Seminar: Touching/Transforming
Public Talk: Pauliina Feodoroff
Thursday, 3rd June, 10-12 (Finnish Time)

An online talk with Pauliina Feodoroff, organised by the Cluster for Critical Artistic Research (CCARe) at the Department of Art at Aalto University. Feodoroff discusses the questions of fighting for your existence, depression, re-rooting, the joy with land and self-doubt.

Link to the zoom.

This public talk is part of the Touching/Transforming seminar.

Touching/Transforming departs from a consideration of the precarious relation of artistic research to both the university and a wider field of counter-institution building. While an artistic research practice may beformulated and marked by the discursive and political framework of the neoliberal university, the multiple genealogies of critical artistic research reach far beyond and are rooted in feminist, queer, antiracist,postcolonial and decolonial activisms and theory.

This tendency of artistic research to ‘reach towards’ multiple sites of knowledge production occurs also within and across academic disciplinary boundaries, with many critical practices ‘touching on’ the study of theory,film, music, technology, science or medicine.

This seminar provides a space to reflect on the value of ‘touching’ fields of knowledge through material practice and what it means to ‘transform’ them. The notion of touch proposed here embraces the physical and material as well as the virtual, literary and speculative. The Touching/Transforming regards the power of magical thinking to transform institutions and knowledge as well as ourselves.

Pauliina Feodoroff (she/ her) is a skolt Saami theater director and artivist from Keväjärvi and a part of Snowchange co-operative.

She has been part of the cultural revitalization work within skolt Saami community starting Saa´mi Nue´tt organization with Tiina Sanila-Aikio, Heini Wesslin and Minna Moshnikoff, among others, organizing cultural camps, language nest activity in Sevettijärvi, hosting IPCC-bound workshops, coordinating the campaign leading the skolt Saami gramota scrolls to be listed in the UNESCO Memory of the World listing and starting the co-management plan work in the watershed of River Näätämö that has led to the first indigenous-led watershed restoration work in Nordic countries.

Feodoroff has also served as a chair of Saami council and during her term concentrating on guarding the Saami´s right to have a say on the industrial land use projects in Sápmi, especially on projects concerning industrial forestry and mining. She has been advocating the truth and reconciliation process between the Saami and Finland and as a cherry in the pie, designed the dubbing structures for Saami languages with Susa Saukko for children's programs.