Our artist collective Koski are proud to have been selected by the Kone foundation as recipients of the Saari arts residency and grant. We spent two weeks of July at the beautiful Saari residence in western Finland.

Surrounded by sea, fields and forest, we set to work in the peaceful homestead buildings of the residence, choosing this barn (below) as our working space to develop a performance we presented to the public at the end of our stay.

The main purpose of our time at Saari was to develop our creative process. Koski projects have centered around reflections and interpretations of places and cultures we visit that are then presented to the people of the place. This involves absorbing and investigating as best we can, developing theatrical, musical and performance material, and crafting an intimate, surreal experience for audiences.

To date we have been resident artists and crafted performances in Italy, Thailand and now Finland.

In this performance we utilised the newer imposing structural reinforcements of the old building to superimpose upper, middle and lower realms, touching on aspects of the living world, our plight within it and outside of it, and the absurdity of the constructed life around us. As with our previous performance pieces we journeyed through dark and dreamy primal aspects of humanity and being, contrasting them with the brightly lit contrived situations we seem to find ourselves in when we wake up.

Please see our main Koski site and look at earlier videos to get a better idea of our performances. There are a few of Jake’s great photos from our time at Saari below.

And lastly, while making field recordings in the forest to use in our performance – I happened to catch this amazing orgy of crows: