Scrying into a Shell

Investigating the Collaborative Surplus of Care

The project is curated and produced by the temporary curatorial collective
Julia Fidder, Cyane Findji, Myriam Gras and Aino Kostiainen.

The sound of the ocean will greet you when you listen to a seashell. They say this ritmic murmur of waves is the blood that is running through the blood vessels in your ear, which echoes back to you after travelling through the interior surface. The seashell is an excellent amplifier of the noises that surround us; noises that, under normal circumstances, are cancelled out by our brain and we don’t notice them. However, when you put the shell to your ear, the brain registers that the frequency of the noises have changed and it tries to understand this unknown sound by ways of finding subtle patterns in the world around us, labelling it, for instance, as the «ocean». Nevertheless, sometimes different patterns can be found in the seashell’s resonance. This strange psychic phenomenon called shell scrying appears when listening carefully to the shell. At first, you should hear fragments of words, followed by fully formed words, and finally whole segments of a conversation. But what happens when you listen to something that at first sounds familiar, but which is essentially quite different? Do you perceive it as noise or do you have to listen carefully to understand it clearly?
   How does the notion of care resonate in the mind of the other? Scrying into a Shell – Investigating the Collaborative Surplus of Care departs from the proposition of sharing, rather than extracting from artistic and scientific practices. The project explores the possibility of creating a cognitive surplus around the theme of relational care by means of interdisciplinary processes of knowledge-exchange.
   With care we understand the practice of nurturing and cultivating one another, whether this is in- or unintentionally. Relational care stems from a base of connection, interdependence, collectivity and collaboration. Additionally, relational could encline relativity. In that sense, care or caring for could be perceived not so much as a fixated notion but as something that is in flux and open for re-examination and re- definition according to the changing world we live in. Rather than focusing on the strategies of caring, or the caregiver and care recipient as an individual, we highlight what emerges between the different agents in their practice: the relational care. While bringing people together can be seen as an act of caring, as a curatorial method it can also be seen as demanding labour. Surplus usually refers to methods that tend to serve capital by using unremunerated labour to generate additional forms of value. In Tania Bruguera’s Arte Ùtil and Stephan Wright’s Towards a Lexicon of Usership, the notion of cognitive surplus can be apprehended as the excess product of this free labour emanating from actively shared knowledge. Scrying into a Shell proposes an alternative and more ethical mode of the creation of surplus by practising direct redistribution of the knowledge production generated by the participants, all working across multiple disciplines.
    Instead of returning to the ways we are already familiar with, Scrying into a Shell proposes to discover new perspectives instead. Artists Riina Hannula and Minna Suoniemi and researchers Anna Varfolomeeva and Charlotte Angove share their thoughts on non- idealised practice of relational care in an on- site conversation, moderated by curator and writer Taru Elfving. Within the discussion, all the participants depart from a multivocal angle, through the various roles they each take on.

We thank Antoine Flahaut for original music and sound support, Clément Beraud for production support,
Aalto Studios and HAM for technical assistance.

Charlotte Angove

Charlotte Angove
  • SIAS_Presentation_Charlotte. Date de sortie : 2022.

In this episode scientist Charlotte Angove elaborates on her practice and how she perceives relational care. Charlotte Angove is a plant scientist and holds a PhD in marine biology. She researches how plants interact with their environment in boreal and aquatic ecosystems. Currently, Angove and her colleagues are researching tree responses to climate change.

Anna Varfolomeeva

Anna Varfolomeeva
  • SIAS_Presentation Anna. Date de sortie : 2022.

In this episode scientist Anna Varfolomeeva elaborates on her practice and how she perceives relational care. Anna Varfolomeeva is a postdoctoral researcher and part of HELSUS (Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science). Her interests lie in environmental anthropology of the Arctic and Siberia, indigenous studies, human – resource relations and anthropology of infrastructure.

Minna Suoniemi

Minna Suoniemi
  • SIAS_Presentation Minna. Date de sortie : 2022.

In this episode artist Minna Suoniemi elaborates on her practice and how she perceives relational care. Minna Suoniemi is an artist and pedagogue. Her practice draws from embodied experiences and feminist knowledge production and she has worked on themes such as control, body, class and family. Within her artistic practice, Suoniemi works with moving and photographic images and sound.

Riina Hannula

Riina Hannula
  • SIAS_Presentation Riina_new. Date de sortie : 2022.

In this episode artist Riina Hannula elaborates on their practice and how they perceive relational care. Riina Hannula is an artist and PhD candidate at Helsinki University. They work with the sociology of microbes and their project happens in a multi-species context where they share practices of care in an anti-anthropocentric way with, among other species, goats.

Scrying into a Shell : live discussion in HAM

live discussion in HAM
  • SIAS_Discussion_light.

In this episode we create a temporary togetherness by sharing knowledge and ideas that circle around the theme of relational care, with our guest speakers and Taru Elfving who moderates the live discussion held in HAM, Helsinki Art Museum. Taru Elfving is a curator and writer focused on nurturing undisciplinary and site-sensitive enquiries at the intersections of ecological, feminist and decolonial practices.

Scrying into a Shell : Afterthoughts

Afterthoughts
  • SIAS_AfterThoughts. Date de sortie : 2022.

