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Karen Vedel

Clothing the Suomussalmi Silent People

From Site-Specific Dance Performance to Ritually Informed Community Event

Introduction

The relationship between rituals, processes of ritualisation, and theatre or performing arts has long been established in the overlapping discourse between the disciplines of performance studies and ritual theory.1 Empirical examples focus predominantly on the study of classical traditions such as Sanskrit drama, mask traditions from the ceremonial life of West African tribal communities, and practices of worship among Native American Indians. Innovations tend to be theorised as transferences of performative elements from cultural or religious traditions of pre-modern societies to more contemporary genres of performance (i.e. rituals performed on stage).2 The relationship is, however, neither determined by criteria of longevity nor by the canonical status of the tradition in question. It is also not given that transference between rituals and performance must pass from the realm of the non-theatrical to the theatrical.

Recently, an illuminating discussion of the merging of theatre and ritual in performance was granted by the German theatre scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte in her analysis of the transgression of the boundary between the actor’s semiotic and phenomenal body as an act of self-sacrifice.3 If, however, we turn our attention away from the stage, it is also possible that performance art works may give rise to ritualised activity outside a conventional theatrical context. This argument, which will structure my discussion, follows a trajectory drawn from the Finnish choreographer and performance artist Reijo Kela’s dance work Ilmarin Kynnös

1 Schechner 2002; 2003 [2008]; Turner 1977; 1979; 1984; Bell 1992; 1997. 2 Holm & Nielsen & Vedel 2008. 3 Fischer-Lichte 2005: 5.

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(“Ilmari’s Ploughing Fields”) in 1988 to the recurring event of clothing the installation titled The Silent People twenty years later.4

The Event

In the morning of 6 June 2007, around 25 people arrived at the field of Hiljainen Kansa (The Silent People) some thirty kilometres north of the small town of Ämmänsaari in Kainuu district in North-Eastern Finland. Situated alongside Highway 5, the field of close to 1000 effigies lies in the thinly populated area of predominantly swamps, woods, and a few of Finland’s well over 1000 lakes. While some of the women started up a fire in front of the barn-like building that serves as a handicraft shop, another group, consisting mainly of sulky young males between the ages of 17 and 25, received their instructions before carrying a range of items from the vans in the parking lot into the field: man-high wooden crosses, black plastic bags filled with clothes, and two large pieces of tarpaulin. In the field they began by dismantling the effigies’ peat heads. All was done in a very practical manner; in a matter-of-fact way, and without a lot of words. Ahead of the youngsters worked an elderly couple, neighbours of the field, who had their own very deliberate manner of going about the task: Making sure not to undress the effigies all at once, they first removed their overcoats, allowing a little time for the warmth of the sun to soak in, before removing also the pullover, the shirt, and the undergarment. As the grey wooden structures underneath the clothes were bared, the field revealed itself as a field of crosses. But not for long: While repairs were being made to the wooden structures, and the young men were digging out fresh peat heads from the ground below the effigies, the women, retrieving colourful dresses and fresh shirts from the plastic bags, had already begun clothing The Silent People at the upper end of the field.

In the course of the morning, a few people from the village stopped by, bringing their own clothes for The Silent People, adding an extra pullover, a jacket, or a scarf to an outfit, or dressing up an effigy from scratch. Tourists, too, pulled off the highway to satisfy their curiosity and perhaps enjoy a pancake and a cup of coffee made over the open fire in front of the café by the side of the field. In the early afternoon the job was completed, the old clothes wrapped and waiting to be taken to the municipal dump to be burned. The previously saggy and somewhat sad-looking Silent People had been transformed into a fresh and brightly coloured, westward-bound armada – and the work gang into a slightly less sulky group of young men.

4 Reijo Kela (born 1952 in Suomussalmi, Finland) is an internationally acknowledged performance artist and choreographer, whose training took place in Helsinki and New York in the 1970s. His works are often site-specific.

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In late September, there was again a gathering of members of the youth workshop, volunteers, and the odd tourist in the field. This time layers of clothes were added in order to protect The Silent People from the cold of the Kainuu Winter. The same procedure has been repeated twice a year since 1994.

The Sites

Reijo Kela’s site-specific work in Suomussalmi in north eastern Finland, where the artist was born, was introduced to me at a dance research conference in 1990.5 The artist’s presentation was eye-opening, not least the filmed images from the performance of Ilmarin Kynnös6, which had been commissioned by the cultural office in a remote and – to me – unfamiliar part of northern Finland on the occasion of their dance week.7 The performance, which had drawn local audiences of more than 2000 people to a grass field outside the church village of Suomussalmi, had been remounted on the same site two years later for the production of a documentary by Yleisradio, the Finnish National Broadcasting company.8 The filmed document showed the facial expressions and the vocal reactions of the audience to the restaged performance, which left little doubt of their enthusiasm for the event. As one onlooker exclaimed “Hell, it’s all about us!”9

Almost two decades later, when I learned that the closing image of Ilmarin Kynnös, an installation of man-sized wooden effigies entitled The Silent People, remained accessible to the general public, my curiosity was kindled once again. Under the custodianship of the municipality of Suomussalmi, The Silent People was now featured as an attraction, a semi-permanent art installation at a different site beside Highway 5. The new location was even listed (and still is) as a link on

5 The second international dance research conference of NOFOD (Nordic Forum for Dance Research) at Copenhagen (1990).

6 Ilmarin Kynnös (1988) was the first of a series of site-specific works by Reijo Kela in Suomussalmi. The title refers to one of the main characters of the Finnish national epic Kalevala, which relies largely on folk tales from Eastern Finland. The title also is associated with the cherished Finnish writer Ilmari Kianto (1874–1970), who spent a large part of his life in Suomussalmi and whose fiction writings were often based on life in the area. (see e.g. Kianto & Enckell 1946 [1909]) The title of Kela’s Ilmarin Kynnös has been translated in many ways, among others: Ilmari’s Field, Ilmari Sowing, and Ilmari’s Ploughing Fields. For this reason I have decided to keep the Finnish title. (K.V.)

