Even Minn & Teo Ala-Ruona
Even Minn (they/them) and Teo Ala-Ruona (they/them, he/him) are a duo working with performance and trans-feminist speculative fiction.
Even Minn is a dramaturg and writer who is fascinated by the dancing body, the spiritual body, the animal body and our shared ancestry with other life forms. Their practice is informed by transfeminism and somatics.
Teo Ala-Ruona is a performance artist whose work focuses on queer speculative fiction (=SF) in forms of speech performances, texts, sound installations, video, community organizing and writing workshops. They are interested in artistic practices’ potential to generate new forms of collectivity, futurities and understanding of interdependencies as well as space for unheard, marginalized or non-normative, queer and trans narratives and experiences.
The current project of the duo is called Deep Time Transcestors which deals with queer origins of evolution. They view evolution as a process with no one direction or goal, centering gender-variance, symbiosis and pleasure as the core elements of evolution. In the project they dismantle the evolution stories based on competition and reproduction and denounce the cis-heteronormative views of evolutionary biology that re-enforce gender-binary.
Being trans is nothing new, it’s as old as time. We have always been here, we will always be here. In the beginning of time there was no egg and sperm, but electricity, slime and vibration. We celebrate the birth of the universe as a queer event.
The project will manifest in two forms. The first is a larp for trans, non-binary and gender nonconforming players in collaboration with Mad House Helsinki (TBA 2022). The second form is a performance that will premiere in November 2021 in Helsinki. In addition to their previous collaborations, the performances toxinosexofuturecummings and My Flesh is in Tension, and I eat it, Even and Teo have hosted a number of workshops together in which they invite participants to dream up possible worlds and try out speculative bodily forms by writing pleasurable body fiction.
More info:
evenminn.com
anateoalaruona.net
Photo
Photo in the slider by Nova Kaspia
Main picture by Nova Kaspia
Photos in the gallery from left to right by Nova Kaspia, Nova Kaspia, Saara Autere, Nova Kaspia