In this episode the participants share their post-discussion thoughts. We reflect on whether or not a cognitive surplus has emerged from the discussion.

Scrying into a Shell

Investigating the Collaborative
Surplus of Care

The project is curated and produced by the temporary curatorial collective Julia Fidder, Cyane Findji, Myriam Gras and Aino Kostiainen.

The sound of the ocean will greet you when you listen to a seashell. They say this ritmic murmur of waves is the blood that is running through the blood vessels in your ear, which echoes back to you after travelling through the interior surface. The seashell is an excellent amplifier of the noises that surround us; noises that, under normal circumstances, are cancelled out by our brain and we don’t notice them. However, when you put the shell to your ear, the brain registers that the frequency of the noises have changed and it tries to understand this unknown sound by ways of finding subtle patterns in the world around us, labelling it, for instance, as the «ocean». Nevertheless, sometimes different patterns can be found in the seashell’s resonance. This strange psychic phenomenon called shell scrying appears when listening carefully to the shell. At first, you should hear fragments of words, followed by fully formed words, and finally whole segments of a conversation. But what happens when you listen to something that at first sounds familiar, but which is essentially quite different? Do you perceive it as noise or do you have to listen carefully to understand it clearly?
   How does the notion of care resonate in the mind of the other? Scrying into a Shell – Investigating the Collaborative Surplus of Care departs from the proposition of sharing, rather than extracting from artistic and scientific practices. The project explores the possibility of creating a cognitive surplus around the theme of relational care by means of interdisciplinary processes of knowledge-exchange.
   With care we understand the practice of nurturing and cultivating one another, whether this is in- or unintentionally. Relational care stems from a base of connection, interdependence, collectivity and collaboration. Additionally, relational could encline relativity. In that sense, care or caring for could be perceived not so much as a fixated notion but as something that is in flux and open for re-examination and re- definition according to the changing world we live in. Rather than focusing on the strategies of caring, or the caregiver and care recipient as an individual, we highlight what emerges between the different agents in their practice: the relational care. While bringing people together can be seen as an act of caring, as a curatorial method it can also be seen as demanding labour. Surplus usually refers to methods that tend to serve capital by using unremunerated labour to generate additional forms of value. In Tania Bruguera’s Arte Ùtil and Stephan Wright’s Towards a Lexicon of Usership, the notion of cognitive surplus can be apprehended as the excess product of this free labour emanating from actively shared knowledge. Scrying into a Shell proposes an alternative and more ethical mode of the creation of surplus by practising direct redistribution of the knowledge production generated by the participants, all working across multiple disciplines.
    Instead of returning to the ways we are already familiar with, Scrying into a Shell proposes to discover new perspectives instead. Artists Riina Hannula and Minna Suoniemi and researchers Anna Varfolomeeva and Charlotte Angove share their thoughts on non- idealised practice of relational care in an on- site conversation, moderated by curator and writer Taru Elfving. Within the discussion, all the participants depart from a multivocal angle, through the various roles they each take on.

Charlotte Angove

Charlotte Angove
  • SIAS_Presentation_Charlotte. Date de sortie : 2022.

In this episode scientist Charlotte Angove elaborates on her practice and how she perceives relational care. Charlotte Angove is a plant scientist and holds a PhD in marine biology. She researches how plants interact with their environment in boreal and aquatic ecosystems. Currently, Angove and her colleagues are researching tree responses to climate change.

Anna Varfolomeeva

Anna Varfolomeeva
  • SIAS_Presentation Anna. Date de sortie : 2022.

In this episode scientist Anna Varfolomeeva elaborates on her practice and how she perceives relational care. Anna Varfolomeeva is a postdoctoral researcher and part of HELSUS (Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science). Her interests lie in environmental anthropology of the Arctic and Siberia, indigenous studies, human – resource relations and anthropology of infrastructure.

Minna Suoniemi

Minna Suoniemi
  • SIAS_Presentation Minna. Date de sortie : 2022.

In this episode artist Minna Suoniemi elaborates on her practice and how she perceives relational care. Minna Suoniemi is an artist and pedagogue. Her practice draws from embodied experiences and feminist knowledge production and she has worked on themes such as control, body, class and family. Within her artistic practice, Suoniemi works with moving and photographic images and sound.

Riina Hannula

Riina Hannula
  • SIAS_Presentation Riina. Date de sortie : 2022.

In this episode artist Riina Hannula elaborates on their practice and how they perceive relational care. Riina Hannula is an artist and PhD candidate at Helsinki University. They work with the sociology of microbes and their project happens in a multi-species context where they share practices of care in an anti-anthropocentric way with, among other species, goats.

Scrying into a Shell : live discussion in HAM

live discussion in HAM
  • SIAS_Discussion_light.

In this episode we create a temporary togetherness by sharing knowledge and ideas that circle around the theme of relational care, with our guest speakers and Taru Elfving who moderates the live discussion held in HAM, Helsinki Art Museum. Taru Elfving is a curator and writer focused on nurturing undisciplinary and site-sensitive enquiries at the intersections of ecological, feminist and decolonial practices.

Scrying into a Shell : Afterthoughts

Afterthoughts
  • SIAS_AfterThoughts. Date de sortie : 2022.

In this episode the participants share their post-discussion thoughts. We reflect on whether or not a cognitive surplus has emerged from the discussion.