiction to a broken heart, no, to my heart breaking. A circular journey of reaching out, of surrendering to longing. This moment of feeling so alive and paradoxically connected to the world. Maybe the rawness of a felt rejection? Falling and the mercy of the dark that had been calling out to me to notice it, embrace it. I do not want to be fixed, it whispers. When you’re feeling small, feel it all until you can hold yourself in your own palm again.
A shadow is not fragile. Or is it?
Cracks in my mind letting dreams seep through it. Two hands, one on top of the other, lightly, moving slowly. Like a worm trying to wiggle itself back into the soil. And one entire being melting. I am sorry to be mean when I am hurting. One finger brushing the palm.
melody
On a windy day I see a buzzard in the sky above me. I wonder, how much she is playing, how much training her strength? How can she be certain she will be stronger than the gusting wind? It sure seems like she is. Strong enough and knowing, I mean. If I observe her long enough my mind attunes to her rhythm of play. The way she defies the wind direction only to let herself be swept away as if her strong, feathered body had spontaneously reduced itself into a single fluffy feather, melting effortlessly into the air to join the other molecules. But no, there she is again, throwing herself against the wind.
ray
How fragile each moment is. How easily it can be cracked open, like some thick sugary crust. By what you ask? For me, a certain brightness of the morning sun, falling on my face, illuminating past and future. My mind melting into this moment, fragile yet ever expansive. And I am falling through time, reminded of one winter morning when I was getting water for the sheep. You, warm and golden, entered the yard through a small slid in the gate and landed on my nose. But I was busy so I just smiled back at you, greeting you like my mother just coming home from the bakery. I’ll be right there!, I call out to you, my sun.
I am lying in bed trying to meditate before sleep. If I listen closely, I am astonished that my heart just beats, my breath is flowing more or less evenly and my limbs are moving, taking me places. Strangely, I seem to plan everything and to work on autopilot at the same time. Like a twilight zone of biological self-sufficiency and conscious control. If I remember today, I wonder how often I have been surprised. How did I react? When did I respond? Do I notice the difference in experience at all? Taking the entirety of each of our existences I feel overwhelmed by all these moving universes ever expanding, full of memory, immediacy, conscious or unconscious longing. And yet, when I lie in bed looking at the wobbly wallpaper ceiling above me, to my numerous plants, to the lamp and the shadows it produces, my universe seems so incredibly small. All that I want to explore. All that I have explored and unfaithfully forgotten. Memories must be falling from my too tiny trouser pockets to the ground, to be trampled on, lost. Tomorrow I will try to be more careful, I think. Everything about me just feels too small to hold my own existence in its ordinary yet strange entirety. I wonder if I actually know how it feels to be human.
soul
I think I feel most human when I imagine to be something or someone else. When my mind reaches outside of itself to grasp the phenomena of this world. For I can only do so in occupying my body and senses completely. Then my imagination makes my skin tickle at the thought of being leaves in a tree or nutrients traveling through and underneath dented old bark. Oh to be a bird! Or a seal. Oh to be supple and strong and -
breath
to be air, yes! I am air. I am O2, CO2, N2. I am already a symbiosis. And I am traveling, traveling, traveling. The sun moves me, literally, all the time. I stroke every surface I pass, inter-acting, changing, being changed. Remember how your sliced apples turn golden brown, yellow bronze? … I move up and down and up and down to eventually stroke the cheeks of a deer, the wings of a crow, to wrestle with humans by the shore. Or I linger on the surface of the vast ocean, waiting, swaying. If I have any enemies, if you want to call them that, then they are small like me, disrupting my innermost structure. Only if you build impenetrable walls around me will I cease to be. Some of my closest friends are green and brown and white and innumerable other colors. I call them friends because they tear me up, break me into pieces only to send me on a new journey across and through the atmosphere. I like to sneak into everything, you know. It is quite natural to me because no one can really see me. I am invisible.
escape
Maybe I asked the wrong question. Maybe my question is: How does it feel to be alive? To be present in infinite, all-pervasive aliveness. I activate all my senses, all that I am in this moment, to perceive this aliveness underneath the pavement, between the forever malfunctioning wheels of an office chair, or sticking to the conveyor belt at the supermarket. I am torn between wanting to stop time and seeing everything erupt. Although, maybe they aren’t opposed at all. For really I wish to stop us; to let the roots underneath the pavement to not just create some cracks but actually break through and reclaim the ground, letting soil resurface, reviving the land. I want to climb branches and hop from root to root. I want my feet to have long, complex and aimless conversations with the earth. I want my mind to engage in endless dialogues with the wind that is always present, having found its ways through concrete jungles since the beginnings of so called civilization. Teach me!, I call out to the wind. Teach me to be alive like you!
