Pääsky Miettinen: Pouring hard or hardly pouring? The Album
Pääsky Miettinen
Pouring hard or hardly pouring?
The album
This publication is a part of Fidgety Shores Of The Makeshift City with Francesca Bogani Amadori, Henry Lämsä, Pääsky Miettinen curated by Micol Curatolo
Asbestos Art Space, Kristianinkatu 16, 00170 Helsinki 13. - 21.7.2025
Pääsky Miettinen
Pouring hard or hardly pouring?
The album
Pääsky Miettinen performs on the coast of Kruununhaka, exploring domestic and intimate interactions with Hakaniemenranta’s growling development site and the waters framed by Hakaniemi’s two bridges. The dance brings homely and nostalgic elements like porcelain jugs to meet the movements of the excavators. The shore becomes an edge between past and future; a contact site – dirty, cosy, harsh, noisy, and in motion – where the audience is invited to join in giving and receiving, containing and pouring. Miettinen asks questions about hardness and fragility, hostility and hospitality in the urban environment. Born from bodily interaction with the neighbourhood and research on the history of its (de)construction, the performance takes the shape of an album of twelve songs, compiled of memories, gestures, photographs and texts. Miettinen hosts a concert of movements and words, a lecture and a tea party between human and machine bodies, weather and water. Dripping, dropping, growing, growling, soaking, squeezing, washing, messing, blessing…
Watering The City As If It Were My Garden
growing growing growing growing growing growing growing growing growing growing growing growing growing growing growing growing rowing rowing rowing rowing owing owing owing owing wing wing wing wing ing ing ing ing
giving giving giving giving forgiving forgiving forgiving for for for for or or or or
more more more more no more no more no more no no no no
giving giving giving giving giving up giving up giving up giving back giving back giving back giving in giving in giving in up up up up back back back back in in in in
ing ing ing ing taking taking taking taking aching aching aching aching a king a king a king a king breaking breaking breaking breaking break break break break king king king king ing ing ing ing dripping dripping dripping dripping ripping ripping ripping ripping
watering watering watering this city needs watering watering wuthering wuthering wuthering weathering weathering weathering withering withering withering this city needs watering watering water water water water whatever whatever whatever water ever ever ever ever evergrowing evergrowing ing ing ing ing pouring pouring pouring pouring pouring hard or hardly pouring pouring hard or hardly pouring
Signe Brander’s Alley 2035
This song goes to Signe, to Signe and her camera, her eye, her hand on the shutter
Have you ever heard of Signe Brander? She once stood on that rock pointing her camera to this sea northeast there was no bridge no Merihaka.
A woman sitting, the warm stone reaching her hamstrings through the skirt. She reads a newspaper, a dog lies next to her, eyes wide open looks straight into the camera. We get pierced by the dog’s gaze.
Across the water, the buildings on Hakaniemi shores, 1907 appear so solid, so permanent and now they’re so gone the buildings – gone their materials – somewhere, still.
Signe – gone Signe – coming back
as a name of a street that has not yet been built. Even the land on which the street will be, does not exist. Or, of course it exists, all matter exists already, it only needs to be relocated.
Look into the horizon, look 5, 6, 7 years into the future: We’re looking at Signe Brander’s Alley
The City of Helsinki has a plan.1
More apartments with ocean views, hotel rooms with ocean views. Fill a part of this strait, move the shore. Take more space from the water, for the city.
Signe, she was hired to capture the vanishing city of Helsinki2 Helsinki was vanishing / being remade in 1907 Helsinki is vanishing / being remade in 2025. Signe, how does it feel to stand in front of a building you know will be torn down in order to make way for the future? To capture the moment just before the end that is also a beginning?
Photos of islands that no longer exist, photos of rocks being smashed and torn open.
The humans look so small next to the rocks they’re lifting with machines made of wood. No helmets.
Where to move from these memories?
