CONVERSATIONS WITH ANTS EVENING
Kekäläinen & Company, Teatro Mosca and Leirena Teatro from Portugal, and Colectivo Glovo from Spain are embarking on a long-term collaborative project, with Sanna Kekäläinen invited to serve as artistic director.
The first phase of the project will take place in September at the Muscarium#11 festival organized by the main partner, Teatro Mosca. Sanna Kekäläinen’s solo work Conversations with Ants will premiere on September 10 at Teatro Mosca’s AMAS theater in Sintra.
The collaboration will continue in November 2025 with performances in Finland and in 2026 with a series of different performance versions in Portugal, Spain, and Finland. The Finnish version will premiere on November 1, 2025, at K&C’s Space. Performances will continue until December 5.
Sanna Kekäläinen is responsible for the overall dramaturgy and direction of the works. She does not see the project as the construction and presentation of a single, unique work, but rather as a series of works that transform and take on a life of their own.
The theme of ants runs through the entire project. Kekäläinen is working with author Kari Hukkila with the aim of linking the principles of ants’ activity to the theme of the Anthropocene.
Ants are a kind of biological and global double for humans: only ants and humans have spread across the entire globe, except the northern and southern polar regions.
However, there is one significant difference between ants and humans: if humans disappeared from the Earth, it would take a long time for the biosphere to recover from the damage caused by humans. If ants disappeared from the biosphere, it would quickly become uninhabitable.
The project’s performance events will change according to the new space and location. The concept of the work centers on the idea of visiting. Local performers will visit the work and immediately continue the performance event with their own presentations. The guest performer in Helsinki is K&C’s artist-in-residence Heli Keskikallio with her solo work Ordinary matters.
Heli Keskikallio is working at the K&C residency on the performance Ordinary Matters, which draws from the embodiment of everyday materials. The performance will be developed over a long process, with a series of versions that will be presented in various places and situations during 2025 and 2026. Keskikallio is approaching the everyday world as a sort of sensuous and imaginative opening, observing the complex and often invisible relationships we have with the materials in our immediate environment. With Keskikallio as performers there is a collection of everyday things, brought from home, to which she has a personal relationship. Ordinary Matters brings forth the poetics of the everyday and the sense of familiarity and strangeness inherent in everyday experience. The performance intends to explore how we are formed in continuous interactions with the things and materials around us.
Concept, direction, space, and performance: Sanna Kekäläinen
Text: Kari Hukkila
Lighting design: Lauri Sirén
Sound: Anonymous recording from Africa, edited by Sanna Kekäläinen and Heli Keskikallio
Guest: Heli Keskikallio
