GIFTS/PRESENTS/PRESENCE
Meanings and Materialities
Conference – Exhibition

Cable Factory (Valssaamo), Helsinki
6–15 June 2024

Conference 6–8 June 

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    Exhibition 6–15 June

    Open every day 12:00-18:00          Introduction
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    Sonja Lampinen, Olli Pyyhtinen & Niina Uusitalo



    Video (5 min 17 sec)
    Used television sets, booklet

    The installation consists of used tv sets which display two simultanoeusly
    running collage videos consisting of scenes from 'garbographic' fieldwork
    juxtaposed and merged with digital excess that was discovered online
    and appropriated for artistic use. The videos are accompanied by
    a poetic voiceover made up entirely of questions. The poem also 
    appears in print in a booklet with covers made out of waste materials.

    The artists would like to extend their thanks to Maija Sura (for reading
    the voiceover), Kaija Rantakari (for the waste covers of the booklet), Kalle Pyyhtinen (for layout), Random Doctors (for the tv sets and technical help), and Henrik Pathirane (for tips and advice).


    Biographies
    Sonja Lampinen
    Sonja Lampinen is a Bachelor of Sociology, currently working on her Master’s thesis on the Onkalo nuclear waste repository. She is particularly interested in the temporal complexities that different forms of waste create, as well as the processes of exclusion and inclusion and the systems of ordering and governing involved. Sonja holds a Diploma of Screen and Media from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and has a background in working in audio and video production. She has a keen interest in these mediums and combining them with doing research. She is inspired by wastelands, ruins, entanglements of humans and non-humans, borders and boundaries and everything that challenges them.

    Olli Pyyhtinen
    Olli Pyyhtinen is Professor of Sociology and the founder of Relational Studies Hub (RS Hub) at Tampere University, Finland. His research intersects social theory, philosophically inclined fieldwork, STS, economic sociology, and the study of art, and he is the author of for example More-than-Human Sociology (2015), The Gift and Its Paradoxes (2014), The Simmelian Legacy  (2018), and Simmel and ‘the Social’ (2010). Pyyhtinen is the PI of the GIFT project (Kone Foundation, 2021-2024) organising the conference, and currently he is also leading two projects on the leaky realities of waste and the circular economy, WasteMatters (ERC Consolidator Grant) and DECAY (Research Council of Finland).

    Niina Uusitalo
    Uusitalo is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University, Finland. Currently she is working at the intersection of visual studies and waste studies. Her theoretical interests lie in politics of aesthetics, eco-philosophy and more-than-human methodologies. In her work she explores theoretical concepts through photography and videography.