Imagine it’s July 2035. We live on Signe Brander’s Alley. Our windows open to the sea, we can see this shore, we can see Siltavuori where Signe climbed. We laugh and remember this summer 10 years ago when I was making that silly performance down there.
Imagine it’s July 1907. We sit on the rock, you’re the woman with the newspaper and I’m the happy dog. A woman with a camera arrives behind us, asks if it’s okay that she takes a photograph. Snap.
Signe Brander, 1907, Siltavuorensatama. Helsinki City Museum.
Building Bridges
OKAY! LET’S TALK ABOUT BUILDING BRIDGES.
Dance is for building bridges! Music is for building bridges! ART IS FOR BUILDING BRIDGES!
Has anyone ever told you that?
Building bridges
A nice metaphor for praising connection at the expense of erasing power.
The last time I was told to build bridges was when working in the Students for Palestine movement –working towards an academic boycott of the genocidal apartheid state of Israel in the University of Arts Helsinki.
This is how the argument goes: “As artists it’s our duty and honour to build bridges! Where politics polarize and tear us apart, art brings us together — joins us. Like a bridge! It makes us see past our differences! We can not boycott! In these hard times, we need to make connections, not break them!”
I learnt to see to the rotten core of this argument by listening to Leila Mire, a LebaneseAmerican choreographer, dancer, educator and researcher of Dabke, a traditional dance from Palestine and the wider Levantine region. (A dance that is older than the colonial project of Israel, btw.)
Leila Mire on her lecture Unpacking Zionism in Modern Dance: “..but what does this buzzword “bridge building” really mean structurally? A bridge is built on equal ground suggesting that if you reverse X or Y (...) you will yield similar results.”3
She tells about the Israeli choreographer Zvi Gotheiner who learnt Dabke from YouTube and claimed it to be an Israeli dance, and when critiqued defended himself by saying he was just building bridges between Israelis and Arabs. To do his “bridge-building”, Gotheiner received funding from the state of Israel that oppresses and murders Arabs. He toured the piece, spreading mis-information about the origins of Dabke, and the profit that was made ended up in his own pocket.4
Leila Mire: “What we’re supposed to do is claim that dance builds bridges between people – and I’m not saying that it can’t – but I am saying that in instances like these artists are not building bridges, they are creating a static seesaw, a piece of installation art, a stand-in for some relic of utopic equalization.”
In a seesaw, one goes down so the other can go up.
In a static seesaw, one stays down so the other can stay up.
One-sided bridge building: building access for the oppressor to steal and control. To hide the one-sidedness: The oppressed are tactically made to appear “difficult” and “bitter” in their unwillingness to “collaborate”. The aim of cultural boycott is not to polarize or destroy connections, it is to stay clear about the grounds that are needed for building bridges. Grounds of justice. No bridges without grounds of justice.
I am not done with bridges, not yet. How many bridges can you see from here?
Do you know what this street is called?
Siltavuorenranta. The Shore of Bridge Mountain. Named after the Bridge Mountain that was named after the bridge from Kruununhaka to Hakaniemi, Pitkäsilta, the Long Bridge already in the 1650’s.
As we speak, the longest, tallest and longest-standing bridge of Finland is being built. 200 years of service to-come.5
The Kruunuvuori Bridge from Korkeasaari to Kruunuvuorenranta.
Some call it already the new icon of Helsinki.
They say it will redefine the concept of the centre of this city. Connecting everything to the center. As straight as possible. Bridges – tools for defining a center.
How to know if I’m building a bridge or a center? How to know if I’m building a connection or a symbol of connection?
Lost Islands
How many bridges do you see?
How many islands do you see?
How many islands don’t you see?
How many invisible islands hiding in plain sight?
This song goes to Siltasaari, Pikku-Siltasaari and Pannukakku.
Siltasaari and Pikku-Siltasaari – swallowed by Hakaniemi.
