ArtECult IV

We have just found out ArtECult’s lates application for ‘ArtECult IV’ has been approved by Cimo organization. From here you visit all the other applications and see how much we got!

Mikko Auerniitty from Sataedu has kept himself busy. Here are some links referring to his latest book “ Football Landscapes – Jalkapallon Jäljet” co-written with Harri Heinonen. Further you can read an essay from Otso Kantokorpi from the book.

• Article in Kameralehti (in Finnish) PDF
• Article from Taide-lehti: http://www.taidelehti.fi/arkisto/taide_6-11/kritiikit_6-11?832_m=834
• Article from Vastapallo: http://vastapallo.fi/yleinen/kirja-arvostelu-mikko-auerniitty-harri-heinonen-football-landscapes-jalkapallon-jaljet-2011/
• Swedish book review: http://www.idrottsforum.org/reviews/items12/andtor_auerniitty-heinonen.html

In the Margins of the Sidelines | an essay by Otso Kantokorpi:

For most people, football, the most popular sport in the world, immediately suggests a great number of visual associations. The colours of scarves and jerseys are well known. Even those without an interest in the sport know many of its international stars, and many people also have in their minds the image of seething crowds of fans, and occasionally football hooligans. Along with the visual associations, there are many of those who can easily recall the auditory world of football, the team songs and slogans, the drumming, and the massive roar of the crowd. Football creates a colourful and noisy world, both dynamic and quickly changing – and often quite dramatic. Football is also big business, with rich and eccentric owners of teams, magnificent arenas, lives of luxury and business dealings, and the night-club antics of players are not unfamiliar to fans.

Both jointly and separately, photographic artists Mikko Auerniitty and Harri Heinonen have worked for years on football-related themes, approaching the world of this sport in quite unconventional ways. They themselves note that, in a sense, they make counter images of how football is usually portrayed. While their pictures are far removed from commercial football culture and the glamour of the UEFA Champions League, they are nonetheless marked by a strong documentary approach and even a desire for objectivity. Rather than photographing high points and grand moments, their method is one of viewing and observing everyday life. This includes a prominent poetic dimension that one could even regard as drawing upon the long Romantic tradition. Where the 18th and 19th centuries romanticized ruins, contemporary romanticism often addresses the sidelines of civilization, non-places, abandoned sites and back yards. Auerniitty and Heinonen themselves speak of the romanticism of back yards. They dare to refer to their work as a continuation of Romantic landscape painting. The world of the late 18th and early 19th-century master Caspar David Friedrich is by no means unknown to them.

But Auerniitty and Heinonen do not go out hunting for peculiarities; their aim is to present their subjects in documentary fashion and in quite a neutral manner, as seen by the normal human eye and in completely ordinary perspective. Along with romanticism, they could also speak of realism in not seeking the extra effects provided by the suitable and carefully considered shot, such as dramatic lighting with its different reflections and shadows. They feel that the best conditions are usually those of simple and even, in some way democratic, light. Many viewers might even find this to be dull and boring, but it is precisely this approach that may best reveal the drama of the location and the narrative dimensions that are present there, or could be imagined to exist there. Emptiness often requires being filled with the aid of the imagination, and presence is often manifested explicitly through absence.

Auerniitty and Heinonen have a long history of involvement with football. Both have also been quite “normal” fans with their chosen teams – Benfica for Auerniitty and Everton for Heinonen. Auerniitty is more distinctly a photographic artist. He has been interested in landscape and architectural photography, both of which are readily combined in this project. Heinonen, in turn, has documented for a long while the less obvious traces and marks of football, photographing written graffiti and stickers, the signs left by visiting fans or their territorial markers. This interest led to Heinonen’s doctoral dissertation in 2005. Entitled Jalkapallon lumo (The Allure of Football), it is a study in sports sociology on Finnish Everton fans.

Auerniitty and Heinonen have jointly displayed their work on several occasions, in both duo and group exhibitions. In 2006, they presented their series Football Colours, in which they photographed Finnish football fans wearing their colours during the qualifying play-offs of the European Championship. They went on to address the setting of the sport in Football Landscapes, with regard to the surprisingly complex and diverse relationships of public space and football.

Auerniitty and Heinonen often turn their viewfinders to places that may seem untypical but upon closer inspection will turn out to be highly typical. A worn lawn between two trees may point to an important place where young people gather with a football to construct their own social world. The trained eye may see in a brick wall a chalked and long since faded goal, and, looking up, there may be flag or some other symbol on a balcony in a deserted street telling of the local culture of football fans. Small stickers on lampposts and drainpipes also mark social boundaries – it’s we who rule here.

