Subsensorial Wefts

Tiivistelmä

Aistinalisia kudelmia

Aistinalisuus viittaa kokemuksen piiriin, joka arkisessa elämässä sijoittuu ihmisen aistien tuolle puolen. Se viittaa tapahtumiin, joissa mielemme, kehomme ja ympäristömme lomittuvat yhteen. Nämä tapahtumat rekisteröityvät molekyylien ja solujen tasoilla, mutteivät yleensä kapua ihmisen tietoisuuteen. Kuitenkin nämä tapahtumat vaikuttavat mieleemme ja kehoomme kuin myös yhteyden kokemukseemme maailmassa – siis kokemukseemme siitä, että kuulumme johonkin itseämme suurempaan yhteyteen.

Aistinalinen on ennen kaikkea jaettu tila. Jaamme sen muun maailman kanssa, myös muiden kuin oman eliölajimme kanssa. Itse asiassa jaamme sen koko olemassaolon tilassa. Vaikka aistinalinen sisältää myös tapahtumia tiloissa, joissa ihmismieli ei ole mukana vaikuttamassa (kuten maaperässä, kasvien elämässä, kivissä tai vaikkapa ilmakehässä), ihmisen toiminta, sosiaaliset rakenteet, poliittiset prosessit ja erilaiset maailmankatsomukset vaikuttavat mitä suurimmassa määrin siihen, mitä aistinalisessa tapahtuu ja kuinka aistinalisen tapahtumat sitten vastavuoroisesti vaikuttavat meidän yhteen kietoutuneisiin elämiimme.

Uteliaisuuteni johdattaa minut tutkimaan näitä monia inhimillisiä rakenteita ja alueita, joissa aistinalinenkin on mukana. Nyt käsillä olevassa tutkimuksessani keskityn kuitenkin siihen, kuinka taiteilijana työskentelen ja välitän eteenpäin kokemuksiani aistinalisesta maailmasta.

Abstract

The subsensorial refers to a realm of experience that is beyond the capacities of our everyday human senses. It refers to events interweaving our minds, bodies, and environments. These events are registered on a molecular and cellular level, yet usually do not rise to human consciousness. Nevertheless, these events have an effect on our minds, bodies, and our sense of belonging to this world – our sense of connectivity.

The subsensorial is a realm that is largely shared with the rest of the world, more so than human life and existence in general. Although the subsensorial incorporates events that might not directly include the human mind and interaction at all (such as events in the soil, plants, rocks, or atmosphere), our human actions, social structures, political processes, and cosmologies bear great significance for what happens in this realm, and for how this realm affects us and our interconnected lives.

My curiosity takes me to explore these many human structures and fields in which the subsensorial is shared, but my focus in this research is on how, as an artist, I work with and mediate experiences in the subsensorial realm. I call this artistic work as a whole Subsensorial Sessions.

Subsensorial Wefts[1], an Introduction

I am an artist and a healer. In both practices, my point of departure has often been personal experiences, guiding my inquiries and leading me to investigate the body and its place within the cultural space, as well as its relationship with the larger ecosystem of our planet. Affected by the powerful visceral experiences of a disease in my bodily organism due to environmental toxins, my emergent and urgent field of interest, impact, and research, through the practice of my art, is the subsensorial realm. The urgency is amplified by the fact that the subsensorial realm has a direct connection to and interdependence with our environment, with which we humans should indeed concern ourselves as we are one of the many species on this planet.

In this essay, I discuss what can be understood as belonging to the subsensorial realm. In 2006, I discovered I had been poisoned by mercury[2], a heavy metal and nerve toxin. My nervous system was greatly impacted and led to a number of reactions that I would, in short, describe as micro messages on a molecular level passing inside and between my cells and my sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. In simple terms, I became sensitized to environmental conditions. My heightened sensitivity is now a medium that allows me to receive signals of chemical and energetic events from the cells of my body and to have these signals reach some sort of pre-conscious-consciousness of my “mind”.[3] These are signals that are usually filtered out by the brain, but are now, in my “mind”, translated into various “mind things”, i.e., visuals, melodies, words, movements, and colors. Perhaps one could call this process a multiple-form-synesthesia. Possibly because I am a visual artist, this synesthetic process produces mainly visual effects in my “mind”. I started to call this interstitial work of “mind” and body, this intermediary space and time of signals and synesthesia, the subsensorial realm. Becoming familiar and skilled with the subsensorial realm, I have turned this sometimes debilitating sensitivity into a capability and a medium for my art.

The subsensorial is a realm where molecular processes and micro-messaging between cells, matter, and energy within and outside living bodies meet with a “mind’s” imagination. The subsensorial is a realm where events are mainly beyond the capacities of human sensory equipment to register, and therefore remain outside the realm of human experience. In this context, events that enter human consciousness can be called sensory events. An example of a sensory event is, for instance a person coming too close to fire will feel the burn on their skin and step away. In rare instances, events in the subsensorial realm may come to be expressed as sensory events, such as in my condition. Micro messages between cells of the body usually do not enter consciousness and remain in the subsensorial realm of material events in the body – rather than enter the sensorial realm. In other words, these micro messages do not become sensory events of which a “mind” becomes conscious. Due to my heightened sensitivity, these micro messages in the subsensorial realm do indeed emerge in my consciousness. Since these micro messages take place between cells and in dialogue with material conditions inside, as well as outside the body, micro messages from the subsensorial realm can in a peculiar way be a part of both the material conditions, and, at the same time, become part of the expressions of a “mind”.

This is how messages from the subsensorial realm can traverse through materials, such as skin, bone, stone, and water – as well as become things of the “mind”, in other words, art, fiction, or fantasy. In my art practice, the subsensorial realm manifests itself in the material world as artifacts produced by me in the form of art, which human sensory equipment is capable of registering. These artifacts include paintings, drawings, narratives, sounds, and movements. One of my tasks as an artist is to mediate experiences of the subsensorial realm to a wider audience by way of making art.