Pannukakku – buried under Merihaka.6
Lost islands
When the sea between Siltasaari and Hakaniemi was filled, it took about 10 years for the new land to dry, for the fluid to obey the command of becoming solid.7 For years, the workers had to walk through the area on wooden planks laid out as roads. There are rumours that one of them drowned in the mud, in the sea that was on its way of becoming land, staying in the between, slowly resisting complete transformation. To keep shifting the shoreline of my body.
What would it mean to let islands be islands?
To resist isolation, but to cherish islands?
The effort of connecting. To respect the effort of connecting. To reach to you without merging into one.
To stay as many as possible as many as possible as many as impossible as impossible as possible as possible as impossible.
Map of Hakaniemi, 1869. Archive Doria, Finnish National Library.
Laundry
The art of making the heavy light
The art of making the light heavy
Takes off a shirt, spreads it open and lays it in the sea Lets it float Wash Watch the water penetrate the tissue.
Does the shirt get more dirty or more clean?
When does the intention hold more weight than the result?
As long as it feels that I’m washing it, I’ll keep washing it.
As long as it feels that I’m washing, I’ll keep washing.
As long as it feels that I’m washing, I’ll keep washing.
As long as it feels that I’m washing, I’ll keep washing.
As long as it feels that I’m washing, I’ll keep washing.
As long as it feels that I’m washing, I’ll keep washing.
As long as it feels that I’m washing, I’ll keep washing.
As long as it feels that I’m washing, I’ll keep washing.
If I can’t make it clean, I’ll make it wet.
Morning, Milking, Mourning, Milking
Who wants some milk?
Don’t worry. It’s not real. We’re just playing here.
It’s 5:00 in the morning
Sun rising
Red
A red eye opening in the horizon
The cow can’t hold it any longer
Let me milk
Squeeze squeeze drop drop
A drop for everyone
Give me your jug
And I’ll squeeze you some
I have never milked a cow
Except for a fake cow at a Valio’s event when I was an ice-skater captain, representing my team in receiving a sponsorship from them. As if any of the cows producing milk for Valio would be milked by hand. Valio, so spectacular at propaganda… Making the dirty clean.8
My mother’s father’s mother Tyyne was milking her cow every morning. I have been told that during some scarce years after the 2nd World War, there was this very thin and pale child who walked to school through the pasture where Tyyne sat milking. And so every day, Tyyne gave them a glass of fresh milk, or left it there waiting on a tree stomp. It might be that those daily glasses of milk saved the life of this child, who knows.
I never met Tyyne. This is the most romantic story I have of any of my great grandparents.
The desire to squeeze history. To force out the drops that would prove it romantic, beautiful. My desire to squeeze history. To force out the drops that would tell me my great grandparents were pure. Just lovely lovely lovely.
My other great grandmother from my mother’s side, Hilja, she was involved in a far-right fascist party, IKL9 “The Patriotic People’s Movement”. The goal of the party was to reach a “Great Finland” that was to be “united” by one single language. Fascist politics: greatness and oneness. Against being many, against islands. Assimilation starting from an unjust bridge, escalating in gaps being filled, the between-ness eaten.
For what I know, Hilja was radicalized because first she was traumatized. And still, I don’t want to wash her hands. I want to know of the many things her hands did. The harm and the care. The pouring, the squeezing, the holding, the breaking.
Kruununhaka
“Kruunu” for “Crown” “Haka” for “Pasture”
Both Kruununhaka and Hakaniemi used to be pasture lands in the 1700’s.10
No cows in Kruununhaka, but horses. Royal military horses of the Swedish king’s army were grazing here, 300 years ago munching grass, gazing into the horizon. The last horses of Finland’s army were sold in 1994. According to a news article I found, they were auctioned in Santahamina, Helsinki, and most of them ended up in families with riding teenage daughters.11 One father rode the horse from Santahamina all the way to Sipoo where his daughter was waiting. What a fairytale. Of course, it was teenage girls riding the army’s last horses.
