Conversations with Ants – The Body as a Source of Knowledge
In Sanna Kekäläinen‘s work Conversations with Ants, movement is thinking – embodied philosophy.
The work is not created by depicting ants or humans, but through continuous research in which thought, memory, and the body are intertwined. Choreography here is not performance, but transformation: the body does not repeat a thought, but becomes thought itself. Kekäläinen explores how ideas, memories, and experiences can be transformed into movement — how something verbal, abstract, or unconscious can take on a physical form.
The starting point for Conversations with Ants stems from Kekäläinen’s long-standing interest in the interfaces between species, language, and thought. The character of the ant—tireless, communal, precise—functions in the work as a distant echo, not as a subject but as a working principle. Like an ant colony, Kekäläinen’s process is built on attention, repetition, and distributed intelligence.
Writing as movement – movement as writing
In Kekäläinen’s work, writing and choreography are also intertwined. Both in collaboration with author Kari Hukkila and through her own texts. However, text is not a conceptual tool, but an extension of movement itself – a kind of physical poetry. The text becomes rhythm, the sestina of invisible gestures. The workspace is a three-dimensional page on which thoughts are written through the body.
Kekäläinen approaches concepts by asking how they could be physicalized: finding the physical or spatial logic of information. Through associative work, verbal ideas expand into physical spaces – weight, direction, tension, and rhythm – just like in ant colonies.
Memory, body, and formlessness – Encyclopedia of Movement
Memory is central to the work Conversations with Ants – not so much chronological memory of events, but rather bodily memory: an archive of senses and gestures that carries layers of the past. Childhood movements, forgotten postures, and instinctive reactions return as choreographic material and compositional solutions. They are not reconstructed, but reactivated—the body is allowed to make them real.
This way of thinking continues a line that began in 2001 with the work Iho – Skinless, in which Kekäläinen sought a physical concept for the relationship between humans and animals. Since then, the focus has expanded from animals to insects, from the individual to the collective – towards a necessary and shared state of being – a utopia. The insect-human form that emerges in the ant discussions is not symbolic, but physiological. It springs from the logic of the body, not from classifications of reason.
Through repetition and quiet perseverance, the body becomes its own repository of knowledge. Each gesture restores something that cannot be fully expressed, but which is real precisely through movement. Kekäläinen’s work can be seen as a kind of encyclopedia of movement: a continuous exploration in which thought, body, and memory intersect. The process transforms language into fabric, ideas into rhythm, and consciousness into choreography.
Conversations with Ants is therefore not only about ants or humans, but also about attention – how to think with the body, listen with the feet, and understand through repetition and connection. The workspace is a biosphere of collective intelligence, where meaning is constantly created and decomposed.
Text: Katri Koivuneva
Sanna Kekäläinen’s work Conversations with Ants premiers 1.11.2025 at K&C Space. Buy your tickets.