TAINA RIIKONEN
THE ANATOMY OF DESIRE

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Opening hours:

FRI 20.9 klo 17-20 (opening party)

SUN 22.9 klo 16-18
TUE 24.9 klo 17-19
WED 25.9 klo 17-19
THU 26.9 klo 17-19
FRI 27.9 klo 17-19

”The Anatomy of Desire” is a sound research / installation / work on fetishism. The work consists of a one single extremely stretched recording of latex. The process of stretching the sound has changed the squeaky sound of latex into a smooth hissing, almost like a sound of a distant wind.

Fetishist is a person who enjoys a slow and explorative contact to materials, objects and things. S/he gets excited of touching and palpating the seams and differences of things, on being at the borderlines of diverse entities. For fetishist, the aim is not to achieve a goal as getting into somewhere, as crossing the line, but more as sensing the borderline over and over again. Touching the borderline acts as an extreme stretched instant between the letters in a word ”maybe.” The core of fetishism is the unsolved and unsettled ambivalence of sensing the materials and their invitation to exploration.

The idea of unsolved includes the element of the excitement of the absolute first appearance. In fetishist context, the materials, objects, and things can be approached over and over again in a way that obliges their past, their present, and their future. The things are emerged as instant and naked sings. If this absolute first appearance is stretched, as the sound file could be stretched, e.g. from a second to an hour, the fetishist exposes her/himself to an extreme prolonged anticipation and sensing the material.

I have been doing ten years now sonic material that I call “sound art.” I began by recording urban soundscapes, and since those days, I’ve been moving towards listening and recording more detailed and microscopic sounds. All the time I have been flickering between recording the landscapes and recording the detailed and intimate sounds.

The enigma within intertwined sensing and listening to materials and sounds has always been haunting me. About ten years ago I made recordings in which I touched different materials, such as velvet, silk, plastic, leather and latex. The sense of the materials and the heard sound of them seemed to overlap into each other when listening through microphones and headphones. This perception was crucial for my understanding of the acoustic epistemology, of the multi-material essence of sounds and listening, and also of touch.

In this sound work I have stretched the sound of latex. The act of stretching refers to fetishist desire for awaiting, the endlessly prolonged enjoyment of touching the borderlines instead of achieving something. Also, for a masked / unmasked referring to my upcoming 50 years birthday, I stretched the sound as 50 times slower. So, in the opening of the sound installation on Fri 20th September, there will also be a bit partying in the name of my birthday.

TAINA RIIKONEN is a Helsinki-based sound artist, PhD and adjunct professor of sound studies (in University of Turku). In her sound works she explores urban environments, sexuality, body sounds, machine noises, and silence in different deserted spaces. In her academic research Riikonen investigates acoustic ecological aspects of listening, body sounds through sensory ethnography, embodiment in sound recording, and the aural-tactile epistemologies of environmental sounds. Riikonen has worked in the University of Helsinki and in the University of Arts. Currently she works as a “bold maker”, a post doc researcher funded by Kone Foundation in the University of Tampere. Her research project investigates the diverse registers of silences in Finnish villages.