My art practice incorporates research into other fields, such as natural sciences and humanities, but my practice with the subsensorial realm has also necessitated educating myself in various forms of healing, both traditional and contemporary, such as the Finnish tradition of “Kalevala Bone Setting”, reiki[4], traditions of cosmologies in many cultures, and psychology[5]. The uniqueness of the combination of related but separate practices and disciplines that I have developed lies in the fact that I make paintings and other artistic expressions as they emerge in my body and “mind” whenever I engage in sessions that – in my interpretation – engage with the subsensorial realm. This particular way of working is the method for my artistic research. I understand art as a field of applied curiosity, where I can play with many acquired techniques, skills, and knowledges. In this research I focus on the techniques I have learned to work with bodies, senses, energies, and healing, as well as the discoveries of how to combine them with artistic techniques such as painting, drawing, singing, poetry, and performance art. Proposing critical perspectives to science-making and science as a form of authoritative power that is imposed on many “minds” and bodies, my artistic research puts forward questions such as how does art (and/or an artist) know, how can we describe art as experience, how does art function as mediation (in my case of the subsensorial realm), and, finally, in this essay, how does art mediate the subsensorial realm? My art practice produces data to consider these questions in the form of travel notes, diary notes, session notes, introspection, reporting and re-reporting, experimenting with art, and analysis of the processes.

For a human, to tune in to the subsensorial realm produces a deep embodied environmental awareness mediated by one’s senses.

What role does the subsensorial realm play in the formation of our human consciousness and life – and could it be meaningful for us humans to learn to hear its expressions better? What messages does the subsensorial realm bring us?

Introduction to the Subsensorial Realm

I have worked with the subsensorial realm since the year 2010. The last few years, I have expanded my explorations into a multitude of fields of experience, such as architecture, space, sounds, words, landscape, and interactions between humans and non-humans (such as healing sessions), which are affected by the subsensorial realm. I have discovered that the subsensorial realm affects all of us and everything around us. It is a realm where molecular processes and micromessaging between cells, matter, and energy within and outside living bodies meet with a “mind’s” imagination and weave a weft of artistic expression.

The subsensorial refers to a realm of experience that is beyond the capabilities of our human everyday sensory equipment – beyond our eyesight, hearing, or sense of touch and smell. It refers to events interweaving our minds, bodies, and environments together. Although these events are registered on a molecular level, usually we do not become aware of them. Nevertheless, these events have an effect on our minds and bodies. I believe that it is possible to become more aware – more tuned in – to these events and that this awareness may make us feel more connected to our bodies and our environment. I believe this awareness may increase our sense of belonging to this world. For instance, you become aware of toxic air when you feel pain in your lungs. The effects of toxic air are part of the subsensorial realm, since the toxicity also affects your cognition, digestion, and liver. These events, that are part material, part sensory, and part subsensory, literally force you to pay attention to your environment. Furthermore, once you realize how your intentions and actions may affect this environment, you realize how you are connected to your environment, at the same time as you are connected to the subsensorial realm. The subsensorial is to a great extent a shared realm, shared with the rest of the world, with more-than-human life, and through existence in general. Although the subsensorial realm incorporates events that might not directly include human consciousness, such as events in the soil, plants, rocks, or atmosphere, our human actions, social structures, political processes, and cosmologies bear great meaning to what happens in this realm, and how in turn this realm affects us and our interdependent lives.

Subsensorial Sessions

My curiosity takes me to explore many human and non-human realities, in which the subsensorial realm is also shared, but my focus in this essay will be on how I as an artist work with and mediate experiences in the subsensorial realm. This artistic work I commonly title Subsensorial Sessions. I focus on three of my recent art projects, Nose, Ears, Eyes (material from subsensorial sessions at the Incerteza Viva, 32nd Sao Paulo Biennale, 2016), Sessions with Hardeep (an ongoing project since 2020), and the collective singing workshops and performances Singing for Lead (initiated through a residency with m-cult, Maunula Central Park, 2021–2022, and taken to a new context during Vienna Art Week, through the Kunsthalle Exnergasse and Chill Survive production, in Vienna, Austria, November 2022).

A subsensorial session is a very intimate event and it must be prepared by building trust between participants. It can be truly shared only by those convened in that specific space and time. In the beginning of my work with subsensorial sessions, I showed notes and paintings only to the participant themselves, who was receiving a session – and on a session-by-session basis and only if I considered it to be of benefit to that participant. As my work developed and I became more versed in the practice, I eventually displayed some of these paintings and notes in an art context with the aim of mediating some of these experiences to a wider audience. I hoped to inspire others to seek out experiences in the subsensorial realm for themselves. By comparison, in her paintings, Hilma af Klint did not mediate the spirits she conversed with, but rather the messages given by the spirits to her. I do not mediate specific messages like af Klint, but I believe I mediate the possibility of achieving a connection with the subsensorial realm. As I continued to develop my art practice, I moved on to take a third step of mediation and sought to bring these notes and paintings into the different spaces of cultural and scientific discourses. I aim to participate in the debate about what is there to be known in our world and how. I will continue a conversation about this third step with Robin Wall Kimmerer, Shawn Wilson, Paul Dieppe, Silvia Federici, and Isabel Stengers later in this essay.

For the past decade, I have given subsensorial sessions to human beings as part of my art practice. One of the main art projects in this regard is Nose, Ears, Eyes[6]. During these sessions at the 32nd Sao Paulo Biennale, I gave treatments I composed in a multiplicity of variations comprising mainly Kalevala Bone Setting and energy healing. I gave these sessions to members of the audience on a first-come-first-served basis. During these sessions I saw visions of the subsensorial realm in my “mind”[7] and I painted these visions. These visions appeared uniquely the way they did only in each particular session and interaction with each particular human being[8]. During this work, by methods of artistic practice, I have gained a deeper understanding of how the subsensorial realm affects our lived experience – not only in the interaction between humans – but in all our relations, be it microbes, animals, plants, landscapes, minerals, or waters.

I spent many years coping with toxicity in my personal life. In the long process of seeking a cure from Western medicine I eventually found understanding and help in the practices we generally call alternative medicine[9]. Over time and in various sessions with many different healers, I realized that some of the symptoms of my illness were most effectively addressed by focusing my “mind” on my condition and to seek ways to imagine and reconnect with a world of generosity and love, rather than one of competition and violence.

