Ants and the Dance of Listening
Behind Sanna Kekäläinen’s new work Conversations with Ants Evening lies a strong collaboration with writer Kari Hukkila; like the tireless cooperation of ants, the same methodology is reflected in the working practices shared by Kekäläinen and Hukkila.
Of all the species on Earth, only ants and humans have spread across nearly the entire planet. Their estimated total biomass is roughly the same — as if they were mirror images of one another. Yet their impact on the biosphere could not be more different. If humans disappeared, the Earth would need centuries to recover from the damage we have caused. If ants vanished, the biosphere would soon become uninhabitable. This comparison overturns the familiar hierarchy: it is the ants, not the humans, who sustain the balance of life.
Writer, essayist Kari Hukkila has spent over fifteen years exploring ants not only as biological entities but as aesthetic and philosophical figures. His work moves between art and ecology, seeking to understand what collectivity and communication might mean beyond human systems of control. Hukkila’s key question is deceptively simple: how can an ant colony function with such complex organization — without leaders, plans, or central coordination?
This phenomenon has been described in recent decades as emergence, swarm intelligence, or self-organization. It invites us to imagine community as movement — as an ongoing network of encounters rather than a hierarchy of commands. As Hukkila notes, ants “listen with their feet.” Their communication is a choreography of rhythm, touch, and pheromones — a system that both records and invents pathways. Meaning arises through repetition and contact, not through control. The colony becomes a living organism of shared sense-making, a form of embodied language – Just like in dance.
Ants, Humans, and the Poetics of Connection
In Hukkila’s thinking, ants are not merely the subject of observation but formal models of poetics and thinking Their movement patterns resonate with the sestina, a 13th-century poetic form refined by Arnaut Daniel. In a sestina, six words rotate across six stanzas in a spiral of repetition and transformation. Like the ant colony’s communication loops, the sestina generates continuity without closure — a living rhythm sustained by motion itself.
This parallel reveals not only an aesthetic insight but also an ethical one. If ants embody the intelligence of the biosphere, their self-organizing labour stands in stark contrast to human self-importance. Throughout history, humans have projected their social fantasies onto ants: monarchs saw them as models of obedience, revolutionaries as images of republican virtue, and today’s societies liken them to robots and algorithms. Ants have thus become mirrors for our own political and cultural imaginations.
Perhaps the most radical gesture in Hukkila’s thought is the suggestion that we should begin a dialogue with ants. This is not a metaphor for control or imitation, but an exercise in listening — an attunement to nonhuman forms of communication. To converse with ants means to shift from human-centered thinking toward shared intelligence and collective rhythm. It challenges how we understand creation, authorship, and agency: what if agency is not mastery, but movement among many bodies?
In this sense, studying ants becomes a choreography of thought. Their trails resemble syntax; their colonies, collective authorship. Both art and life, Hukkila reminds us, emerge from encounters — from the fragile intersections of beings in motion.
Text: Katri Koivuneva
Sanna Kekäläinen’s work Conversations with Ants premiers 1.11.2025 at K&C Space. Buy your tickets.