The football stadiums of Europe are often situated outside the centres of cities – partly for reasons of traffic and partly to provide more efficient control. Stadiums are, in a sense, temporary locations, the spirit of which is manifested only during matches, when the stands and surrounding areas are full of fans. Otherwise, their settings are often marked by the lack of any particular genius loci. Stadiums are often in undefined border areas or in outright abandoned and unused land. They are typically so-called non-places lacking identity and history. It could be suggested the Auerniitty’s and Heinonen’s landscapes depict inverse ruins in the manner of the American artist Robert Smithson. In a way, this is the opposite of the romanticism of ruins and it tells how our modern structures can be like ruins even before they are completed.

Dimensions of social criticism can also be read from Auerniitty’s and Heinonen’s work, in which they support each other with means that occasionally tend towards satire. They may, for example, reveal the existence of mechanisms of control: fences and supervised and sometimes highly regulated routes into the bowels of stadiums with their surveillance cameras may also be the subjects of their pictures.

Although the photographs by Auerniitty and Heinonen rarely feature people, they nonetheless describe in a forceful manner the social dynamics of football, its characteristic movement in two directions. Football both joins and separates people, employing precisely the same mechanisms as fashion. All this also marks the landscapes produced by football. It is often about quite small and mundane things, the perception of which is by no means a simple matter.

The power of documentary photography often lies in the fact that it gives the viewer impulses for similar personal observation. This happened to me. When travelling, for example in the countryside in Estonia, after looking at photographs by Auerniitty and Heinonen, I almost instinctively learned to recognize places where football is, or has been, played, even though it might only be a tree-lined field of grass or sand. It is always fun to stop at the side of a field like that, because the imagination will immediately start to work. The place comes to life and its drama is constructed even without a ball or players. The viewer may also be lost in personal memories for a moment. I, too, have recalled on many occasions the apartment building’s garage doors on which I tried to place my curving kicks with Mikko from next door or Vesa from downstairs standing between the imaginary goalposts.

I have experienced the allure of these strange images in quite concrete terms. In their own words, Auerniitty and Heinonen create “pictures in which there doesn’t seem to be anything, but when you stop for a moment before them, their narrativity will grow and you can imagine a social milieu in them”. Speaking from experience, I can say that this is precisely how they work. But at the same time, their quiet, everyday poetics ensure that their meanings do not disappear with one glance or recognition, as when solving a riddle.

Otso Kantokorpi

Check out pics by Anne Haimakainen from ArtECult’s seminar in Netherlands 2012.

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Greetings and happy new year 2012!

Another year with exciting happenings with ArtECult starts and therefore we have finally updated new partners into Partners-section. There are now Riga Art School, Reykjavik Borgarholtsskóli , Landstede Zwolle and Galway Technical Institute added so be sure to check them out.

Also a brand new image gallery by Dirk Hund from ArtECult meeting in Tartu 2011 added here.

Thanx to Anne Haimakainen who sent a bunch of beautiful pictures from various seminars around Europe. You can now browse 4 new galleries from Spain, Iceland, Italy and Estonia. Go to Seminar Trips and fin the following new galleries:

• Spain 2011
• Tartu 2011
• Iceland 2010
• Italy/Gubbio 2009
• Tartu 2008

Enjoy!

ArtECult network will have a gathering in Estonia, Tartu 2.-7.9.2011. We hope all old and new partners will join this five day session with lot of interesting stuff in the program. Get more information from Ave Leek at Tartu Art School (ave.leek@art.tartu.ee).

There will also be Kuikka Network meeting. Ask more information from new Kuikka coordinator Pekka Korhonen (pekka.korhonen@lybecker.fi) from Lybecker Institute of Crafts and Design.

See you all at the seminar!

Kuikka II has been plannig yearly seminar for European ArtECulture network. This year location would bee Spain, Fuengirola. Time of seminar program will be 2.5. – 6.5.2011

Program of the week is still under work: there will be places to visit and lots of development talks amongst us the ArtECult network. During the seminar week we shall organize 15×15 Art Exhibition as usual. Date of Exhibition opening is Thursday 5th of May – bring your exchange student’s works with you as you come or send them in beforehand:

ArtECult Exhibition / Minna Kantola,
Avenida Nuestro Padre Jesús Cautivo 43,
Edf. Morfeo, local 6,
29640 Fuengirola,Malaga
Spain

Exhibition shall be open for public untill 20th of May.

READ THE PRESS RELEASE.

DOWNLOAD EXHIBITION POSTER.

DOWNLOAD EXHIBITION FLYER.