The Maiden of Finland

Pekka Kantonen belongs to the pioneer generation of Finnish performance, video, environmental, and socially engaged art. In the 1980s, he worked in the land art group Turppi and performance art group Auki. Since the beginning of the 1990s, he has filmed a video diary with his extended family and, together with Lea Kantonen, has carried out community-initiated research projects using different media especially on the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico and in Sápmi. His artistic doctoral thesis, Generational Filming (2017), deals with the participatory video-making method developed by the artist couple. The method creates a shared space of watching which deepens and contradicts the viewing experience. The YouTube project 3 x Decade, which is planned to be continued until 2030, is a video diary covering three decades. The works of Pekka and Lea Kantonen have been presented both locally in community centers and internationally in video festivals and art museums. In 2011, they received the AVEK Media Art Award.

Lea Kantonen is emerita professor of artistic research at the University of the Arts Helsinki and PI of the research project Taking Back the Museum – Opening the Space of Community Museums to Recover the Art of Indigenous People. She belongs to the pioneer generation of Finnish performance, video, environmental, and socially engaged art. In the 1980s, she worked in the land art group Turppi and the performance art group Auki. Her video performance, Offering Dance (1984), presented as a part of her final work at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, was the first performance at this Academy. Her doctoral thesis Teltta – Kohtaamisia nuorten taidetyöpajoissa (The Tent – Encounters in Art Workshops with Young People, 2005), was the first Finnish-language doctoral thesis in the field of socially engaged art. Since 1999, she and her partner Pekka Kantonen have collaborated with the Tatuutsi Maxakwaxi education center on the Sierra Madre Occidental and, since 2014, with the video collective Sembrando at the University of Nayarit, Mexico, co-creating community-initiated performances and video installations. She is engaged with decolonial methodology and intrigued with multilingual dramaturgy and interpretation as a challenge in performance art. The works of Lea and Pekka Kantonen have been presented both locally in community centers and internationally in video festivals and art museums. In 2011, they received the AVEK Media Art Award.