Paul Dieppe, a rheumatologist who has compared the curing effects of medical procedures versus healing practices, and who now researches Integrative Medicine, pointed out to me in conversation[10] that sensing a connection to something beyond oneself is the common denominator of successful healing practices. In one of his essays, he states:

(…) practitioners often use – healing – to denote the achievement of wholeness of mind, body and soul. Academics who have studied the subject use a variety of concepts, such as ‘from feeling ill to wellness (…) a process of restoration of the whole person and transcendence of suffering (…), and healing as the remainder – when other things have all been done, but there is still suffering and the need for care.

(Dieppe et al, Aug 11 2021)

The causes of my illness, mainly mercury, had to be cleansed out of my body with the help of plant based medicine. But the rebuilding of my person in such a way that I could continue to protect myself from illnesses and toxins was more complex. It had to do with the multiple synchronous functions of and inside my body as a multispecies organism[11]. I started to see myself partly as the person my consciousness rendered to me on a daily basis and partly as a thing-cloud that is part of an unknown magnificence (for lack of a better word) connected to everything in the universe by way of resonances, base elements, and microbial events. This new unknown, yet somehow expressed to me through my body, something that related to my body and my existence, but was beyond my grasp, led me to study ancient healing techniques – to explore this connectivity by connecting with other bodies (that I seeked to heal) – and eventually to develop a new art practice based on these ancient healing techniques[12] and the complex realities sensory organs, cellular events, “mind”[13], and imagination produce – in the proprioception and cognition of singularities and collectivities by human and more-than human bodies. This personal journey to recuperate and rebuild my body and life is an important base from which I then started to develop my art.

Subsensorial Sessions are Collaborations

My knowledge of the subsensorial realm helps me tune in and express human conditions and, for instance, the atmosphere of a space. Subsensorial Sessions are interweavings and collaborations with members of the audience, such as in Nose Ears Eyes, landscapes, as in Big Toe, Brain, Rock, or, for instance, other existing entities, such as the metal lead in Laulu lyijylle – Song for Lead, 2021 and 2022. The individual forms of a session may vary from a physical healing treatment, a ceremony, painting, writing, singing, or another form of passing of time together. In these moments I often feel like I come close to a very minute and real reality of life: bones, ligaments, cells, fluids, elements, but also energies, will, and emotion.

In these sessions, I often facilitate a mutual exchange, in which all “participants” express their state of being at that same moment[14]. These expressions have varied for each project and have included the making of clay sculptures (project at Museo de Minuto de Dio, Bogota, Colombia, 2012), drawings, paintings, written notes, and narratives (Sao Paulo 2016, Rehearsing Hospitalities, 2019, Barents Spektakel, 2023). In the singing projects, the expressions came out during the exercises and performances as sounds and movements. These exchanges comprise fine-tuned listening in on each other, that invite all diverse experiences of living on this planet to give out expressions, pressures, tensions, or, for instance, tendernesses. After such exchanges, I propose questions to the “participant” as well as myself such as, “What do you need or expect?” I propose various ways to proceed and equally “participants” may suggest ways to proceed. In these processes of slowly learning to connect with each other, I try to weave in[15] with the particular language(s) of a body, place, or space – all embodied experiences of particular lives.

While creating subsensorial sessions, I often sense energy of and in the “participants” as halos, movements, and blockages similarly as I have described above. Sometimes these energy flows appear to me as distinct colors, shapes, animals, and other living figures. These appearances are the base of the writings, sound recordings, and paintings that I make during or after sessions[16]. In some instances, I have made gestures, such as extending my limbs in different ways in relation to the body of the “participant” to whom or which I was giving a session. I have found myself whispering, sighing, singing, shaking, blowing, and doing other things that my body would tell me to do while in session.

Three Examples of Subsensorial Sessions

One of the central art projects for developing my art practice in the subsensorial realm has been my Nose, Ears, Eyes at the 32nd Sao Paulo Biennale, Incerteza Viva, 2016. For four months at the Biennale, from September to December 2016, I gave subsensorial sessions to members of the audience. While giving the sessions, I sensed energy in the person being treated as halos, movements, and blockages. Sometimes these energy flows appeared as distinct colors, shapes, animals, and other living figures. These appearances were the base of the drawings in China ink and pastels that I made during a session. I had chosen to call these paintings in Sao Paulo diagrams, since I wanted to emphasize that they were in fact collaborations between the two bodies (of the person, to whom I was giving a sessions and myself) and emerging out of the session as a description of an unfolding of the subsensory and sensory events of that particular session. I believe the paintings themselves will convey the most important messages accessible in regards to this project. Having said that, the notes do add to the understanding of the work process. Therefore, below I am presenting a sample of notes from my sessions:

Blue Batman, September, 2016. EB

Sprained ankles and knees many times. The joints are contracted. Outside edges of Sacrum Ilium and hips are tight.

Right hand and shoulders are tight

Legs are heavy

Right big toe and ball of foot stiff

Right knee swollen

Treatment of the bottom of the feet, knees and legs.

Connecting foot to knee to thigh to hip, to Sacrum Ilium =>

All the way from the big toe to Sacrum Ilium

Question: what does EB need?

Answer: Image of EB transforms into a powerful deep blue. Looks like Batman, except entirely blue.

Samples of Diagrams and Diary Notes

(Here, all the images of the images from Sao Paulo; Nose, Ears, Eyes, 2016)

Another way I have learned to work “subsensorially”, is to let myself be treated by someone, rather than be the one treating someone. I have also learned to treat other entities, or many, be it living beings or matter, landscapes or bodies of water, such as in the video and notes that accompany the Sompio Lokka recordings, the painting Nattaset, and Geological Time. I am curious to work with any entity that in one way or another is capable of engaging with energies, such as flows of fluids, electricity, gasses, and saline solutions in and between matter or through and with the cells of a living body. This, so far, has happened in addition to group events, in situations such as swimming in lakes, rivers, or oceans, or wandering in landscapes. It has also happened with particular physiotherapists, masseurs, and people engaged with other forms of treatment, such as Rosen therapy, cranio-sacral therapy, and energy healing. One set of these sessions, in which I am at the receiving end, are the Tong Ren sessions with Hardeep Mann.

