SJÄLÖ POIESIS - a thinking herbarium is part of a trilogy of a collection of artistic interventions made on the island of Själö. It is a botanical and mycological collection of writings, drawings, ecological observations, interviews, fictions recalling the complex and multidimensional narratives of the island channelled through the spirits of the plants, trees and fungi. What can the herbs, weeds, flowers tell us?
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
Adrienne Rich--Diving into the Wreck
The story of the stray, with its many streams, runs through my ongoing artistic inquiry that takes place on the island of Själö.
I arrived here in 2016 with the idea of making a film about the scientists collecting time- series recording the changes on the island and at sea. But it was impossible to ignore past. It was everywhere.
For 350 years the island had incarcerated those who did not fit into the societal norm: the lepers, the poor, the war veterans, the insane. In the end the hospital was turned into an asylum for women patients’ only. In 1962, when the hospital closed down, a biological research centre was set up in the building. Today the scientists work in the rooms that used to be the patients’ cells.
I will present the artistic research behind the feature length film SJÄLÖ - Island of Souls and radioessay SJÄLÖ - a mental space and place both premiered in 2020 as well as the ongoing work SJÄLÖ POIESIS - a thinking herbarium. The stray or astray here is referred to as interference, wild/wilderness, error/erratic, loose/lostness and refers both to the impossibility of mapping the whole story of the island and the constant failure in the creative inquiry to do so. This is a story of the unseen and the invisible. The unrecorded, erased and forced out.
Most of those sent to Själö never returned. They were buried here, many without a grave to their name. Their bodies perceived as carriers of the epidemics of their time. Here, parallel worlds meet. One is the present story of the scientists studying the dying sea and an infectious tick. The other story encompasses centuries of all that dark matter that lies buried deep in the soil of this land.
This place of terror hides territories of gaps, pauses, absences and hauntings. A place often described in terms of loss and being lost. Those sent here were loose women, astrayed women, mad women, sexually explicit women, drifters, vagabonds. Many without homes or birth certificates as proof of their existence. Detached from the world just like the island they were sent to.
The way of the ghost is haunting and haunting is very particular way of knowing what has happened and what is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition.
SJÄLÖ POIESIS consists of an artist book and a botanical lecture performance. The herbarium looks at about 30 plants, mushrooms, trees that grow on the island and create another understanding into the ecology, environment and multilayered histories. Reflecting on geological time, the impact and agency of humans, scientific - and curative methods. Looking at medical histories, the origin of institutions, womens' histories, psychiatry and botany.
As a source of the botanical performance lecture is a found, abandoned herbarium collected and created on the island by three female biologists between 1985-86. The descriptions of the plants and the places are as precise as poetic. The botanical lecture performance is constructed in three parts: the first one is a lesson in the botany and the forgotten histories of the island. The second part is a scent laboratory to create and experience the sensual knowledge of this place, the third part is a polyphonic choral work combining the different voices, imagined and documented, of the island.
SJÄLÖ POIESIS and the botanical performance lecture is curated and directed by Lotta Petronella in collaboration with playwright Seppo Parkkinen, composer Lau Nau, biologist Jasmin Inkinen, visual artist Cecilia Westerberg and perfumeur Anna Karhu-Cormier. The live intervention will take place on the island in 2022. The book will be published in 2023.
Lotta Petronella Ruissalo, Finland