7 Suomussalmen tanssiviikko 02/08. – 07/08/1988. 8 Karakorpi 1991 (N.B.: the filming took place in 1990, the production in 1991). 9 Quoted in Siltavuori 1990: 10.

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the municipality’s official website next to the rock paintings, the crafts shop, the museums, and the memorials dedicated to the Winter War.10

How might one explain the transition from the performance in 1988 to the present-day phenomenon? Had an element of Ilmarin Kynnös been taken hostage in a desperate need to arrest the attention of the stray tourist travelling to this sparsely populated corner of Finland? Or was there, as initially suspected, a deeper level of resonance between the work and the myths and memories of the generations that make up the population of Suomussalmi today?

The Argument

My attempt at an answer is materially anchored in corporeality and weighted towards an interest in action and embodied practice, alongside interpretation.11 The theoretical framework adapts the overlapping discourse of performance theory and ritual studies, in addition to key concepts relating to the cultural practice of memory. Contextualising Reijo Kela’s work in the geopolitical history of the region in the twentieth century, the article examines the nature of local commitment more closely. In addition to field notes from participation in the practical procedures through which the municipality maintains the art installation, the material on which I base the article includes interviews, newspaper articles, statistics, photos, film, and video.12 Against this background, I propose to view the biannual event of clothing The Silent People as a ritually-informed event – a ritual in statu nascendi at a site of memory.

The argument has several interconnected parts. First, I examine the interplay between site-specific artworks and locational identity. Referring to the genealogy of site specificity proposed by art historian Miwon Kwon, I trace the nature and development of the activities on the sites, from the original performance of Reijo Kela’s Ilmarin Kynnös to the present-day installation of The Silent People.13

Next, I look at ways in which artworks activate memory on both an individual and a social level.14 Approaching the biannually repeated event of clothing The Silent People from this angle is useful, as it leads to a reflection of how the practice of memory is corporeally played out in the act of maintaining the installation, and

10 See the Suomussalmi Tourist Office’s webpage: http://www.suomussalmi.fi/Resource. phx/sivut/sivut-suomussalmi/matkailu/english/index.htx (05/05/2010).

11 The study forms part of a larger research project on the interrelationship of space, locale, and body undertaken during my fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies 2006–2008.

12 The field work in Suomussalmi is ongoing. Between June 2007 and July 2008 I visited the site four times, each time spending 2–4 days in the area.

13 Kwon 2004 [2002]. 14 Nora 1989; Connerton 1989.

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to what effect. Finally, in the concluding paragraphs, I relate the ritual aspects of the event to the previous discussion of site specificity, locational identity, and cultural memory.

Site Specificity and Locational Identity

Recent years have seen a foregrounding of site specificity as a “new” genre in contemporary art that blurs the distinctions between visual and performance arts.15 In her genealogy of site specificity, Miwon Kwon identifies three paradigmatic changes, or three phases, since the early beginnings of the genre, which she ascribes to New York in the 1960s.16 The temporal span of choreographer and performance artist Reijo Kela’s site-specific works in Suomussalmi is not quite as long. Still, Kwon’s framework provides a template for analysing the nature of site specificity in his oeuvre. Not only does the Finnish artist combine performance and installation artwork in a manner that situates it in the overlapping zone between visual and performing arts; narrowed down to the trajectory drawn by the pieces, on which I focus here, there is also an overlap with the different phases introduced by Kwon. In this manner, the questions of locational identity and the nature of site specificity in The Silent People add a critical perspective to the current discourse.

In the first of Kwon’s three consecutive phases, site specificity is seen to rely on a phenomenological or experiential understanding of the site, which is perceived as a geographical location and an agglomeration of primarily physical attributes.17 The grass field outside the church village of Suomussalmi, which constitutes the original site, is known as “Lassila’s field”. To the outsider’s eye nothing distinguishes this field from its surroundings. The wooden barn, the high grass, and the patches of swampy ground are all typical for the area. In the performance, which travels a distance of about 450 meters, the physical features do, however, form a very concrete basis for the experience of both the dancer and his audience. They also provide the journey with dramaturgical structure. It was, however, according to the artist, his reaction to the saturation of the site by myths and memories, rather than the physical attributes of the locality itself, that shaped his approach. He had thought up the theme of the performance after hearing that a great number of soldiers had died in that field in defense of the country in December 1939:

15 Dean & Millar 2005; Irwin 2007; Lacy 1995; Lippard 1997; McAuley 2006; Pearson & Shanks 2001; Suderburg 2000.

16 It should be noted here that Miwon Kwon’s genealogy leaves out the history of site specificity in the European avantgarde of the early 1900s.