Sessions with Hardeep

Up until the emergence of the Covid 19 virus, my explorations of the subsensorial realm had been focused on my subjective experiences. With the pandemic in 2020, it felt like we were entering a strong collective condition and sentiment, a Zeitgeist of sorts. Something similar had happened earlier in my lifetime with the onset of HIV and Aids. During the years of the pandemic, I experimented with painting digitally. Simultaneously, my social life had become almost entirely digital. I found new frameworks for my art practice which involved making paintings by participating in tapping sessions with Hardeep Mann.

Hardeep Mann is part of Tong Ren Station, a collective and healing center in Quincy, Boston, USA, that bases its research and healing practices on many indigenous and non-Western knowledges and medicine. For more than two years now, I have attended weekly Zoom meetings, following the Tong Ren sessions by Hardeep Mann. She conducts these sessions from Boston, but participants join in from all over the globe.

Hardeep has developed a way to conduct these sessions quite unique to herself. One of her principles is that everyone coming together in these sessions also actively participates in the healing process of those partaking in the session with their own intentions, attention, and indeed, their whole “being” (a “being” that includes our social, mental, and spiritual forces).

During the session, Hardeep taps a miniature human-shaped doll with a small steel hammer, similar to those a medical doctor would use to hit someone’s knee to check reflexes. She taps on marked points on the doll, following the meridians and lines of nerves present in a human body. As she is tapping, she tells about the points she taps and how these are connected to other parts of the body: organs, brain cortexes, nerves, arteries, glands, etc. In this way, Hardeep taps and directs our attention to different aspects and lines of connections in our body and in our “being” – a multitude of inner and outer connections.

I will present here an excerpt from a transcript of a Tong Ren session with Hardeep:

Hardeep: …the brain stem

I draw a light blue blob, thinking this is being nudged… or is it the “nudging” that I am drawing?

Hardeep: Relaxing back, relaxing sensory organs, cortex, association…

I select a darker shade of blue, make the line thinner and transparent. I draw “nudges” in light blue.

Hardeep: …making sure our brains are working well. Cerebellum.

I select a yellow, sun yellow, for cerebellum, draw on top of the blue a dandelion-like rim of yellow and then I change my mind. (I think I am trying too hard to “present” something).

Hardeep: Through the prefrontal lobe that is the eye area – all that: relax! It is all about relaxing the muscles, relaxing the brain…

I select red, and enlarge my drawing. I am drawing bright red small twinkles from the cerebellum going outwards. I think about the prefrontal lobe and eye area. I feel tension in and around my eyes and going up across the front and middle of my forehead.

The tapping and Hardeep’s uttered words evoke in my mind visual associations: lights, color, forms, and lines. These visual associations are familiar to me from the work that I do with processes of the mind and my art practice, as in my work with the subsensorial. But this time, the paintings look quite different. They have been born out of the entangled reality of Hardeep’s words and my internal and embodied sensations. Following the wonderful subsensorial energies evoked by Hardeep’s tapping and words, I started drawing and painting the visual world I see growing in front of my inner eye during her sessions.

I have recorded a stage by stage, organ by organ, tapping session with Hardeep, where I describe each choice of color, line, tip, and mix of my pencil (in this instance digital painting tool) for each invocation by Hardeeps words and tappings. This notation of the interwoven lines of thoughts, associations, energies, organs, and flows of bodily fluids is as close as I have so far been able to get to describe in detail my artistic method[17]. This notation, I would like to suggest, describes in concrete terms what happens when one is engaged in a session of care, since this is the ultimate goal for Hardeep, to teach us all – by example, and by her own specific way of incantation, and through the forming our online community – care.[18]

Landscape or Environment

In the next section of this essay I will look at how I turned to landscapes and environments when working with the subsensorial realm. During the recent decade, I have been focused on internal processes of personal bodies. Most of these processes originate from environmental conditions impacting these bodies. I started to wonder whether humans, in their turn, might impact elements in the environment.

An early memory in my life has given me some inclinations as to how my relation to my environment is significant. One could say that this relation is a general human relation, and vital in many ways. Our environment sustains us and in many instances gives us a sense of belonging. If we can locate ourselves in a meaningful way both socially and materially in a landscape[19], we might experience a sense of belonging.

One winter, when I was maybe 12 years of age, I was skiing – as usual – through the archipelago in my native country, Finland. The landscape fluctuated with small rolling islands and frozen sea. The sky was crystal clear and although it was very blue, glittering beams of lights shot through it and bounced back off the snow. On top of a hill, with the frozen sea all around me, I was struck by how everything shone and vibrated with sun and crystallized water. I felt so small and immense at the same time. As if I had evaporated into the energy vibrating around me. I realized how small and insignificant I was, and maybe precisely because of this I realized how thrilled I was to be a part of this magnificent beauty. On that spot, it did not matter if I lived or died.

In recent years, I have made more explorations with this sentiment. I roam landscapes, listen, look (often seeing with eyes out of focus), close my eyes, dream, and open my eyes again. Sometimes I walk, run, crawl, jump, swim. Sometimes with a camera moving with me. But that happens mostly only after I have realized that there is something going on in a place. A rock formation, a sigh, an opening, embrace, or singing in the landscape.

I then take the camera with me, to be a recording eye. Because I feel like the rocks, the earth, the sky, open up with immense speed and even though I suck in as much as my senses and brain possibly can, I still cannot see enough. I do feel, though. And I feel long after the encounter, too. I can ask this feeling to show me – and images, movements, or sounds emerge, not as recordings, but more like various decodings of the same energy transforming to each new expression.

I try to move with the energy of the space. The camera is part of that movement, not a separated recorder, but an active sensing agent, carried with me. Perhaps what I encounter are openings that release earth’s energies. These encounters activate both the land/rock formation, and me. I am thankful for being discovered by this energy, over and over again. In other places, it seems something has happened, maybe during the era of humans or maybe much earlier. On a molecular level, events may stay recorded as resonance in trees and rocks. Tension, sorrow, joy.

