Composing in Lapland, where the landscape becomes a verb
In July 2024, Johanna Ruotsalainen went to Sápmi* for an art residency. With the support of Projekt Atol and the Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant, she travelled through Finland, Sweden and Norway, encountering the landscape and its musicality.
Text and photos by Johanna Ruotsalainen
*Sápmi is the cultural region traditionally inhabited by the Sámi people, stretching across the national borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. This area has also been referred to in English as Lapland.
Johanna Ruotsalainen (she/her) is a Finnish composer and visual artist, currently working as a dissertation researcher in University of Lapland. In recent years, Ruotsalainen has collaborated with some of the most acclaimed international contemporary performers, ensembles and festivals, such as Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse (FR), Ligeti Quartet (UK), Mise-en Ensemble (NY) and Gewandhaus Orchestra (GE), and she is the holder of the prestigious Hanns Eisler composition Scholar of 2020. Coming from the Arctic area, Ruotsalainen is working to increase the inclusion of marginal voices to the globalized, Western-centered and historically colonialized definition of high-arts: Culture is used to perpetuate differences by giving visibility and experience of belonging only to certain stories. Criteria for artistic quality are not traditionally verbalized in detail but are hidden behind peer and expert evaluations. The artistic quality presented and perceived as universal can obscure the mechanisms that maintain inequality, which produces exclusion based on for example place of origin.
In July 2024 I travelled from Northern Finland to Northern Sweden and Northern Norway with my family of four by driving our camper van, biking and walking. I wanted to write a series of musical compositions in meaningful and relevant locations, thus letting my surroundings leak into my composition work as perceptions, experiences, influences and interactions. Some of the sites were already familiar to me, others I discovered after wandering around aimlessly in Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian Sápmi.
Through travelling I pursue to experience place as a geographical, social, subjective and spatial entity. Bodily place-making is both method and content in my art practice. The idea of composing on site is based on a traditional Arctic concept of landscape, where place is understood as an interaction. Curator, writer and researcher Jan-Erik Lundström has described Arctic local’s unique relationship with land aptly: “Landscape is not a noun, an object or a thing, but always a verb, an activity, an event.” Art practices featuring walking and walk-related methods have been widely used in contemporary art mediums, for example in environmental art, performance art, sculpture, conceptual art, and land art; My immersion into Arctic landscape as artistic practice is about understanding the character of place through the movement of the body – about collecting and transforming spatial knowledge into artistic interpretation of a place. I describe this method of researching place as ‘spatial place-making’: The conception of the world is embedded in the lived body, as spatiality helps understanding landscape in relation to time, place, space and movement. Spatial place-making has an association also to composing, as music is an art medium happening in space and in time, as a movement of musical material.
The spatial interaction between composer and space when walking and composing in Sápmi in July produced a series of musical interactions, that are place-specific: The compositions as sovereign artworks, detached from this interaction, are for me irrelevant and without a context. The nature of the work changes significantly if compositions are brought into the performance conventions of institutional art, such as the concert setting. The project I implemented as part of the Rewilding Cultures -program is the first phase of a long-term research, where the goal is to develop a navigation map application, via which user can experience site-specific works when physically being on site. I work towards widening the definition of art to include different performance and exhibition practices alongside with those traditionally recognized as acceptable platforms for artistic expression and sharing. Next phase in project is planned to happen in Spring 2026, when I’m planning to travel again driving, walking and skiing to compose on site in Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian Sápmi in winter conditions; How does the perceptions and interactions with those same sites change, when my immersion in the landscape happens during the polar night?
Johanna Ruotsalainen is the recipient of a mobility grant awarded as part of the Rewilding Cultures cooperation project co-financed by the European Union’s Creative Europe program.