17 Kwon 2004 [2002]: 11.

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“I thought that on the same fields and in the same barns where people had waged war and died, others had sown and made love. These were the elements that I used in the performance… .”18

Asked about the meaning of Ilmarin Kynnös, the answers provided by the interviewees, whether or not they had actually seen the original performance, were unanimous: Reijo Kela’s Ilmari was a farmer in Suomussalmi in the 1900s. It gave an account of his life from youth, through adulthood, to old age. As shown in the documentary, the performance progressed from dancing on the roof of a barn, through ploughing the field with a plough drawn by mythical reindeer, to the drama of a slash and burn scenario. The acts of war were referenced with explosions in the field that sent the performer flying into the air. The drastic change of life in Finland after the Second World War was captured in the performance behind glassless TV-monitors placed in the window holes of a wooden shelter. In the closing scene, the performer joined the solemnly standing Silent People, to which I shall shortly return.

The ultra-brief historical facts of the battles of the Winter War in Suomussalmi referred to by the performance are as follows. The Red Army crossed the Finnish border on 30 November 1939. As the Soviet soldiers advanced towards the parish village of Suomussalmi from the east and the north, a large number of civilians left their homes, moving towards the west. In the wake of their evacuation, approximately 270 homes were set on fire in order to prevent the insurgents from finding shelter from the cold. The subsequent battles, especially those along the Raate Road leading to the Sovjet border, are well described in the Winter War Exhibition at Raatteen Portti. It took a little more than a month before the hugely outnumbered and poorly equipped contingent of Finnish soldiers in Suomussalmi had fought off the Soviet troops.19 The successful defence relied on the strategic use of the Finnish soldiers’ familiarity with the terrain, their skills with skis, and on their use of the motti tactics of encircling the enemy, thereby cutting them off from their supplies. The death statistics show a loss of around 23 000 lives of Soviet

18 Reijo Kela, interviewed by Eeva Siltavuori (Siltavuori 1990: 10). 19 As the Soviet soldiers advanced towards the parish village of Suomussalmi from the east and

the north, the civilians, who were able to leave their land, fled their homes, moving towards the west. In the wake of their evacuation, approx. 270 homes in the area were set on fire in order to prevent the enemy soldiers from finding shelter from the cold. The subsequent battles, especially those along the Raate Road to the east of the church village, are well described. In the Suomussalmi battles, approx. 23 000 Soviet soldiers were killed, and their tanks, artillery, motor transport, and horses seized. Those who had fled towards the west of Finland, thinking they would never come back, could now return. However, there was not much to start from, as the village, as well as the smallcroppers’ homes, had to be rebuilt from scratch.

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soldiers against 800 Finnish ones in the battles of Suomussalmi.20 In one encounter outside the church village of Suomussalmi, about 200 Finnish soldiers died. This incident took place in “Lassila’s field”, or “the blood field of Lassila” as it came to be known.21 It was on this field that Reijo Kela created and performed Ilmarin Kynnös.

One of the defining characteristics of the second phase of Kwon’s genealogy is the critique of art institutions and their role in defining art.22 In his insistence on site specificity, Reijo Kela’s approach to creating performance works in Suomussalmi is, even if only in an indirect manner, a critique of art institutions and their role in the hegemonic power structures of Finnish society. His voice is, in more than one respect, a voice from the periphery. Not only does he, as a contemporary performance artist and a choreographer, speak from the margins of the art establishment, in his continued commitment to Suomussalmi he also speaks from the socio-economic and cultural margins of Finland. It is, therefore, not coincidental that his work has been read as a “commentary on the structural change in Finnish society, a result of the urbanisation and industrialisation that began in the 1950s”.23

On the map of Finland, Kainuu is geographically situated in the north-east, where the overlap of two gray zones forms a black zone, which can be read both in terms of business activity and in terms of the standard of living. On the whole, there has been considerable socio-economic development in Finland in the first two decades of the post-Soviet era, which coincide with the time that has elapsed since the performance of Ilmarin Kynnös. Statistics show, however, that Kainuu, and, to an even greater extent, the municipality of Suomussalmi have been “left behind”, if not entirely “left out” of this development. While the population of Finland as such has increased by 12% over the past 25 years, the population of Suomussalmi has decreased by 25%. In terms of income per capita, the population of Kainuu ranked lowest in the country in 1988, lower than even Lapland. This is still the case. Unemployment figures for 1990 show numbers almost twice as high in Kainuu as in Finland as a whole. This difference has not diminished, but rather increased in the following two decades. In the summer of 2007, the estimated rate of unemployment in Suomussalmi was as high as 25%, compared to an average of 5.9% on a national level. Most discouraging are the suicide statistics, which once more show that, while the curve has been falling over the last twenty years on a national basis, it has remained extraordinarily high in Kainuu (even by Finnish

20 Raatteen Tien-Projetiryhmä 1988: 13. 21 Jalo Heikkinen interviewed by Karen Vedel on 07/06/2007. 22 Kwon 2004 [2002]: 14. 23 Sutinen 1997: 20.