In the project Geological Time I have, among other, traveled to Saana mountain in Kilpisjärvi Lapland, Keflavik former NATO base in Iceland, and Karukinka National Park in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. What combines these locations is an energy I sensed in rock formations in these landscapes. Working with artistic sensibility and learning from other sensibilities (scientific, social, and spiritual), I document these, my energy explorations, digitally, ceremonially, and with drawings. Retelling these documentations are sessions of healing, performance, and lecture.

See http://www.32bienal.org.br/en/collaboration/o/3149.

Voicing for the Environment

The third and last example of subsensorial sessions is my work with singing. Already while giving sessions at the 32nd Sao Paulo Biennale, I had noticed how sometimes a voicing of the subsensorial realm was more forceful than its visualization. Voice and sound seemed to have a stronger effect on my own body as well as on the person, to whom I was giving the session.

During recent years, I have tested new methods aimed at both sensing various elements in a landscape, such as bodies of water, rock formations, animals, or historical events and peoples that have sojourned in the landscape at different times. Thus I have been looking for ways to impact the landscape or elements in it by the use of sounds by creating works such as Singing for Lead.

Learning from the experiences I have had making these exercises and performances, I have created a new method to work in the subsensorial realm with voice, resonance, matter, and living bodies. I have tested and compiled different exercises with the help of which I can bring in volunteers and have them tune in, to sense and sing subsensorial connections to the environment and to their own bodies.

Singing for Lead

In the Fall of 2021, I was artist-in-residence in the Maunula/Helsinki Central Park, through a program produced by the cultural organization m-cult. During the residency I was introduced to the former shooting range in Maunula (which shut down its operations in the 1960’s). The soil in the area of the shooting range, located in the Maunula part of Helsinki Central Park, is heavily poisoned by lead. This lead originates from the large amount of bullets shot and let lie in the ground for decades. In the year 2022, it was still forbidden to pick wild mushrooms and berries in the area, due to the high concentration of lead in the soil and thus, in the plants. During Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 I organized collective singing exercises and eventually performed Singing for Lead at the shooting range together with volunteers from the Women’s and Mixed Choirs[20] (OTK, Osuustukkukauppa). In Spring 2022, in addition to the theme of toxicity, Singing for Lead concentrated on the theme of war and aggression, here materialized as lead and bullets. Participating in the planning and facilitating of the exercises was sound artist Heidi Fast.

As the war continued to ravage in Ukraine, I continued with Singing for Lead in Vienna[21], this time with Viennese singers. We performed on the 25th of November in the park in the back of the Haus des Meeres. I taught similar exercises as in Finland to the singers in Vienna. As an introduction to the Viennese singers, I explained how in Finnish healing tradition, words and voicing have been used as an intentional force and that this practice is sometimes called the practice of making a “Manaus”. The following is the explanation of this tradition:

According to Finnish healer-traditions the place of Lead is in the depths of the Earth, where it cannot poison living organisms and wreak havoc on nerve cells. However, Lead has been dug up to the surface by us humans – to serve our industrial and economic, even belligerent, motives. Lead is a preferred metal in bullets, due to its density and stability in heat. In the act of shooting, a shooter inhales lead particles and eventually develops lead poisoning. A visible symptom of lead poisoning is aggression. War breeds war.

Manaus is the Finnish word assigned to the act of speaking or singing a spell that focuses the world’s forces. For instance, with a manaus, one can drive something down into the earth or up into the sky. With a manaus, one sets oneself in vibration with the world and becomes a sympathetic part of the forces of the world.

How to sing a manaus, to re-build, to reform, melt the metal?

We start with a few examples: wolves, cods, whales, cattle calls, and a deaf dog. These examples have in common the act of vibrating a particular relationship of dimensions of the world, such as ocean water, levels in the atmosphere, and insides of a living body. We train our sympathetic relations, becoming part of the magnificence of the world, vibrate together our systems of nerves and cells. This is the force of the manaus.

In order to sing for Lead, we begin with simple exercises that can guide you to experience these relationships and vibrate with these forces. We talk through how wolves and whales tune into these vibrations and how human-to-cow sympathy has been established and kept vibrating – throughout centuries. We explore how we can connect ourselves with each other’s singing bodies. We learn to give energy by singing to another human as well as to beings of other species, plants, and matter. A manaus gives energy: moves and transforms. There are no specific scores to begin with, but these exercises will bring forth the scores and possible words that you need and/or want to work with.

Looking back at my notes and documentation from these exercises and performances, I realize I have difficulties in analyzing these two projects. The difference to the other projects I have described in this essay, is that I have not personally performed, nor experienced these subsensorial events. Instead, I have made attempts at guiding others to experience these subsensorial events in their own bodies and then express them through singing. During the performances I functioned as some sort of a conductor. Or perhaps, rather a midwife helping in a process of deliverance of a collective experience of the subsensorial realm. The results that I have to observe and analyze are the sound recordings and my memories of the atmosphere among the singers during the exercises and performances. The atmosphere has in each instance been intense and mostly joyful. A sense of freedom has dominated the voicing bodies. The sound recordings give a sense of that liberated feeling. At times the many singers’ voices fall apart and do not fulfill any expectations of either harmony between them, nor of aesthetic sounds. The general sense of the singing is that of an embodied process. It is a process of working through the themes we had set forth for us to work through – that of war and toxins – by literally moving the toxins, grief, and aggression through one’s own body by the force of the vibrations of one’s own voice.

Transcripts from some of my notes in my diary will reveal some relevant details regarding these processes. Teaching workshops for singers, I aimed at making the singers feel, firstly, how one can direct one’s own voice to resonate in various parts of one’s own body. This resonating affects one’s nervous system, parasympathetic and sympathetic systems. Focusing one’s thoughts on specific emotions, such as love, grief, or aggression, or simply on a physical pain one is feeling at that very moment of singing or voicing, one can affect the experience of that emotion. This, I hoped, could be the first steps to connect with the subsensorial events in one’s own body. From this first step, my aim was to then have the singers experiment with how to affect another person’s feelings and body. Eventually, the step to affect the environment in a similar way would not seem an impossibility. With the many exercises I aimed at helping each singer to build and trust their own experience of connection to the subsensorial realm. This way the singers could learn to sing spells, in other words, use their own voice as a vibrating force.

Notes from my Singing for Lead diaries[22]

19.4.2022

Rehearsals

with the all-women choir, OTK.

