Soon 20-year-old Pixelache Helsinki, a transdisciplinary platform for emerging art, design, research and activism, explores this summer collapse from psychological, social and environmental perspective as well as developing resilience. Week-long festival consists of localised FM radio, online streams, media art, lectures, haircuts, experimental home cooking, among many others.
Pixelache Helsinki Festival 2021 #Burn____, co-directed by artist-organiser Andrew Gryf Paterson and author Laura Gustafsson, takes place this year with limited access in selected spaces inside Oodi Central Library in Helsinki and outside the front canopy of Oodi, as well as online, from the 6th to the 13th of June 2021. The theme of the festival #Burn____, anticipated in late summer 2019, sets the context of the festival contributions, reflecting on mental health, social solidarity and struggle as well as on ecological crisis.
The programme selected via open calls, direct invitations and partner contributions offers a wide range of local and international perspectives. Included are site-specific artworks, radio and audiovisual performances, online and offline workshops and presentations, with over 80 contributors participating in the festival. A highlight of the online offer – essayist Silvia Hosseini and Laura Gustafsson comment on the festival during the Radio Helsinki broadcast.
Co-director Laura Gustafsson writes about the festival:
“Themes of interfaces, metamorphoses and decomposition connect the projects while they also reach out towards recovering. In order to build a brighter future, the programme seeks to rearrange the somewhat dystopian elements of the present and to nurture the weeds sprouting from the cracks of our time. Dakar artist Babacar Traore’s work speaks of the traces we’ve left as a culture. Those traces are what we wish to examine during the coming festival – from abandoned fur farms to effects of climate crisis and tourism to lichen in the Sápmi region to the scars in one’s skin.”
After a year of excessive screen-based meetings, the festival re-adopts one of the oldest media forms at physical distance from another – radio – seems to be the idea of making a festival event with local and international contributors in consideration of mobility and gathering restrictions. With the established experience of hybrid radio, Pixelache brings a localised listening mix of audio works from two open calls, a live radio stream of festival events especially made or adapted for radio, emerging sound artists, podcasts, and interviews with festival artists and contributors. During the festival, the public can interact with a local FM radio broadcasting around Oodi. Bring Your Own Radio (BYOR) to listen, and if you like a blanket or picnic!
Festival homepage: https://festival.pixelache.ac/