Waterways performance series

Waterways (in Finnish Vesireitit) is a multidisciplinary project that explores various human relationships with the landscape of Eastern Finland. The artists involved in the project each have either a physical relationship with the Eastern Finnish landscape, or their practice deconstructs the social and political relations tied to place, ownership, and belonging.

Waterways examines the mythical, ideological, and emotional dimensions of Eastern Finland’s bodies of water—dimensions tied to purity, clarity, and a “special relationship with nature,” as well as the magical melancholy of bright summer nights, the warmth of smooth cliffs, and the transience of life. The starting point of Waterways is the movement of place, time, and being within the landscape: how it feels in the body to be part of something incomprehensibly vast, and how the landscape simultaneously affects living bodies.

The curator of the Waterways project is Riikka Thitz, who works in the fields of contemporary performance and visual arts, and the project is produced by i dolci ry.

Artists and artworks

Waterways begins in 2025 with a series of four site-responsive artworks:

💧 String Quartet, an interdisciplinary work by choreographer and visual artist Anne Naukkarinen, in which she captures four generations of her family’s memories and stories from the landscape of Pappilanlahti in Ruokolahti. The work is based on interviews Naukkarinen conducted with her family members, from which she compiled a multi-voiced script. Composer Leevi Räsänen translated the script into a composition for four string instruments.

String Quartet premieres in the garden of Naukkarinen’s grandmother, Kerttu Kukkurainen, overlooking Lake Saimaa and the Ruokolahti church on 2 August 2025.

💧 Lilluminen, a two-part work consisting of a live performance and a video work by choreographer Anna Mustonen. The works form a pair that undulates toward each other, where the past and present merge and bring to the surface sorrow, nostalgia, everyday life, and boldness—a landscape shaped by Lake Kallavesi, the Kuopio market square, the changing seasons, flickers of light, and dance, both intimate and shared.

💧 Etiological Hydro Disruption Report (EHDR) is an audio play by performance artist Teo Ala-Ruona that explores the intimate politics of drinking water. EHDR connects the body, shaped by oily technologies, to the water cycle, where waste filters from lakes into groundwater and passes through purification processes before reaching our taps.

Anna Mustonen and Teo Ala-Ruona’s works premiere at ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival in Kuopio in September 2025. The exact times and places of the performances will be announced later.

Read about Waterways on i dolci homepage.