MSL/anti&jarri/ (Installation)
Salon de Normandy by The Community
Hotel Normandy, Paris, 2019
MSL/anti/jarri/ (Performance)
(Rehearsal 200% speed edit)
Titanik, 2019
MSL & Jaakko Pallasvuo:
Fruits of the Loom (HD Video), 2019
I used to work a real job, but that was a long time ago.
The year of the hungry men. Their place - the past, and a series of abandoned summer cottages. In a director's commentary, a communist and a capitalist recall their voyage into a wilderness of leisure time. A domestic cycle of breaking into houses, chasing the ghosts of parties past, and trying to conceive...but what?
Then, like a fragment of future birth, a pierced nose appears in the waters off a summerhouse pier. Time is ruptured, forcing our commentators into action. Even living in the spaces of borrowed family time, they are unable to outrun the seasons of their lives. Finally, the capitalist makes a familiar plea to heal the conflicts in their relationship; they must build something to bring their optimism and despair together synthetically. The waters ice over, ready to incubate. Something new is being born, or is at least arriving. From one perspective - an investment, from the other - Satanic.
Align yourself with a father or play the role of the baby. But remember - this isn't supposed to be therapy.
description by Marianne Forrest
♅
MSL & Jaakko Pallasvuo:
Bridge Over Troubled Water (HD Video), 2016
It's 1967, 2015, 2515, 10000 AD. Simon and Garfunkel are travelling through time. Seeking an answer to their growing sadness and anxiety, brought on in part by the slowly overwhelming presence of climate change, they head to the coast, are incarcerated, visit the botanical garden in Turku, and watch Jake Gyllenhaal in Deep Impact in a darkened room. Above the tree line and into the Arctic Circle our protagonists find themselves in Kilpisjärvi, at the most northwestern point of Finland where they are - perhaps more than usual - alone together.
Seeking an alternative pastoral narrative, the duo take pause in 1969. Here is the Simon and Garfunkel we know and love, playing guitar and watching the drift in matching cream rollnecks. They are together, free from the kibble of the present day (Dr Oetker, Club Mate, sadness). Is this a scene that we will one day return to again? If they travel forward far enough, will they find our current state of rabid fossil fuel consumption was just a moment in time and in fact 10000 AD is much the same as 10000 BC?
This post-human future is not apocalyptic, but something comforting: a love story about people, a romantic shipping of folk-rock's most powerful couple. Exhausted by constant travelling through time, the duo find moments of respite from their doomed quest to save the world from global warming but - as in their real-time mythology - cracks in the relationship begin to show.
Where Simon and Garfunkel recline together, two specks amid a vast tundra, checking their phones in a silent camaraderie, technology is omnipresent, yet peripheral, and while the duo's unfriendly drone Neil flies as instructed for the time being, we are warned that he is developing a will of his own. No longer content to fulfil the desires of humans, Neil is forming his own ideas about how to live in this world. Cruel maybe, but carefree, Neil cruises at altitudes beyond the physical and emotional baggage of humanity.
Are we all Neils, who look back nostalgically to our Garfunkel days, unable anymore to see what they meant?
description by Marianne Forres
♅
Hybrid Children (HD Video), 2016
Performance
Sorbus, Helsinki, 2014
Performance
Titanik, Turku, 2014 (Edit)