Wounds That Will Take Time To Heal
9/2020 New Performance Turku Festival, Turku, FI – Stockholm, SE – Příbor, CZ
Collaboration with Anitta Kynsilehto (Senior researcher at the Tampere University (FI) – New Social Research / Tampere Peace Research Institute), NPTF curatorial team, and voyagers Dasha Che and Elisa Pirinen
The performance was executed remotely from Příbor (CZ). After a lecture by Anitta Kynsilehto about the ethics and (im)possibilities of international traveling during times of limited mobility, two audience members were offered to undertake an almost 24h long cruise from Turku (FI) to Stockholm (SE). Importantly, the two travelers could not disembark in Sweden as due to the emergency restrictions against the pandemic they might not be allowed to re-enter the territory of Finland.
Annotation for the festival:
Traveling is no longer what it used to be.
COVID-19 pandemic continues to change the ways how we (can not) travel and thoughts we have about traveling. New apparatuses of control over bodies of people on the move were added to the ones that were already normalized – from temperature scanning to banning certain passport holders from entering or leaving certain territories.
But not only technical and administrative tools are influencing travelers’ mobilities. Before the pandemic, the “flygskam movement” (from Swedish: “flight shame”) was promoting the reduction of air travel for ecological reasons. During the recent pandemic months yet another issue arose: is it ethical to move around and by that to potentially become a carrier of the disease? The work “Wounds that will take time to heal” wished to contribute to this ongoing debate on the freedom of movement.