Pasture
From Latin “pascere” meaning “to feed, graze” From the proto Indo-European root “pa-” meaning “to protect, feed” From the same root might come pastor, antipasto, companion, company, pantry, food, forage.
When the pasture is gone, the pa- is still left. No matter how many houses are built on old pastures, no matter how much asphalt and concrete we pour, we still have the work of protecting the work of feeding.
Tea Party
I wonder if “pa-” could be the root for “party” too?
It isn’t. Parties can feed and protect, but at their core lies something else: to part.
A part, a piece, a share, a portion. Partir, French for leaving. Yes, we’re getting closer to an end. That’s why it’s time for a party.
For a party we need clean clothes, lucky that I washed this.
Puts on the still wet shirt
Why do we need to clean in order to party? Why do we need to be clean in order to end, to leave?
Now, let’s toast!
What should we toast for, my companions?
At the end, you let go Or how does it go?
Do you let go in order to end, or end in order to let go? To party to let go, so you can partir, leave?
We need to talk about waste. I’m realizing now, maybe we clean before a party in order to make space for the mess.
After parties there is always waste after building bridges – waste after taking a photograph – waste after making an album – waste after making a jug – waste after taking a sip – waste.
The city works to hide its waste, The shit, the pee, the leftovers. Look at the piles.
Waste always comes from somewhere and is on the way somewhere. Like the stones and soil that were used to fill the sea between Siltasaari and Hakaniemi.
It was waste material: dug up from the sea bed by Sörnäinen to make the harbour deeper for boats. It became waste once it was piled on the shore. It unbecame waste once it was poured back to the sea, a couple kilometers to the south.
My body is a jug.
My body works with waste all the time: My kidneys, here, below my wings Filtering liters and liters and liters and liters of liquid every day.
The waste, the urine that the kidneys separate from the blood flows through the ureters, narrow tubes to the bladder, a bendy storage bag, and when the bag can’t hold it any longer through the urethra, the final pathway, it exits.
Where my body ends, the water continues.
What do I know about excess, about too much?
The feeling of holding pee Stretching the limit The pleasure of letting go Pouring hard.
Kate / Coral Rooms
There’s a city, draped in net2 this is how it begins. Kate is singing. Would you believe me if I told you that this all began with Kate Bush? Out of all the possible beginnings, this is it: A Coral Room.
A song after the end, after the apocalypse, after death. Moving and glistening and rocking / Its babies in rhythm As the spider of time is climbing / Over the ruins
“The song is really about the passing of time”, says Kate.13
We’re about to step into the coral room.
It’s July 2045.
We’re back at Signe Brander’s Alley We don’t live here anymore. We’ve just come to visit, to spend a hotel night to remember how 10 years ago we lived in the building next door to remember how 20 years ago we stood on the opposite shore imagining this hotel and the apartment houses rising on the shoreline that was still in the making.
The crown jewel of the hotel is of course their luxury suite, the Coral Suite.
Follow me, let’s take the elevator to the 12th floor Here, show the key card. A green blink. As the door opens, the orange-pink glow pulls us in, into its embrace, like stepping inside a body, a palace of flesh. We run to the window to see the view, our feet sink into the thick coral carpet.
The sunset is draping the sea, the sky in honey. I see you looking at Siltavuori where Signe stood with her camera, where the woman with the newspaper and the dog sat posing. Your eyes brush over Kruununhaka where the army’s horses grazed, and continue to the left where the white pillars of the Kruunuvuori Bridge, Helsinki’s new icon, shine. As we stand there in silence, the sea begins to rise. No rain, no storm, the water just begins to rise from below.
It creeps over the shores, Pitkäsilta bridge drowns.
Islands become islands again until they become sea bed again. Everything becoming sea bed.
Through the window I sense the quiet rage of the sea, the desire for revenge, to take back the space.
The sun sets, the sea rises until it reaches our 12th floor. We open the window.
