
Featured image from: Helka Heinonen: The Swirl (2022)
Discover AV-arkki’s latest acquisitions for our online archive below. For professional preview, please register to see the full-length versions.
Documentary form and essay films
Liinu Grönlund: Scope (2021, 10:40)

This video is a spontaneous recording on a rainy day; “I try to get closer to my thoughts and my way of working. What is left when so much is reduced? Patagonia comest to my mind through various details and memories.”
Helka Heinonen: The Swirl (2022, 22:59)

If nothing happens, why is it better not to tell about it? The Swirl examines boundaries on the turning point of growing up. At the end of the school year, a 12-year-old girl gets an exceptional gift from her teacher, a trip up north. They travel together. As an adult, she re-examines her experience. The work studies sensitively the complex experience and telling it as a story.
Kaisu Koski: DermaBread Participatory Performance (2021, 45:00)

This participatory performance offers surgical and anatomical training through the experience of tasting. The participants will engage with sensory skills acquisition, simulation, and the relationship between (non)human animal bodies and food through the experimental simulator DermaBread. DermaBread simulates the anatomy of the skin and various kinds of skin conditions. The 45-minute performance is led by Kaisu Koski and Noémie Soula, the developers of DermaBread and members of the Citizen Surgery Collective.
Kaisu Koski: DermaBread (2022, 01:34)

This short film introduces an edible surgical training simulator DermaBread. With DermaBread, one can learn about the anatomy of the skin, train their perception of depth, and practice diagnostics by taste. This particular demonstration highlights the difference between superficial and deep injury. DermaBread is part of the Citizen Surgery Academy training materials.
Kaisu Koski: Citizen Surgery Research Kitchen: Baking DermaBread (2021, 09:35)

In this video we enter the Citizen Surgery Research Kitchen. The team is developing a new recipe for a surgical simulator DermaBread in front of a Zoom audience. The session exposes the negotiations, materialities and temporalities involved in co-creation of edible vegan surgery simulators. The team tests various ingredients and techniques in baking DermaBread. The jury of STS Making and Doing Awards 2021 considered that “Juxtaposing the skills of cooking/baking with surgery is a feminist demonstration of making and doing with pedagogic significance.”Surgery Academy training materials.
Mia Mäkelä: Anthropobee (2022, 17:00)

Anthropobee is an experimental video essay about the unique interspecies relationship between humans and the honey bee (apis mellifera). The artist spent three years as a beekeeper, documenting her experiences in a series of humorous, poetic, and contemplative dialogues which leave space for not-knowing and ecocentricity, differing from traditional nature documentaries. Various scenes common in European apiculture today reveal the degree of anthropocentricity and control we impose on the life of the honey bee, subjugating the bees into a condition of exploitable natural resource.
Timo Wright: Everyday VRealities (2022, 12:23)

Everyday Vrealities is an “open world” -type free movement virtual reality documentary about different kinds of homes, families and lifestyles. You can walk freely through the 3D-scanned homes and see the on-location volumetrically captured everyday moments.
Performance-based videos
Sari Nordman: Assembling (2021, 01:57)

“Essembling” is an environmentally-themed video featuring two performers dressed in red overalls. Their bodies are shifting slowly and awkwardly as they attempt to find comfort in an urban landscape that has been filled with cute-colored trash.
Anna-Sofia Nylund: O. (2022, 11:58)

The short film O. explores the feeling of religious extasis. Can the same emotion be received through art-making? A group of people is trying to get rid of their egos and reach a specific state of mind called O.
AV-arkki has promoted and distributed Finnish media art since 1989. AV-arkki’s promotional efforts have made the artists’ participation in this event possible.