Maya Oliva performing mo-stru-o-sa at Kaisaniemi Botanic Gardens. Credits: Mana Tashakorinia.
The Art For All Festival promotes artists at the beginning of their career, and aims to bring art closer to people and in unconventional spaces.
The AFA Festival 2022 UNDER-GROUND opened its doors at Kaisaniemi Botanic Garden on 26.-28.8.2022.
UNDER-GROUND reflected on soil as a model of coexistence and transformation.
Soil is a compound body, in constant metamorphosis. Animals, plants, and other organisms contend for its resources, finding shelter and nourishment. Being porous to changes, soil collects waste and chemical pollution. It hosts hybrid, resilient and mutual ways of living, offering a model for communities that welcome the struggles of diversity and cohabitation. At the UNDER-GROUND Festival, inspired by soil, we will imagine social ecologies and sustainable forms of living, as vegetal, earthy creatures, learning ways of living in-between nurture and trouble.
Seven artworks and eight artists inhabited the gardens and greenhouses in the heart of Helsinki city, reflecting on the infrastructure of the botanical garden, on the effects of climate change and its relation to technologies, on different ways - bodily, sonic, experiential - of knowing and sensing their material surroundings, on imaginative ways of being and producing inspired by the more than human.
The artists were selected through an anonymous open call. I led the curatorial team, side by side with Asja Lapteva and Adnan Mirza. The exhibition was produced by a team of young people: producers, technicians, volunteers, together with the artists, during the Festival Residency on 19.-25.8.2022. in the Gardens.
AFA 2022 Team and artists. Credits: Lù Chen.
