Kalevala in Context: Creative & Critical

Join us in the AMP Lab (FIP 251) for Kalevala in Context: Creative & Critical, a series of talks by visiting artist Olli Aarni and AMP Lab director Karis Shearer, with an introduction by Jodey Castricano and respondents Sean Lawrence and Francisco Peña.

Olli Aarni will give a talk on “The Weep of Trees” by Band of Weeds, a four-channel work of sound art by the Band of Weeds based on the poem about a weeping birch tree in the Kalevala epic. In the poem, Väinämöinen listens to the lament of the birch about how people treat it badly. Band of Weeds, consisting of Olli Aarni, Lauri Ainala, Kalle Hamm and Hermanni Keko, creates sound art primarily using plants. They convert variation in the electrical conductivity of plants into sounds. Their works have been presented in exhibitions, and they also perform live together.

Karis Shearer’s talk is titled “Kalevan Naiset: Reading Epic Poetry in Migrant-Settler Communities in Northern Ontario.” Situating the Kalevan Naiset Ainikin Tupa (Ladies of Kaleva Ainikki Lodge) within the longer history of Finnish-Canadian migrant-settler history in Northern Ontario, this talk offers preliminary observations about how Finnish-Canadian women used reading, recitation, and lay-scholarship of the Kalevala epic poem to sustain cultural memory, negotiate gender roles, and articulate belonging amidst shifting ideas about citizenship, nationalism and multiculturalism in Canada in the 20th century.

This event is free and open to all, and is presented by the AMP Lab and sponsored by the Principal’s Research Chair program at UBC Okanagan.

About the Speakers

Olli Aarni (born in Oulu, Finland, in 1988) is a multidisciplinary artist working with sound, music, language, and literature. His work ranges from sound installations to artist’s books, and from sound poetry to ambient and noise music. His work covers themes such as perception of time, the relation between knowledge and senses, and translating phenomena from auditory to visual and linguistic realms, and back. The conceptual side of his work is sometimes upfront, and sometimes hidden and embedded in the pieces. Aarni has collaborated with scientists, musicians, visual artists and poets. Everything he does has to do with sound in some way or another, whether it be in printed, visualized form or verbally described. A major part of Aarni’s work takes the form of audio recordings. He has released over 20 records on four continents with record labels such as Students of Decay, Flau, Dauw, Ultraääni, Mappa, Mondoj, and Superpang. He has performed live in numerous European countries and in Japan. He has made solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions, including the Helsinki Biennial. He has made works for the Finnish National Broadcasting Company YLE, radio art festivals, and poetry events.

Karis Shearer is a 4th-generation Finnish-Canadian and scholar of literary audio, poetry, and print culture in Canada. She has published extensively on women’s labour in literary communities and, together with Deanna Fong, is the co-editor of Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Finnish-Canadian writer Gladys Hindmarch. For eight years, she has been the lead UBCO researcher on the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb Project and has co-authored The Data Primer with Marjorie Mitchell, Felicity Tayler, et al. With Emily Christina Murphy, she has co-authored numerous articles on digital humanities labs and co-edited the most recent issue of Scholarly Editing.