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standards).24 At the time of my first field trip in June 2007, the municipality of Suomussalmi had already suffered 10 deaths by suicide in that same year. The latest incident, which involved a young man who shot his girlfriend before killing himself, had taken place the day before I arrived. Although only two interviewees actually referred to the tragedy, it marked the event of clothing The Silent People with an underlying tone of sadness and grief.25

In the second phase of site specificity outlined by Kwon, the role of the artist comes to be seen as that of a cultural service provider, the site as a network of social relations, and the artwork as an extension of “the community”.26 The extent to which this was the case with Ilmarin Kynnös and with the later development of The Silent People may be illustrated by a brief account of how the two works came into being. In his creation of the original performance onsite in 1988, Reijo Kela had wished to hire the two to three hundred unemployed youth of Suomussalmi to perform with him in the closing scene as The Silent People.27 When no-one responded to the advertisement he had posted in the local newspaper, the job of producing a stock of 240 man-sized “stick-figures”, in the cross-shape used for drying hay, was commissioned with the municipality. The portfolio was given to the youth workshop that trains unemployed local youngsters and dropouts for a working life. They built the first contingent of “stick-figures”, the number of which corresponded to the number of unemployed youth. Since that day, the obligation to maintain the effigies, which today amount to approximately 1000, has remained with the youth workshop.28

According to Miwon Kwon, the third phase of site specificity is defined by a radical opening of the notion of “site”. Released from its ties to a specific physical location, the “discursive site” can be a wide variety of arenas, from a political debate to a social cause. Based on the manner in which Reijo Kela’s social, historical, and environmental awareness is played out in his works, his approach to site specificity may be seen as discursive, even if it is in an oblique and indirect manner. One example is the use of “offspring” from The Silent People, who in varying numbers have been featured in others of the artist’s works. One case was the performance titled Jalonhaarassa rantojen raukat. Ämmän koskessa Kauniit ja Rohkeat (“The Bold and the Beautiful. Wretched of the Shores”) which was sited on the banks of the Jalonuoma, close to the centre of Ämmansaari, in 1994. In this

24 According to nation-based WHO data, Finland ranks ninth in the world in terms of suicide in 2007. http://tilastokeskus.fi/meta/til/ksyyt_en.html

25 The incident made media headlines and drew (short-span) attention to Suomussalmi on a national level.

26 Kwon 2004 [2002]: 53. 27 Jalo Heikkinen interviewed by Karen Vedel on 07/06/2007. 28 Lea Matéro-Seppänen interviewed by Karen Vedel on 06/06/2007.

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site-specific work, around 350 effigies of Silent People were cast in the role of the Wretched on the Shores, depicted as passive spectators, watching from a distance the ways of the Bold and the Beautiful. Later that same year, when the Kainuu district put on an exhibition in Senate Square in front of the Cathedral in central Helsinki, all 1000 Silent People were transported from Suomussalmi to the capital. In the dark of the night they were erected on the stairs of the Cathedral, peat heads and all, creating a puzzling sight, before they returned from their Helsinki-outing to Suomussalmi. Most recently, “cousins” of The Silent People appeared in the UK in the summer of 2007, where Reijo Kela’s Hei People were built overnight on secret and shifting locations across country Kent.29

In the above-mentioned examples, the inter-textual references to Ilmarin Kynnös and the installation by Highway 5 in Suomussalmi are implicit, and the effigies carry traces of both without even mentioning their names. The itinerant effigies remain connected to Suomussalmi when making their appearances away from “home”. In a subtle way The Silent People become themselves the site, the political cause, and the issue, addressed in various media, from the original performance through the TV documentary to the conference presentation, the derived performances, and the mention of the installation on the Internet.

The claim may be expanded, taking into account the latest development in Kwon’s genealogy, “new genre public art”, which has the integration of art and everyday life as the ultimate goal.30 In this phase, the community’s sense of identification with the work is secured through an investment of labour by people otherwise distant from the artistic process.31 Community involvement in the installation near Highway 5 takes places on several levels, from the biannual charity,where quite substantial amounts of clothing are donated, to the very practical commitment of the shifting membership of the youth workshop, from the approximately 80 school kids, who arrived to assist in clothing the effigies for the winter, to the municipal decision-makers, who recently renewed the contractual agreement with the artist for a ten year-period.

Asked about the attitude towards the job, the leader of the youth workshop explained:

“The basic idea of the workshop is that whatever you do, you do it properly, you do it carefully. [I]n the beginning – before they come here, the boys are so that they say, it’s nothing important, why should we do a thing like that.

29 http://www.nklaap.com/heiPeople.html (05/05/2010) See also www.youtube.com under “Hei People”.

30 Kwon 2004 [2002]: 82, 104ff. 31 Ibid.: 96.

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But then when they start working, they do it ok, and then afterwards they become proud: We did it, it’s kind of ours.”32

The municipal interest in the installation may be ascribed to the production of difference, which Kwon calls the “hidden attractor” of site-oriented practices.33 Paraphrasing Henri Lefebvre on the dialectics between the increasing abstraction of space under globalisation and the production of local specificity, Kwon emphasises the powerful dynamics which underlie the pitching of the identity of a specific locality as a meaningful place to visit.34

It took determination to make a more permanent installation out of The Silent People. The now retired leader of the cultural division of the municipality, Jalo Heikkinen, revealed how – after the performance beside Jalonuoma in 1994 – he had convinced the artist that the field in Käpylä on the side of Highway 5 between Suomussalmi and Kuusamo, where the forest had been cut down, would be a good choice as a “resting place” for The Silent People.35 But when the first 100 figures had been erected, it already became clear that the installation, breaking the monotonous landscape with an unexpected display of humanoid structures, colours, and motion, attracted attention from passers-by, who would stop their cars to ponder the sight. In order to cater to the visitors, a café was established at the side of the field, where coffee and pancakes are made over an open fire. There is also a stand with information about other memorial sites and attractions (Finnish muistomerkki) in the area.