How to live together without fixed agreements, rules, schedule, in silence. Listening deeply to the needs of the collective body.
Opening/closing / Opening up, protecting oneself, sharing, showing, listening, hiding, concealing. The choreography of bodies in a shared space. The movement of a collective body.
ZORAS collective: Sitting with
Our autonomic nervous system has a field of awareness wider than the boundaries of our body. We sense around us and into others. Slowing down and tuning into each other on the level of the nervous system is functional, in order to support a calming process in another being. It involves necessarily nonfunctional presence: spending of time, openness, affect, a certain state of body and mind. Time shared in the ordinary present can have extra-ordinary effects. Though not a permanent state, it is a possible place to make us more capable together.
Rona Kennedy & ZORAS collective: Common ground Curious and excitable as we are, we get stuck into the doable and the possible, wading around the messy, sticky and troubling. Depending on the season. / We are circling the fuse box in the dark. With no electricity or hot water, we are standing, staring, grumbling. No-one is fully dressed. And then we laugh. / Neighbours and more than neighbours, we are an affinity, of sorts. The bonds creep up on you, with their strange elusive glue, delicate balance. A quiet kind of magic.
Jonne Kauko: Urban space
In URBAN SPACE… / …ACTIVISM city dwellers aim to improve and develop city spaces, to democratise the discussion about their usage and influence the politics of urban space / However, the city organisation has unconditional power to make decisions in a city. It is not a democratic entity that respects the diversity of people and issues but a hierarchical, even authoritarian machine which consists of special organs using bureaucratic and political power, also in matters concerning space. / Our power is as strong as our castle! / Hheeey WE are here TOO… / This hierachical governing of the city --- produces “influencers”. / These individuals often have close ties with corporations and sport business. “The influencers” gain in stature as the phenomenon has personality cult features. / Lots of power increases power!
If the city was a human individual, the situation could be compared to an auto-immune disease. / City (written in the hands and on the shirt). / What on earth is this spatial condition? / Chronic condition? / Health status? / Outdoor space? / Indoor space? / Lack of space? / State of deficiency or state of transformation? / State of emergency? / Division of space? / Limbo – A wall of partition? / The state of a divided mind? / Wonderous-weird-spacehuman? / I resist the city which resists me... which one here is the mad one?!?! If I now flip out, is it a sign of symptoms of spacelessness or being too much in ‘space’? / The creativity of art supports activism by stimulating experimentation with new things and simulating alternative futures. / Suomen Trikoo (factory in Tampere) Long live Onkiniemi Cultural Factory. In cooperation. / The anti-gentrification sculpture park of Pispala Centre of Contemporary Art. / Activist and art communities are fragile. The principle “The space belongs to everyone” may also let in abusive personalities who make other’s lives difficult. / I am the solution and you are the problem. / I can’t take this anymore. / I don’t want this anymore. / In the end, since we live in a capitalist state and urban space is valuable capital, the constituents deemed to be inappropriate can be removed quickly and legally.
Sanna Hukkanen, Rona Kennedy & The Mushroom: In the mushroom mmmmm, oh yes. Electric pulse forward, backwards. Yes, sideways too. Tickle, entangle, push, chord, weave. oh, smell dark, under, down. mmm, that smell of wet, wet smellness. Stop, wait. We taste raining. up and out, oh, yes, fresh, (giggle). cap on, quick. Aaaah rain, yes. rain. Aaah yes.
Feel, touch, sense. Mmmm, this is good, find air, send spores. Speak spore, sporing. Puff, puff. up we go, and off, barely visible. We are in process, in rot and regrow. Movement is constant.
