pportal.fi - Article: machine. becoming. body. becoming. labor. becoming. number. becoming. ghost

In May 2021, our performance duo Mean Time Between Failures (Suvi Tuominen and Dash Che) spent three weeks at Old Mine Residency, an art residency in Outokumpu, Finland, about 100 km from the border with Russia. The residency uses the facilities of a former copper mine factory to offer living and work spaces to local and international artists of various disciplines.

Though the factory hasn’t been active since 1989, the history and identity of the city and many of its residents are intertwined with the narrative of the labor industry.

For some time before the residency, we had been interested in doing artistic research into industrial labor and its ghosts. We wanted to somatically research how this type of labor leaves imprints on the bodies that are not affected by the work directly.

While both of us have held various working-class jobs throughout our lives as cleaners, vendors, and servers, we have been in a more privileged position than our ancestors. For example, Dash’s mother’s family comes from Magnitogorsk, a Russian city in the Ural mountains built around a large metallurgical plant in the 1930s. Most of Dash’s family worked at the factory and sustained injuries from the harsh working conditions. They had circles of friends among their coworkers and received factory benefits when they were sick.

While Suvi did not have a family history of factory work, she did live in Outokumpu and explored the factory site for two years. The Townhouses, a vocational dance school where Suvi studied, interacted with the mine premises through dance practices and performances.

As dance artists, we worked not only with narrative and concepts but with the body. We explored the site physically, staying with the site as well as dancing through the experiences that we personally did not have but sought to embody. The process of exploring the emerging story led us to create a common past for these two places, Magnitogorsk and Outokumpu, that pointed toward some unknown future in 2040.

We conducted interviews with several residents of Outokumpu in which we asked them about their memories of the functioning mine and its current presence in their lives. We simultaneously did research on the economic impact of the mine on the development of each city.

We brought this factual, economic, social, and somatic research to both Kino Marita, the Outokumpu theater, that is, on stage and to the streets. For the latter, we organized a little intervention along the main street during which we held a poster featuring symbols of both

Magnitogorsk and Outokumpu. During the intervention, we engaged with the passers-by, telling them our fictional narrative about the historical connection between the Outokumpu and Magnitogorsk workers.

The story went that Dash’s grandfather Alexander, who worked at the metallurgical factory, suffered a serious injury (that was true) and upon recovery decided to create a secret interspecies union of workers and factory machines. This union practiced a more gentle approach to listening to their human bodies and to the bodies of machines. The story continued that at some point the workers of Magnitogorsk wrote a letter to the workers of Outokumpu, learning that similar practices of caring toward bodies was taking place at the Outokumpu mine. At the end of the story, we said that we were in town to study the archives of correspondence between the two groups. The fictional narrative created a curious collective investment into the past – our listeners nodded, tried to recall if they heard this story before and validated our story by affirming with their gestures. We asked each person

to draw a pathway between Outokumpu and Magnitogorsk as they imagined it, in order to further affirm the connection of those two places. Then we collected and documented the maps.