During the summer, members of the local community are among the visitors to the site. Especially popular are occasions when musical concerts or dance performances are arranged in the field. The majority of the visitors are, however, tourists, both Finns and foreigners. The installation of The Silent People in Käpylä provides jobs for 3 employees, who work (one on halft-time) in the café and the shop for the duration of the season, which lasts from June to September.

A central objective of “new genre public art” is the creation of works in which members of a community will see and recognise themselves, where they will be affirmatively pictured or validated.36 The point of identification cited earlier by the leader of the youth workshop is confirmed in several of the interviews, for example, in that of a young woman who had brought some of her own clothes to the field “I see this artwork as it is like us, our people here. I can find myself … .

32 Lea Matéro-Seppälä, interviewed by Karen Vedel on 06/06/2007. 33 Kwon 2004 [2002]: 159. 34 Lefebvre 2005 [1991] in Kwon 2004 [2002]: 54. 35 Jalo Heikkinen, interviewed by Karen Vedel on 07/06/2007. 36 Kwon 2004 [2002]: 115.

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Because now there’s my clothes.”37 A somewhat older woman added a historical explanation to the same interpretation:

“To me, these effigies are the people of Kainuu. Life here has been so tough, they have been fighting to earn their living and their daily bread, really. So they are not people who make revolutions. They are humble, but they still, somehow they’re proud in their humility. They are not people who you can crush under your shoe.”38

Balancing the examples of positive identification with the installation, it was brought to my attention that there were those who were very critical of The Silent People. But even in their desire to distance themselves from the locational identity suggested, the point of recognition seems to be confirmed:

“[L]ocally, some people don’t even like this. They think that this is something very negative for this region, for Suomussalmi, these (rääsylainen). They think it’s like these old people from a long time ago, when we … were very poor, we don’t have enough food, we don’t have any proper clothes. [W]e have this Kainuu song … Nälkämaan laulu, how can I say it, … Land of Hunger?”39

My conclusion on the sense of local ownership is that, although expressions of positive identification with the installation dominated the interviews, there were also ambiguous feelings and accounts of adverse opinions. The marketing of the art installation through brochures, which have been printed by the Suomussalmi Tourist Office in three languages, integrates the ambiguity and the tension in the sense that the text dissociates the work from an identification with Suomussalmi. The title on the brochures says: The Silent People. The Oddity of Highway 5. The fact that the installation is today situated at a distance from both the church village of Suomussalmi and the “new” village of Ämmansaari may also be seen to underline the desire to avoid an explicit identification between the installation and the local community.

By way of concluding the correlation with the phases in the conceptual frame provided by Miwon Kwon, it should be emphasised that the shifts through which Reijo Kela’s works foreground different kinds of site specificity are subtle. The experience of the site as a geographical location retains importance alongside the notion of the work of art as a voice from the margins of Finnish society. And, with

37 Anonymous F, interviewed by Karen Vedel on 06/06/2007. 38 Anonymous F, interviewed by Karen Vedel on 06/06/2007. 39 Ritva Mäkeläinen, interviewed by Karen Vedel on 05/06/2007. The title she refers to is that

of a poem/song (Nälkämaan laulu) written by Ilmari Kianto, with music composed by Oskar Merikanto.

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regard to the notions of the “discursive site”, it continues to exist as new momentum is added to the site, the latest example being the derivative performance-installations in the UK. The community involvement since the performance of Ilmarin Kynnös may be characterised by its continuity. The strength of the interest in holding on to the performance installation was recently demonstrated in the renewed contract between the municipality and the artist.

Sites of Performance – Sites of Memory

In human geography, identity has been posed as a quality assigned to place through human activity, rather than a quality which is inherent to place.40 Among the forms of human activity that impart meaning and identity to place are rituals, commemorations, and preservation. Adding site-specific performance and installation art to this list raises questions about the relationship between memory practices and place, which have been pursued by performance theorists.

Important insights into the understanding of how site specificity may contribute to the production of locational identity have been provided by Kathleen Irwin, who recently introduced the notion of “the spatial performative” as a useful concept to account for “how site makes meaning”.41 In a similar vein, and in reference to the work of the British performance group Brith Gof, Mike Pearson notes that “site specific performances re-contextualise site; they are the latest occupation of a location where (previous) occupations are still apparent and cognitively active…”.42 And he continues: “Such performances are a complex overlay of narrative, historical and contemporary, a kind of saturated space…”. The suggestion made here is that the inscription of new meaning in site-specific performance involves a re-actualisation and re-organisation of meaning previously assigned to the locality itself.

