puija

“Puija is my imaginary friend from my childhood. I do think imaginary friends are for adults too. With this performance named after Puija, I want to celebrate and highlight our strength to fantasise, and create immaterial companionships even if – and especially when – our surroundings are penetrating us with normative expectations and hostile messages. The unconscious world is too wild to be left alone, we must unleash spontaneity.”

Puija is the third part of Suvi Kemppainen’s performance trilogy (teething 2021 and no, but very close to the bone 2022) on immaterial ownership and the value of embodied knowledge. These themes have affected Kemppainen towards a movement practice informed by the ownership of the body and its bones – and also the letting go of this ownership. In the performance psychopoetic corporeality is reframing normative ideas of a spectacle: from outside to inside, from an image to a corporeal experience – spectacle of the soul, spectacle of the inner experience.

Kemppainen’s artistic practice, psychopoetic dance, refers to a precisely choreographed, associative travel in the sphere of performance, delving deep into the psyche. Kemppainen finds political value in the ephemeral nature of dance and wonders how to work with immaterial media, such as dance or performance, in the context of constant commodification. In Puija performance the working group is in touch with three immaterial others: imaginary friend, sickness, and choreographic rooms of the body.