Gradually, courage emerges. a little.

When we do the exercise where a partner puts their hand on a part of the other partner’s body to sense the vibration physically of their voice, I am told by one of the singers that she has a deaf dog. And she has a habit of going and lying down next to it. Holding the dog close, she then makes noises. The dog senses the vibrations and responds with similar noises. This is their, very gratifying, way of communicating connectivity.

Another singer makes this observation: “We are singers, and we have been taught to imagine our voice in front of ourselves (she gestures to show a level spot as if a tray on a high table approximately 60 cm from her mouth, her head slightly tilted upwards). But now we are supposed to go as if, towards the inside of ourselves, project our voice inwards.”

25.5.2022

Yesterday, we sang for lead. I had planned the session with Heidi Fast the day before. First, Heidi did the exercise to ground oneself with simply breathing. Then, hand on your abdomen, sensing your own breathing, and then, some place on your body where you have pain. (“Listen to your body, sense if there is any part where there is pain or tension”). Put your hand on that place and direct your thoughts and breathing into that place. And then, breathing out, let out a hissing sound – think that that sound goes through the pain.

Second exercise

Choose a bucket (metal), place it with the bottom towards your abdomen, and I will blow with a didge[23] into the bucket. The vibration becomes very clear, and it massages.

Final exercise: one person lies on the treatment bench and tells us what kind of sound environment she would like to be surrounded by.

(We others surround her, singing what we think she wishes to hear)

After this exercise, one of the singers said she starts to believe in this stuff!

These diary notes exemplify how I have worked with trying to make concrete and physically sensed the forces of voice and singing as vibration. We tend to think about and listen to singing as something immaterial, simply audible, but all sounds are vibration, that is, force and energy. Sound and singing voices vibrate both inside the singer’s body as well as in the air and other surrounding matter. This vibration has an effect on everything that encounters it. Vibration can touch you, traverse barriers, and even touch you inside your body. This is how singing can affect emotions, energy flows, and other subsensorial processes – more than words and melodies. To me, working with these physical and concrete manifestations of sound and voice (such as the didgeridoo blown at your tummy through a metal pot) as well as the associative aspects of songs (words and melody), voice and sound are ways to seek connection with the subsensorial realm and, I believe, stimulate and be stimulated by it.[24]

Making Connections

Something that combines these works presented above together, in addition to being expressions of what I call the subsensorial realm, is the idea of how humans can make connections to the world and how we are indeed in relation to one another, plants, animals, and other more-than-human entities. Through a connection to the subsensorial realm we can shift our perspectives and understand the multiple layerings of material realities. We can move from human perspective to more-than-human, or to a multispecies view.[25]

My art practice operates in the field between the entangled and disentangled[26] and I bring into view that which can be understood in the material world with the limited sensory capacities we humans have. Much of the micro messaging in the subsensorial realm is profoundly affected and functions with the energies ascribed to quantum physics. Indeed, all energy returns to quantum physics. Entanglements in the sense Barad uses the word describe the “wad of wefts” that cannot be truly observed and if it were, it would necessarily be disentangled, if not disappear altogether. In order to continue my discussion of my art practice, I have chosen in this essay to use the verb “weaving” to be associated with my writing and my art practice – a concept that pertains to contemporary indigenous research and is well described by Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her brilliant book Braiding Sweetgrass (2020). In addition, Donna Haraway and Ursula Le Guin are my guides. As an alternative to the anthropological views on human social formations oriented by competition and dominated by aggression associated with masculinity, Le Guin uses the form of the woven baskets carried by women of hunter gatherer societies[27]. In other words, Le Guin offers another view on social formations by looking at the activities associated with femininity, which include the foraging and preserving of foods – and of gathering, of not only resources, but also the members of the society and help weaving these relations together, to protect and support the society as a whole, including its more-than-human entities. Haraway, some decades later, presented a similar critique of gender bias in the culture of scientific research in the discipline of biology. In Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989) she analyzes social cohesion among primates and concludes that it should be viewed as an achievement created by the collaboration and emotional labor produced mainly by the female individuals in the tribe. This cohesion of sisterhood is, according to Haraway, what keeps the tribe thriving – not the aggressions associated with male behavior. Kimmerer, as a botanist, and Shawn Wilson, a scholar of indigenous research, reclaim and further develop the line of thinking in regards to weaving baskets and social relations. Relevant references to indigenous research are numerous, but here, I focus on Kimmerer and Wilson, since their work helped me gain insight into how my experiences in the subsensorial realm is connected to social relations and ideas of cosmology.[28] I understand the weaving of relations as a work of looking at and sensing how you, as a body with desires and intent, are located and active in this world. Further, this connection is woven together with all the relations by which your existence is upheld. This world includes material realities we can sense, but also those we cannot. Wilson’s idea of “ceremonies as research” is about analyzing how one is connected (what relations one has) to the world. Feeling connected includes building a relation also to the realities we cannot sense (literally, the “sub” in “subsensorial”). This is where spiritual practices come in: a cosmology is an attempt at describing that which we cannot sense, but yet, is there. It is in this sense, indeed, an ontology.

In an Indigenous ontology there may be multiple realities, as in the constructivist research paradigm. The difference is that, rather than the truth being something that is “out there” or external, reality is in the relationship that one has with the truth. Thus an object or thing is not as important as one’s relationships to it. This idea could be further expanded to say reality is relationships or sets of relationships. Thus there is no one definite reality, but rather different sets of relationships that make up an Indigenous ontology. Therefore reality is not an object but a process of relationships, and an Indigenous ontology is actually the equivalent of an Indigenous epistemology.

(Wilson 2008, 73)

Wilson speaks of ceremonies – a part of spiritual practices – as research into our relations. These relations are to the creatures living around us, the creatures that lived before us and will live after us. These relations also include organic and inorganic entities (see for instance Latour’s concept of actants[29], or Bennett’s material agencies described in Vibrant Matter[30]), and various forms of energies, such as electromagnetic resonances, radiations, electricity, chemical movements and reactions, crystallisations and other tensions of nanostructures. That is a lot of relations! Wilson and Kimmerer help me make sense of it all – including events in the subsensorial realm. Time and time again, in my art practice, I weave it all into shape and usually an artwork results. That is my kind of basket.