I wish to look more closely at the practice of memory as one of the activities through which meaning may be generated and performed in site specificity. In introducing the notion of sites of memory or lieux de mémoire, the French historian Pierre Nora points out that, unlike history, which attaches itself to events, memory attaches itself to sites.43 A phenomenon of present times, he poses sites of memory as a new memory practice, which holds the “remains of a memorial consciousness, that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it”.44 His sites of memory appear where living memory has collapsed

40 See e.g. Osborne 2001; Massey 1994. 41 Irwin 2007: 69ff. 42 Mike Pearson quoted in Kaye 1996: 214 43 Nora 1989: 22. 44 Ibid.: 12.

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(or is collapsing) as a result of the movement toward mass culture on a global scale. Finnish society, with its massive structural changes over a relatively short time, is a textbook case of the kind of society in which Nora would expect to find sites of memory. The history of this barely century-old nation is further marked by the scissures, the fissures, created by its history of wars.45 Most important in this sense are the traumas of the 1918 Civil War, which currently preoccupy Finnish historians. All the while, the nation is as deeply absorbed in its own transformation and renewal as any other modern and post modern society of the world today.

In order for a lieu de mémoire to appear, there must be a will to remember. As underlined by Nora, the transition into a site of memory is voluntary, intentional, and conscious. Voluntary memory is defined as distinct from “true memory”, which in Nora’s terms refers to gestures, inherent body knowledge, unstudied reflexes, habits, and skills that have been passed down in unspoken tradition.46 The creation of a work of art is, in every respect, a conscious and intended, rather than a habitual, activity. As demonstrated in the discussion of the relationship between the Ilmarin Kynnös and the site, Reijo Kela’s creation of the piece involved a “re-actualisation” and “re-organisation” of the meaning already assigned to the site. The format within which this process was undertaken was artistic and aimed at the creation of a performance artwork, which might be of relevance to members of the local community. It implied a transformation of the field into a performative space. In the performance itself, the identification of the field with one of the tragic battles of the Winter War was placed within the larger temporal frame of the structural changes in society at large, as well as in the lifespan of a farmer in the course of the 1900s. In this sense, the site became, at least temporarily, overwritten with a new layer of meaning.47

In the detachment of The Silent People from the performance and the site of Ilmarin Kynnös in “Lassila’s field”, and the subsequent relocation of the installation to the field in Käpylä, new layers were added to the work. It was the

45 Apart from the Civil War in 1918 and the Winter War of 1939–1940, these include the Continuation war of 1941–1944 (against the Soviet Union) and the Lapland War of 1944–1945 (against Germany) (Kirby 2006).

46 Nora 1989: 13. Although he uses a similar terminology, there is a difference between Pierre Nora’s and Henri Bergson’s distinction between two forms of memory (Bergson & Paul & Palmer 2007 [1912]). Bergson uses the term mémoire involuntaire, alternately “true” or “pure” memory, to speak of memory that holds the oldest surviving memories. Memories of this nature reside in the unconscious. They are regressive, uncontrollable, and surface spontaneously, for example, in dreams. The opposite is his notion of “habit memory”, which is created through willed repetition, seated in sensory-motor mechanisms of the body, progressive, and future-oriented. Nora’s use of the notion of “true memory” is thus closer to the Bergsonian concept of “habit memory”, than to what the French philosopher meant by “true memory”.

47 Kaye 2000: 215.

Karen Vedel 14

interest the installation generated in passers-by on Highway 5 that gave rise to the idea to make it possible for visitors to stop by The Silent People for a cup of coffee. Gradually the services were extended: the first of the now three wooden barns was built, and negotiations initiated with the regional road authorities, which in 2000 resulted in the posting of the M53 signs, which allocate the status of an “attraction”. At the same time, a car park and toilet facilities were constructed. While the sale of coffee and pancakes today finances the salaries of two people (one of whom works half-time), the salary of the third is paid by the municipal tourist office, under the condition that information is offered about other “attractions” in the region. The “café” functions as a “gateway” to the installation itself. With its rustic seating arrangement around an open fire, it creates a space for the sharing of stories.

In Nora’s discussion, a lieu de mémoire is defined as a “site where (cultural) memory crystallises and secretes itself”.48 Materiality is, however, just one of three co-existing aspects which characterise sites of memory, the other two being functional and symbolic.49 Not only is The Silent People one of the few stops outside the towns on Highway 5 where tourists and travelers can pull off the road for a rest and a coffee, but the installation, as we have heard, also serves the local community in various ways. On a symbolic level, the installation has value as a place of cultural activity, of rest and contemplation. There are annual art events in the field, for example, musical concerts or dance performances, which, I am told, draw large local audiences. But it is also being used as “a sanctuary of spontaneous devotion and silent pilgrimage”.50 Several interviewees confessed that they would visit the field every now and then on their own. There is, I was told, also an old musician, who is known to visit the field to play his accordion. One woman, whose mother passed away five years ago, was now slowly beginning to bring her clothes to the field. Reflecting on this, she said: “It’s difficult, because it’s kind of, do I bring my mother here, as a dead person?” Referring to a relative who had brought the clothes of her mother-in-law to the field, she added: “… but maybe it’s easier, your mother-in-law, than your own mother?” Her incentive to visit the field outside the season was to check up on the clothes, for example, after a storm or rain.51