Without a moment of hesitance, the water enters. We let go,
we float above the king sized bed, the coral satin sheets flying with us. Little fish swim through our hair,
The coral velvet curtains flow with the waves, I close my eyes.
I see the ghost of the worker who drowned in the mud between Hakaniemi and Siltasaari island, rising with the sea, finally free.
And as the years pass by, actual corals will grow there, eating the walls, the chandelier, the bathtub, our skeletons.
Just like dolphins returned to Venice canals as soon as the Covid pandemic started, as soon as humans yielded.
Maybe you know this fantasy?
The fantasy of how the sea will return. How the sea will heal itself
Back to square one, history erased.
We will just wait.
The fantasy of total surrender.
giving in giving in giving in in in in in
Look into your jug, Is there a coral room in there?
Can you find a harder fantasy?
Can you find a softer fantasy?
My mother and her little brown jug It held her milk / And now it holds our memories
Kate’s mother, Hannah. A song to remember her, to hold her. After death. I have heard Hannah’s voice. It’s in Kate’s song “And Dream of Sheep” from 1985. She says: “Come here with me now.”
The line comes when the protagonist of the song is floating alone at the sea. It’s getting dark and they’re wanting to fall asleep to get away from the situation but also trying to stay awake to not drown.14
giving up giving up giving up
Come here with me now
Hold something in your hand, knowing that, at some point, it will break breaking breaking breaking breaking aching aching aching aching
“And the pieces will lay there a while in a house draped in net / in a room filled with coral”
The jug in my hand: I came here asking what it could hold, what could I hold knowing the risk of breaking?
Come here with me now,
Come out of the coral room.
From the Rider-Smith-Waite Tarot deck, 1909. Illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith.
Temperance and the Star
One foot on the ground, one in the water
An angel pouring liquid from one jug to the other, from up to down and down to up, simultaneously, making a bridge.
Pouring in.
Pouring against gravity, not hard, but focused.
One foot on the ground, one on the water
A person without wings, naked, kneels by a pool of water, pouring liquid from two jugs. From one to the ground, from one to the water.
Pouring out.
Returning.
Temperance, the card that comes after the Death card in Tarot. The Star, the card that comes after The Tower, a card about collapse.
In both, we’re half on the ground and half in the water.
To keep shifting the shoreline of my body
In both cards, we hold two jugs, We pour.
There has been an end that was not the end.
We’re on the other side now. After crossing a bridge, becoming a bridge holding a tension.
“Care is not about fusion; it can be about the right distance.“15 Recovery is not about releasing all tensions; it can be about attending to the tensions. Tension is not an opposite of tender, it lives inside tender.
How are you holding?
Pour with me: everything in everything out
What is the next way to hold?
Dirty Baptism
Who here needs a new name?
You don’t need to need it
Wanting is enough
You don’t need to keep it visiting is enough.
Rebirth, rename Rename, rebirth
You don’t need to leave old names behind to receive new ones, you can just have more and more and more
You will know when it’s time to give again, eventually.
How can this city still be called the same after all the change?
more more more more
giving giving giving giving giving back giving back giving back
Why was the area built on top of Pannukakku renamed as Merihaka? Some names get buried. Some names stay while the place is erased: Siltasaari. Carrying its island-history in its name.
In order to remake a city, we need to build new words, new names. Pour them out of our mouths!
Baptizing the concrete in my saliva Dripping, dripping, dripping
What name would you give to Helsinki to feel at home here?
Please, can I pour this water on you?
Please, pour this water on me.
Footnotes
Signe Brander’s Alley 2035
1. City of Helsinki: Information about Hakaniemenranta area and the building plans for the next decade (www.hel.fi).
2. Helsinki City Museum: Signe Brander. Signe Brander (1869–1942) was the first professional museum photographer in Finland.
Building Bridges
3. Leila Mire: Unpacking Zionism in Modern Dance, lecture recorded at Studio 34 on Jan 1, 2024 in partnership with La La Lil Jidar and Jewish Voice for Peace Philadelphia.
4. Leila Mire, ‘Disrupting Invisible Choreography: Understanding Implicit Bias in Dance Education’, thINKingDANCE journal, 24 July 2023.
5. News release on Kruunusillat development project’s website, 11 November 2021 (www.kruunusillat.fi).
Lost Islands
6. Sallamaria Tikkanen, Teppo Sillantaus, Ensio Ilmonen, ‘Helsingin kadonneet saaret (Lost Islands of Helsinki)’, Helsingin Sanomat, 1996.
7. Ulpu Marjomaa ja Marko Halonen, ‘History of Hakaniemi’, 19 October 2021.
Morning, Milking, Mourning, Milking
8. Valio is Finland’s biggest dairy company known for its milk-promoting propaganda in primary schools.
9. Isänmaallinen kansanliike (1932-1944) was the biggest far-right group in Finland in the 1930’s. It was found to continue the work of Lapuanliike (1929-1932), (https://www.fsd.tuni. fi/pohtiva/ohjelmalistat/IKL/291).
Pa-
10. Institute for the Languages of Finland: ‘About the origin of the name “Kruununhaka”.’
11. Vellamo Vehkakoski, ‘Armeijan viimeiset hevoset myytiin Helsingissä’ STT, 9 June 1994.
Kate / Coral Rooms
12. Kate Bush, A Coral Room, 2005. All the lines in italics in this song are from A Coral Room. 13. Kate Bush in an interview by John Wilson on BBC4 “Front Row” radio program 4 November 2005.
14. Kate Bush tells about the thoughts behind “And Dream of Sheep” in ‘Kate Bush Talks ‘Hounds Of Love” Track By Track. Radio Documentary, 1992.
Temperance and The Star
15. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Pääsky Miettinen is a dance artist and poet working in and between the fields of performance, pedagogy, choreography and activism. Their work explores how agency and vulnerability move between performers and audiences, always complicating the questions of who is performing, who is witnessing, who is at stake and who is in power. Pääsky works from the body, but reaches towards also verbal and visual modes of expression, focusing on embodied relations to place, situated knowledges, senses and shifting states of presence and absence.
www.paaskymiettinen.com
Fidgety Shores Of The Makeshift City
Francesca Bogani Amadori, Henry Lämsä, Pääsky Miettinen
Curated by Micol Curatolo
Asbestos Art Space, Kristianinkatu 16, 00170 Helsinki
13. - 21.7.2025
Opening 12.7. at 14:00-17:00
Performances on 12.7. at 15:00 and 21.7. at 17:00
Fidgety Shores Of The Makeshift City is an exhibition in dialogue with Helsinki’s ever-present construction sites. The exhibition questions a habit of demolishing and rebuilding by which the city eats into its landscape, exposing our society’s compulsion for erasure, accumulation and expansion. Through performative and multimedia work, Francesca Bogani Amadori, Henry Lämsä, and Pääsky Miettinen engage with the renovation of Hakaniemi's, Merihaka’s and Hernesaari’s shores. The artworks explore the textures and temporalities of material displacement in a gentrified landscape that is continuously torn down and rebuilt. Through embodied practices and speculation, they reflect on the impact that city development has on collective memory, cohabitation and future social imaginaries. Fidgety Shores Of The Makeshift City is a semifictional and semi-public space engrossed with the dirty piles of matter of our domesticity.
Artist: Pääsky Miettinen
Curator and producer: Micol Curatolo
Graphic designer: Valentina Černiauskaitė
Printed at Copy-Set, Helsinki
July 2025
The making of this album was intimately accompanied by Kate Bush’s album
Aerial, published by Noble & Brite, 2005.
Thank you Benedikte, niko, Viki, Adalmiina & Riina for the love and support during the process.
