Introduction: The Halavasepikkä (Hylochares Cruentatus) Epoch

“The chthonic ones are not confined to a vanished past. They are a buzzing, stinging, sucking swarm now, and human beings are not in a separate compost pile. We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not post human.” Donna Haraway

Henrik Håkansson’s IHME Project 2018 is THE BEETLE. This film is the Festival’s main production and gives a voice to an endangered beetle species, the halavasepikkä or Hylochares cruentatus, by showing us where it lives and what it does. At the Festival the film experience was continued with a programme of discussions, films, workshops and music on the same subject. Putting a beetle in the leading role raised issues of the cultural objectification of animals, inter-species inequality, the sixth wave of extinctions, and global warming. The film’s themes are epitomized in the much-discussed term, the Anthropocene, the human epoch, which is the source of all these issues.

The Anthropocene refers to an era, comparable to a geological period, in which human activity has irreversibly changed the living conditions on our planet for all species, even more than the last Ice Age did. The US feminist theorist Professor Donna Haraway has, however, criticized the concept of the Anthropocene because it does not ultimately take us beyond a human-centric mindset: belief in progress; modernization; and individualism. Haraway has taken up the challenge of looking for new ways of thinking that better reflect the current state of the world, and uses other terms – “stories that are too big but not big enough” – such as Capitalocene, Plantationocene and Chthulucene.

If we were to use just one term for this period, Haraway says the correct one would be the Capitalocene, which refers to capitalism and to all the processes that have led to the current state of our world: the massive exploitation of natural resources; the organization of labour; the development of technology; the formation of markets; and the unequal accumulation of well-being. What does climate change mean for the global Capitalocene, when glaciers are melting and the world’s biggest energy reserves are in the Arctic regions?

The Plantationocene, on the other hand, alludes to human-made changes to the environment brought about by agriculture and forestry, mining, the building of road networks, and urban construction. These changes both force species to move and prevent them from moving to new areas. The Plantationocene is an era characterized by densely cultivated, enclosed farms, forests and plantations, which are often created by humans, even using slave labour. These plantations break up large natural environments, such as rainforests, into small patches, affecting the lifespans of local plant and animal species.

According to Haraway, the story of the Anthropocene ends badly. But the Chthulucene, on the other hand, tells the story of a time and a place that offers hope for good living conditions, continuity, collaboration and cooperative thinking. In biological terms, we can speak of creation, sympoiesis, symbiosis and symbiogenesis, of networked ecosystems and microbes. The Chthulucene is a continuous period that cannot be expressed in numbers, and which requires countless names to be understood. According to Haraway, the emblem of the Chthulucene could be a spider or any other invertebrate, since they constitute more than 97% of the living beings on our planet. The Chthulucene thus tells a more comprehensive story about what is happening in the air, on the rocks, in our oceans, and up in the atmosphere. According to Haraway, the Chthulucene is “life in a common compost heap.”

IHME 2018 took a look at this moist, fertile compost, our planet Earth, from the point of view of the Chthulucene, and shone a light on the chtonic subject of this year’s IHME Project, an endangered beetle that lives in cracks in the wood. Swedish artist Henrik Håkansson chose the halavasepikkä or Hylochares cruentatus and its habitat in Myyrmäki, Vantaa, as the subject of the Festival’s commissioned work. According to insect researcher Professor Jyrki Muona, this species is endemic to Finland, having lived in its current geographic location for about 5,000 years. As the ice receded northwards at the end of the Ice Age, the first plants to grow were the hardy willows, which can also successfully interbreed. Bay willows and dark-leaved willows offer Hylochares cruentatus a place to eat and breed. A narrow strip of about 30 hectares of jungle-like flood meadow in Mätäoja, Myyrmäki, is currently protected. Willows need a riverbed that floods, and the city of Vantaa needs an overflow area for heavy rain to run into, and so this protection decision resulted in a win-win situation for both species. Jyrki Muona told the story of this tiny beetle at the Festival. His talk can be seen on IHME’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmIwSULMU7c

THE BEETLE film was screened at the Korjaamo Kino. The film can be seen at Yle Areena until May 25, 2019.

Photo: Veikko Somerpuro

Henrik Håkansson has been discussing the relationship between humankind and other species in his artworks since the 1990s. Most of these works have focussed on living plants and animals, especially birds and insects. He is also interested in technology and its ability to convey information and knowledge about other species, our relationship with them, and their importance for our environment. The 2018 IHME Project, THE BEETLE, is a meditative, dream-like journey from the green willow jungle to visually powerful close-ups of these endangered insects, whose otherness and inaccessibility is very real. THE BEETLE, like Håkansson’s most recent works, shows us how the violent relationship between human beings and other species operates. Slow-motion scenes of a jumping beetle that have the spectator waiting for it to land back on its feet do not necessarily bring immediate satisfaction: the irksome repetition creates a tension, which is familiar from Håkansson’s short film THE END from 2011. Besides THE END, the Festival programme also included Håkansson’s earlier production, a filmed performance called Birdconcert Oct. 23, 2005 (Carduelis carduelis) Part 1 from 2006. The subject of former is a fly, and of the latter a goldfinch.

With reference to Haraway, if the Chthulucene Era belongs to the invertebrates, then rather than talking about the Anthropocene or Human Era, we could talk about the age of Hylochares cruentatus. THE BEETLE uses this species to ask urgent questions about global warming and the sixth wave of extinctions, especially the mass disappearance of flying insects. The key issue is the radical loss of plant and animal diversity. What is diversity and what role do human beings play in its decline?

Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, gives a case study. In a diverse environment with a large number of species, the various species exhibit a correspondingly high level of specialization and co-operation. Kolbert presents the case of ants in the Brazilian Amazon that live in cooperation with more than 300 other species. The more diverse and specialized the environment, the more it relies on remaining unchanged. Rapid environmental change caused by humans, for instance, through intensive agriculture, makes it impossible for many species to adapt, to transform themselves or to change, and they become extinct. The importance of insect diversity was discussed at the Festival by Academy of Finland Research Fellow Marjo Saastamoinen. She is continuing the research begun by the acclaimed evolutionary biologist Ilkka Hanski (1953-2016), who studied the biodiversity of the Glanville fritillary butterfly in the Åland Islands. Saastamoinen’s talk on IHME’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRqClLg-zRI

Professor Jyrki Muona has made the study of beetles his life’s work. In his research he has specialized in the False Click Beetle family and has observed the hard-to-find halavasepikkä in nature for some 20-30 hours.

Photo: Veikko Somerpuro

Besides THE BEETLE, IHME presented three long art films that further reflected on the Festival’s themes: the relationship between humans and the environment; the state of the world and its future; and how other species are presented in art. The German conceptual artist Lothar Baumgarten’s film Der Ursprung der Nacht from 1973-77 combines the indigenous Brazilian Tupi people’s myth about the origins of the night with colourful images of tropical plants and animals and the vibrant sounds they make. The rainforest that Baumgarten experienced in the 1970s has changed before the modern spectator’s eyes from large expanses of forest to small, discrete patches. The urban landscape of the Rhine Valley shown at the end of the film could well be a view of the fragmented rainforest in present-day Brazil. The Swiss artist Marie José Burki A Film (2017) portrays our time via a dialogue between two people and meditative imagery from everyday life. The discussion takes in current news topics, such as the state of the world, the relationship between the two people talking, and Glenn Gould’s piano interpretation. The third film in the programme, Jan Švankmajer’s Insects (2018), rejects the realistic starting points of the previous films and takes a free dive into surrealism to study the relationship between humans and insects. The incoherent twists and turns of the subconscious, combined with the pronounced sound worlds that feature in all of this year’s films, turn the viewing experience into a multilayered break with reality.

Video works by Antti Laitinen, Tuula Närhinen, Kati Roover and Jenna Sutela were shown during breaks in the Festival’s talks programme. The main character in Antti Laitinen’s collection of documented performances attempts to rearrange his environment: to move a lake, to animate branches like the wind does, and to put a chopped-up tree back together again. All this has to be done by one man alone. Närhinen’s videos view natural phenomenas as a source of visual and aesthetic material: water freezing into a spray; plant dyes fading; or the way ocean waves keep plastic garbage in perpetual motion. In the midst of our planet’s ecological crisis, her works are multilevel comments on climate change and the Capitalocene. These themes carry on in the work of Kati Roover, which examines the state of the planet in places where climate change is most evident: deforestation in rainforests and the problems caused by increasingly mild climates in mountainous areas. In her meditative works Sutela turns her artist-researcher’s gaze to microbes and slime moulds, along with a completely new piece, Holobiont. The main focus of the work is organisms that require extreme conditions to survive. At the same time, they raise the question of whether climate change is moving too fast to allow species to adapt, or if there are grounds for placing our hopes for the future in these pioneers.

Still image form Kati Roover's Fragments of Paradise - Lost video Coexistence.

Photo: Kati Roover

Keeping to tradition, the IHME Project opened the Festival programme with a panel discussion. Henrik Håkansson talked about THE BEETLE with the public and three experts. Professor Jussi Parikka has published extensively on digital culture, media archaeology and media theory, and has also analysed what it means to be human nowadays, and what the human era will mean for the history of our planet. Filipa Ramos specializes in experimental film and has also edited a book, Animals, about contemporary art that focuses on animals. Animal behaviour and consciousness, and the relationships between different species have played an increasingly large role in our experience of art in recent years, for instance, in works by Pierre Huyghe, Allora & Calzadilla and Francis Alÿs. Classic examples can be found in works by Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), Carolee Schneeman and Marcel Broothaers (1924-1976). The third speaker, Professor Jörg Heiser, has had a long career as a journalist and critic with Frieze magazine, but more recently he has also been working as a curator, and nowadays as Professor of Art Theory and Philosophy at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. Heiser is a long-time friend of Henrik Håkansson, and has written extensively on his oeuvre. You can read a transcript of this conversation on pages 60-81 of this publication or watch a video of it on IHME’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?- v=wsr83HmjdmE

The Festival’s tenth anniversary was celebrated with the 10th IHME Marathon and a speech by writer Juha Hurme. Artists and curators talked about their experiences of curating public art in projects in which representatives of other species have also played a role. Finlandia prizewinner Hurme’s novel Niemi (2017) examined Finland at a time when Hylochares cruentatus was still a common species in the country’s willow groves – he now decided to look back a hundred years. “What lives in our heads is no more than the imperfect tense, the past. The only possibility of understanding where we are now is to look at where we came from, whether you are a woodsman or a philosopher. You have to where you have come from, so you can see the future,” Hurme said at the start of his talk. Delving into our shared cultural history, he dug up Maiju Lassila’s novel Pirttipohjalaiset (1911), which depicts a community being driven to catastrophe – as are our global and local communities right now. Hurme’s talk is on IHME’s YouTube channel: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Mwa0KmCDc

IHME Contemporary Art Festival expert group: Tuula Arkio, Leevi Haapala, Hanna Johansson, Paula Toppila and Timo Valjakka