An obvious transformation that has taken place over the twenty years that have passed since the installation was part of the performance in Lassila’s field is the style of clothes. Images from the documentary of Ilmarin Kynnös (1990) show The Silent People as a group of men, dressed in black suits. These were the clothes that the people of Suomussalmi had stored away in their cupboards then, and which

48 Nora 1989: 9. 49 Ibid.: 19. 50 Ibid.: 23. 51 Anonymous F:50, interviewed by Karen Vedel on 06/06/2007.

Clothing the Suomussalmi Silent People 15

therefore made their way into the field. The black uniform of masculinity added an austere feeling to the installation. This impression is confirmed in the interviews. Recalling her perception of the installation in 1988, one woman said: “[T]hen they had these black coats. It was very frightening, very, they didn’t laugh at all. Now they are laughing, they are quite cheerful, actually.”52 Today, the gender representation in the field has changed to the extent that the majority of the effigies are dressed as women. Incidentally, this also corresponds with the fact that the majority of those who leave Suomussalmi are women.53

Asking about the meaning of The Silent People, the answer I got was mostly evasive: “It is for everyone to decide for himself … .” The consistency of the answer underlines the ambience of ambiguity and enigma which surrounds the work. It also recounts what is a generally accepted definition of abstract modern art. The open interpretation is supported by the artist, who has refused to assign any one “meaning” to the work. It complies with yet another defining condition of lieux de mémoire, “their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications”.54

While, on a general level, the answer was inconclusive, I was offered a variety of personal interpretations. Some gave several, others provided overlapping answers. Here is a selection:

The Silent People are:

– the Finnish people. As a result of having been wedged between strong political and military powers for so long, they have become silent.

– the Finnish people. We don’t protest much; we just take what we are given.

– the people of Suomussalmi: strong, humble and upright

– all those who fled from Suomussalmi when the Red Army arrived

– all those who have emigrated from Suomussalmi in recent times

– the unemployed youth, who exhibit a lack of trust in the world, a lack of courage

– friends and relatives who have passed away. By dressing them up in a recently deceased person’s clothes, they are commemorated. People place personal notes to the deceased in the pockets of the clothes.

52 Transcript from an interview with Ritva Mäkeläinen F:42 (1681/23) (1:09:04) on 05/06/2007.

53 As a result of this demographic tendency, which leaves a “surplus” of bachelors in Suomussalmi, there has been an influx of Russian women in the municipality. Of the total population of about 9 000 people, there are around 300 Russian women, all married to Finnish men.

54 Nora 1989: 19.

Karen Vedel 16

– the Finnish soldiers who were killed in the Winter War

– the children and grandchildren of the Finnish soldiers who fought in the Winter War

– the poor who have been forgotten. They can’t defend themselves. They receive these clothes as a gift we (the rich people in Finland) give poor people.

The quotes demonstrate that The Silent People embrace multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings. As a site of memory the installation complies with Nora’s definition in that it is “… hybrid, mutable, and intimately bound with life and death, with time and eternity; enveloped in a Möbius strip of the collective and the individual”.55 It constitutes a radically open monument and a space for the experience and exploration of a range of individual responses. It also acknowledges what has been called the “inherently instable, ephemeral and episodic nature of the processes of memory”.56

Memory as Corporeal Practice

An often-cited contributor to the discussion of memory practices and how they work with respect to the interplay between the individual and the social is sociologist and social theorist Paul Connerton. In How Societies Remember (1989), he makes a distinction between two areas of social activity, which make common remembering possible: commemorative ceremonies and bodily practices.57 Connerton’s emphasis is on the second of the two, the bodily or corporeal practice of memory, which he explores in a discussion of habit memory. The idea that past performance(s) become laid down in the body as habit memory has already been mentioned in reference to Nora’s concepts, which depend on Henri Bergson’s writings on memory and matter.58 The claim pursued by Connerton follows Bergson in that he sees habit memory as a) non-cognitive, and b) different from recollection. Arguing that habitual memory is inherently performative, he proposes a “rhetoric of re-enactment”, which functions on the level of calendrical, verbal, and gestural repetition.59 While ceremonial re-enactments of the past, as for example the invented rite of carrying the Olympic torch, have been the object of interpretive activity, this is less often the case with non-inscribed social practices of less overtly spectacular and/or political nature.

55 Ibid.: 19. 56 Bordo 2003: 174. 57 Connerton 1989: 39. 58 Bergson & Paul & Palmer 2007 [1912]. 59 Connerton 1989: 65.

Clothing the Suomussalmi Silent People 17

As an example of the kind of incorporating practices he has in mind, Connerton points to the memorisation of culturally specific postures, which includes the ability to differentiate between postures appropriate for ceremonial occasion and for everyday activities.60 Returning to The Silent People, one such posture, which belongs to the incorporated repertory of culturally shared bodily gestures in Finland is the erect standing, which characterises the effigies of The Silent People. The same solemn and composed standing may be recognised in other culturally specific postural performances, such as commemorative events for the annual celebration of Finnish independence, or at other events of a ceremonial nature.61 Yet another example from the repertory of shared bodily gestures seen in the material from Suomussalmi is the “victorious pose” of Reijo Kela in the closing image of the documentary from the performance of Ilmarin Kynnös, where he stands in the field of The Silent People. The pose was tested spontaneously by one of the young men from the youth workshop upon entering the field in Käpylä.