Conclusion: Afterwor(l)ds

Through my explorations of the subsensorial realm, I have built an understanding of what I believe are the possibilities of not only healing, but of re-weaving relationships to the world. This re-weaving is built on an awareness of our interdependence of the more-than-human world. In my art practice, working with the subsensorial realm, in the ways I have described in this essay, I have created an artistic method to stay tuned and acutely aware of this interdependence. Creating artworks with this method offers three stages of mediation. In the first stage, I mediate experiences of the subsensorial realm in the direct relationship to a “participant”[31] in a subsensorial session with the aim to stimulate healing.[32] Secondly, distributing artworks created in, or directly after subsensorial sessions, I mediate experiences from the subsensorial realm to a wider audience and thus increase awareness of our interdependence of more-than-human entities in this world. Thirdly, by widely distributing my artworks made with this method and by writing about my many variations of subsensorial sessions and my method, I participate in debates about how, and what is there is to be known, and indeed who has the right to know, or the authority to present their knowledge as valid.

Many artists now work with finding other possibilities of weaving, no, indeed untangling, their sensory investments out of the market. I have chosen to investigate another sensory possibility to reclaim the body from this logic of capitalism. I hope to untangle our bodies and senses with the help of a subsensorial realm. The subsensorial is also a realm of embodied knowledge, albeit on a cellular level, that so far has eluded measurability and therefore might not become an observable object for science and a tool for labeling and atomising evaluation.

Working with the subsensorial realm, as it is based on lived and sensed experiences and practices, brings about conditions for life to live in a variety of temporalities and spatial dimensions. Multiple knowledges and experiences can co-exist without structural violences of overarching economies, sciences and languages. But, in this world, the subsensorial weaves its way in and among societies and empires, politics and economy – in other words, human formations, that are often perceived as the only existing and meaningful worlds we know. It is my choice to reclaim and validate my embodied enchantment with the world,, as Federici has called for.

All in all, the subsensorial realm escapes definition by words and there is no determinate answer to the question what it is. As an artist, I can describe, visualize, make manifest parts of it, and sometimes its effects on beings. But I cannot give a full and complete rendering of it. The subsensorial realm is connected to an immense number of aspects of life on this planet (resonance, cells, chemicals, water, light, minerals, organs, thoughts and imagination.) The manifestations of the subsensorial realm vary constantly depending on the various constellations that these factors and elements conjure and can offer.

Notes

1 The use of the word “weft” here is my way of acknowledging my debt to Robin Wall Kimmerer, who presents the act of weaving to describe ways of having dialogues with various forms of knowledge such as Western science and Indigenous knowledge. It is my belief that in weaving dialogues in this way, one allows for the separate elements of this dialogue to maintain their relative identity whilst still forming together a new shape – like the woven basket per Ursula Le Guin. Weaving is a gentle way to connect and collaborate.

2 Mercury had accumulated inside my brain fatty tissue and joints over a prolonged period of perhaps 35 years. At an early age, I had been exposed to mercury first by planting forest on my family’s farm. The plants I handled as a child were doused in pesticide, a mercury derivative. Later, dentists put in several tooth fillings of amalgam in my teeth. Decades later, the mercury had accumulated in my body to such a degree that it was causing autoimmune reactions, dysfunctional digestion, and a weakened immune system. As mercury is also a nerve toxin, I was at this stage experiencing cognitive difficulties. It appears that after recuperating from the poisoning, my nervous system continues to have a heightened sensitivity to anything reminiscent of a nerve toxin. Thus, I have discovered that I suffer from indoor air, especially in houses infested with mold. Mold may produce nerve toxins similar to mercury and my nervous system now reacts to these toxins. The symptoms include pain, electric shocks, and cognitive difficulties accompanied by hallucinatory effects.

3 I am aware and committed to the notion that a binary relation between mind and body – as Descartes has it outlined – is the result of a historical and political particularity within which Descartes was embedded, and that this binary is not productive. Here, for lack of a better word, I use the word “mind” as an imaginary location and time within which processes take place once micro messages are entering consciousness. I am talking about a pre-consciousness of sorts. This is where both imagination, creativity, and materiality of one’s body come together and process, synesthet-ize, the totality of a body’s experience. In other words, mind and body are indeed inseparable, but in order to describe my experiences, I am naming here the locus of this synesthesia, “mind”.

4 Reiki is a healing system founded by Mikao Usui in Japan in the early part of the 1900’s. The proper term is Usui Shiki Ryoho, “the Usui System of Natural Healing.” For more information, see for instance: reikialliance.com/en/usui-shiki-ryoho.

5 Also worth mentioning is the research conducted by Bessel van der Kolk (2015), parapsychology, and the history and practice of many techniques that pertain to the body and mind, including somaesthetics and psychedelia.

6 Commissioned by Sao Paulo Biennale in 2016.

7 See above, my definition of how I use the word “mind” in this essay.

8 For more writings about these subsensorial sessions, please see: nivel.teak.fi/carpa5/pia-lindman-feeling-forms-of-knowledge.

9 In academic circles this alternative medicine has generated research projects and institutions in complementary medicine. For instance, University of Tromsø in Norway has a Department of Complementary Medicine that engages in clinical research into health benefits of, among other, shamanism (Kristoffersen) and a specific Sami technique of singing called the joik (Hämäläinen). In the US and UK there are institutions for Integrative Health, the research of which aims to be as robust as any science research institution. However, often health authorities, such as the state health care system in Finland (THL), still define all alternative care as “quackery”.

10 We had many conversations at the research residency in Saari Manor with the Slow Research Lab/SlowACES research group, Kone Foundation, Finland, 2019.

11 Haraway 2016 and McFall-Ngai 2011, in Margulis, Asikainen, Krumbein.

12 These traditions I have had the privilege of studying both in theory and practice are of Finnish ancestry, transferred through generation by oral tradition and practice. Sometimes it becomes relevant to point out, as I do now here, that I am myself of Finnish heritage and see myself as one inheritor of this tradition.

