With performance as research emerging as a green thread and methodology in the book, our research assembly concludes with an evening of performances by Margherita Pevere, Rubiane Maia and Sepideh Rahaa. Each enacting distinctly rigorous, beautiful and moving bodies of research, their performances will unfold over the evening in correspondences of love, grief, breath, ritual and resilience.

 

Rubiane Maia’s durational performance maps her research on African rice as she creates a diagram that connects hair, seeds and soil. Her work braids archives, ancestry, colonial displacement and plant migration. She will explore intimate relations with rice seeds as plants that embody identity and resistance.

 

Margherita Pevere brings her contribution with scientist Diana Vieira, “For the Love of Wildfires” back to the body, honing in and extenuating movement in a rendition of her Lament installation and performance about post-wildfire ecologies and more-than-human mourning. 

Sepideh Rahaa performs a new iteration of her work Songs to Earth, Songs to Seeds. Drawing on her family's long history of rice cultivation in Northern Iran, the work connects traditions of sustainable cultivation, neo-colonial food politics, food security, labour conditions, and stories of daily life and struggles. In these increasingly turbulent times, Rahaa revisits the paddy fields and rice grains, focusing on ancestral knowledge and the poetic of rice as food, and as a source of life and resistance. 

 

Timings:
Rubiane Maia 5–8pm
Margherita Pevere 7–7.30pm
Sepideh Rahaa 8–8:30pm

 

This event is a collaboration between Bioart Society, Food Art Research Network and HIAP.

 

 

Venue: HIAP Gallery Augusta, Suomenlinna B 28/2, 00190 Helsinki

 

Access: HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme is on the island of Suomenlinna, about a 15-minute walk from the ferry pier. The island is accessible by a ferry departing every 20 minutes from Kauppatori (Market Square) and the travel time from Kauppatori to HIAP is approximately 25 minutes. Find the HSL ferry timetable here. Find the walking route from Suomenlinna ferry platform to HIAP Gallery Augusta & Project Space here. There is a step at the HIAP’s main entrance and no power-assisted door. The HIAP toilets are not wheelchair-accessible. Accessible toilets can be found on five different locations on the island indicated on this map. The closest one to the HIAP Studios is located in the Summer Theatre (building nr 36 on the Suomenlinna visitors’ map). Booking is not required. 

 

 

Rubiane Maia is a Brazilian multidisciplinary artist based in Folkestone, United Kingdom. Her practice encompasses performance, installation, photography, video, writing, and collage, operating at the intersection of embodied experience, language, memory, organic matter, and processes of transformation. Her work explores diverse states of perception, attention and relationality, with a particular interest in the interdependent networks that connect human and more-than-human worlds, including plants, minerals, and landscapes. 

 

Known for her otherworldly work with living matter, ecology and biotechnology, Dr Margherita Pevere is an artist and researcher addressing taboos like death, sex and vulnerability. Her practice embraces object-making, installation, performance, and writing, which she waves seamlessly thanks to her transdisciplinary background. A member of the Bioart Society since 2017, her dialogue with its cosmos has unfolded through workshops, shows, art talks, and the publications.

 

Sepideh Rahaa is a multidisciplinary artist based in Helsinki, Finland. She investigates and questions prevailing power structures, social norms, and conventions while focusing on womanhood, storytelling, and everyday life and resistances. She aims to initiate and create spaces for dialogue, influenced by feminist politics, decolonial and postcolonial theories and practices as well as social and environmental justice. Currently she is pursuing her doctoral studies in Contemporary Art at Aalto University.