And what about the silence itself? May it not be viewed as a culturally specific and incorporated performative gesture? Participation in the atrocities of war is potentially a traumatising event, which – if it is not addressed as such – risks internalisation as pain on the level of both the individual and the social body.62 Regardless of the Winter War being commemorated as a heroic war, the successful defence of Finland’s independence was for decades overshadowed by the fact that the Soviet Union came out as the winner. The peace agreement, whereby parts of Karelia were ceded to the victorious neighbour in the East, also left Finland within the Soviet “sphere of influence”, and, furthermore, prescribed cooperation with the Soviet Union. As phrased by an interviewee in Suomussalmi: “It would not be cooperative to talk about it (the defeat of the Soviet army).” Instead the silence became incorporated. This was confirmed by several of the persons interviewed, whose fathers, even within the four walls of the home, would not speak of the war. “Those who had seen the most terrible things, they didn’t speak.”63

A Rite of Spring

Having asked why it was made, how it is done, and what it means, the question which remains to be asked of the installation of The Silent People and the event of clothing them is: What does it do?

60 Ibid.: 75. 61 I witnessed such “ceremonial standing” on the occasion of the disclosure in Kajaani in

September 2007 of a monument for the multiple Olympic medalist Heikki Savolainen. 62 See e.g. Kleinman & Kleinman 1996; Young 1996. 63 Anonymous F:50, interviewed by Karen Vedel on 06/06/2007.

Karen Vedel 18

Bearing in mind ritual theorist Catherine Bell’s notion of “misrecognition”, which she uses, following Bourdieu, in reference to the intrinsic blindness of practice, this is the one question for which the researcher should not expect satisfactory answers from those involved.64

Instead, we may find answers in the analytical concepts of performance and action theory. According to Richard Schechner, “Rituals are a way people remember. Rituals are memories in action, encoded into actions.”65 In pointing to this level of action, his claim agrees well with Nora’s assertion that the memory sites

“… mark the ritual of a society without ritual; integral particularities in a society that levels particularity; and signs of distinction and of group membership in a society that tends to recognise individuals only as identical and equal.”66

As a level of ritualisation in a deritualised society, I suggest that the event of clothing The Silent People is ritually informed. I am looking at a “rite of spring”. This is confirmed in its calendrical re-occurrence, which follows the change of seasons, marks the passing of time, the overturn of the old, and the possibility of fresh beginnings.67 The activity itself, and the manner in which it is carried out, goes back to the creation of the performance of Ilmarin Kynnös in the troubled field of Lassila. It also goes back to a time, not so long ago, when the small-scale farmers of Suomussalmi would erect wooden cross-like poles and load them with freshly cut grass left to dry. Over and beyond the re-enactment of (by now) almost extinct cultural practices and the symbolic importance of the calendrical recurrance, the event is rich with ritual aspects. For example, the distribution of work tasks (differentiated by gender as well as age), and the use of experts, who return every year with specific jobs, is, according to Bell, another defining characteristic of rituals or ritualised behaviour.68 The repair of the crosses is in the hands of the same person every year, and I have referred above to the elderly volunteers, whose deliberate manner of changing the clothes of the Silent People follows an implicit logic. More heavily weighted in symbolic terms is the de-capitation of the effigies, and the constant updating of their style of clothing.69 The return of the heads to complete their decomposition in the ground and the gathering

64 Bell 1992: 81ff. 65 Schechner 2002: 45. 66 Nora 1989: 12. 67 Bell 1997: 92ff. 68 Ibid.: 82. 69 Connerton 1989: 10.

Clothing the Suomussalmi Silent People 19

and ultimate burning of the clothes, further ties the event to cyclical patterns of life and death. The shifting styles of clothes, too, remind us of the change of time.

Framed in the manner of ritual or ritual-like activity70, the café gains a meaning as a gateway, and a place to ponder, that is beyond a purely functional one. As far as the serving of pancakes is concerned, these, made from white flour in an area where bread was scarce, become, within a symbolic reading, a sacrificial meal.

The ritual aspects mentioned here have not been “invented” with the intention of creating a ritual in the manner of, for example, commemorative rites as invented and fixed in Soviet times.71 Rather, the ritualisation which is at stake here is a potentially infinitely ongoing process, and part of the “central dynamic in human affairs”.72 Viewed next to the other muistomerkki (memorial sites) in the area, The Silent People in Käpylä is unusual, in the sense that the Silent People are self-referential, tied to nothing in particular, and yet potentially to everything, through the process of memory itself.73 Next to the Winter Monument’s memorial site of 20 000 rocks, and the crosses in the cemetery in front of the parish church, the installation of The Silent People is characterised by instability, fragility, even decomposability. It is a radically open monument, which performs a complex layer of roles in the society. The desire is not to fix the past, but rather to keep memory alive, by accepting the flow of time.

70 Bell 1997: 158. 71 Fischer-Lichte 2005: 97ff. 72 Bell 1997: 264. 73 War memorials in Suomussalmi are numerous, and they are especially abundant along the

Raate Road running between the church village and the Russian border. Among the more prominent monuments are Alvar Aalto’s Eternal Flame and the Winter War Monument. The latter was created in a joint effort between Finland and Russia in 2003, with the explicit aim of developing tourism related to the military history of the area; it stands near the Raateen Portti Museum of 1998.

Karen Vedel 20

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