13 See above, my definition of how I use the word “mind” in this essay.

14 Here, it is time to expand the notion of “participant”. Subsensorial sessions almost always include more-than-human entities and sometimes for instance a body of water, a metal, a rock, or a cloud of microbes is the main entity, with which I create a session. I mark the word participant with quotation marks, when I intend the possible presence of such a more-than-human entity in a subsensorial session.

15 See Ibid, “weaving” per Kimmerer.

16 While I previously titled these sessions Kalevala treatments, I have now started to call them subsensorial sessions, partly because, despite the fact that I am educated and fully trained in their healing practice, I do not want to refer to the singular practice of physical treatments that are taught by Kansanlääkintäseura/ Society of Folk Medicine in Finland (who title their specific teaching as Kalevalainen jäsenkorjaus, English translation approximately: Kalevala Bone Setting). This would be too narrow a definition of what I do in my sessions, as I engage in sensing energies, listening to my own bodily reactions, sometimes doing other gestures than simply physiological bone setting movements according to the protocol I was taught by teachers at the Society of Folk Medicine in Finland.

17 Lindman 2021.

18 For more about my sessions with Hardeep, please see: ecoversities.org/reassembling-a-cosmopolitics-as-subsensorial and piuska.myportfolio.com/sessions-with-hardeep-august-2022.

19 An environment becomes landscape when it becomes socially signified by humans.

20 Singers in final performance: Hannele Aarniokoski, Heidi Fast, Pirjo Laaksonen, Maisa Paloneva, and Arja Virtanen-Haapasalmi.

21 This project was realized in collaboration with sound designer Tuukka Haapakorpi, voice artist Heidi Fast, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna Art Week, and WUK Choir. Singers: Gabi Eichberger, Sabine Hagn, Susanne Halbeisen, Michaela Hanke, Barbara Hießmanseder-Horvath, Hella Matthes, Sainkho Namtchylak, Doris Seyr, Deniz Soydan, Gabi Steinmetz, Friederike Thum, Claudia Valenoa, and Stephanie Wörter. For more information, please see: www.wuk.at/en/events/singing-for-lead-collective-performance.

22 Transcribed and occasionally translated from Finnish or Swedish.

23 I.e., a didgeridoo.

24 For more information on Singing for Lead in Maunula, please see: www.m-cult.org/productions/song-lead.

25 To further prove the case for the effect of the subsensorial realm on our lives, we have only recently discovered how truly, we are our microbes. See for instance: “Clay Office: Art Project and Case Study”, Lindman, Hannula, Elliott, 2014.

26 Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.

27 Le Guin, Ursula. 1896 (1997). “The Carrier Bag of Fiction.” In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women Places. Grove Press.

28 Wilson, Shawn. 2008. Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood Publishing.

29 Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press.

30 Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.

31 “Participant” in quotation marks signifies in this essay not only humans but also more-than-human entities.

32 As shown in the quoted notes earlier in this essay, Hardeep Mann used the verb “nudge”.

Bibliography

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Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.

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Dieppe, Paul L, Sara Warber and Emmylou Rahtz. 2018. “Integrating the art of healing with the science of curing.” Journal of Holistic Healthcare, issue 15.1 – Transformation innovation in healthcare. British Holistic Medical Association. https://bhma.org/integrating-the-art-of-healing-with-the-science-of-curing. Linked May 23 2023.

Fast, Heidi. 2022. Ihmisääni ja virittäytymisen taito: sanattoman äänellisen kohtaamisen merkitys psyykkistä apua tarvitsevien ihmisten kokemuksissa. Aalto Yliopiston julkaisusarja. Joensuu: Punamusta. aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/113435.

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Online sources all linked May 23 2023.

Lindman, Pia. 2023. Singing for Lead. “Chewing the Tundra” and “Vienna Art Week”. Singers: Gabi Eichberger, Sabine Hagn, Susanne Halbeisen, Michaela Hanke, Barbara Hießmanseder-Horvath, Hella Matthes, Sainkho Namtchylak, Doris Seyr, Deniz Soydan, Gabi Steinmetz, Friederike Thum, Claudia Valenoa, and Stephanie Wörter. Project description: https://www.wuk.at/en/events/singing-for-lead-collective-performance. Video: https://vimeo.com/775757025.

Lindman, Pia. 2022 and 2023. Artist pages, ed. Neal Cahoon. Barents Spektakel. https://barentsspektakel.no/en/contributors.

Lindman, Pia. 2021, 2022. Singing for Lead. Project description, video, and images. Singers in final performance: Hannele Aarniokoski, Heidi Fast, Pirjo Laaksonen, Maisa Paloneva, Arja Virtanen-Haapasalmi. Ed. Minna Tarkka, Tuukka Haapakorpi, and Kalle Kuisma. m-cult production. https://maunulassa.wordpress.com/portfolio/laulu-lyijylle-kuvat-ja-video.

Lindman, Pia. 2019. Sompio Lokka Recordings, video: https://vimeo.com/360090105.

Lindman, Pia. 2016. Karukinka End of the World, video: https://vimeo.com/187505587.

Lindman, Pia. 2016. Nose, Ears, Eyes. Incerteza Viva: 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial. http://www.32bienal.org.br/en/participants/o/2676

Lindman, Pia. 2016. Encounters on Rock Formations. Incerteza Viva, 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial. http://www.32bienal.org.br/en/collaboration/o/3149.

Lindman, Pia. 2016. MUDVIBES. Incerteza Viva, 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial. http://www.32bienal.org.br/en/event/o/3286.

Lindman, Pia. 2016. Tree Talk: Workshop with Giuliana Furci. Incerteza Viva, 32nd Sao Paulo Biennial. http://www.32bienal.org.br/en/event/o/2966.

Lindman, Pia, 2015. Search: a) Galgar b) NATO, video: https://vimeo.com/153038651.

Lindman, Pia. 2013. “Artist page.” Working Voices, Harm Lux, ed. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá. https://issuu.com/macbogota/docs/working_voices.

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Copyrights of Embedded Media

All artworks (paintings, drawings, digital paintings, photos, video, and audio) are produced by Pia Lindman, who is the sole copyright owner of the artworks. Photo credits, if photo not shot by Lindman, are stated separately, when applicable.