Kekäläinen & Company, Teatro Mosca and Leirena Teatro from Portugal, and Colectivo Glovo from Spain begin a long term collaboration project where Sanna Kekäläinen has been invited as artistic leader.
The first phase of the project will take place at Muscarium#11 festival organised by Teatro Mosca. Sanna Kekäläinen’s solo work Conversations with Ants will premiere on 10.9.2025 at Teatro Mosca’s AMAS-theatre in Sintra.
During the festival, the collaboration partners will hold a presentation concerning the future performances of the project on 13.9.2025. The collaboration will continue with performance series in Finland, Portugal, and Spain.
CONVERSATIONS WITH ANTS
Why the ants?
Ants are a kind of biological and global double for humans: only ants and humans have spread all over the globe except Antarctic.
Speculative estimations have been presented that the common weight of all ants would be roughly equal with the common weight of all humans.
But there is also a difference of crucial importance: if all humans were to disappear from the earth, it would take a long time for the biosphere to recover from the damage humans have caused. If ants were to disappear from the biosphere, in a very short span of time, the whole biosphere would become uninhabitable.
The work consists of two parts:
1. Encyclopaedia of movement
2. My dream is made of facts
Encyclopeadia of movement:
The starting point for working has been scientific knowledge about ants intertwined with our own images and memories of ants.
The working method has been to transform the concepts of poetry and private memory into physical concepts.
The work has also been furthered by some formal devices of art, such as the sestina developed in the 13th century poetry, in which the poetic movement (from line to line, from stanza to stanza) can be expressed in numbers continuing infinitely and in which this way suggests a comparison to the paths and movements of ants.
In conceptualization and physicalization, movement has been a crucial element alongside material elements, as well as factors creating meanings, such as a concentrated weight, steps, paths, locus, centripetal striving and decisions. The structure of the whole work consists of rules, but requires new local decisions all the time.
My dream is made of facts:
The aim for the text is to try to attain a “dialogue” with something that won’t hear us or respond to us, but which nonetheless is present and even necessary for our existence. Humans know next to nothing about ants, a common estimation is that about half of the ant species are still unfound, and of the taxonomized roughly 16 000 species of ants only some 50 are more or less researched.
However the little we know about ants tells us things that go beyond our imagination — from cattle farming and fungi cultivation to remarkable architecture and the organization of work to mention a few.
Thus, the dialogue, as necessary as it is impossible, will rather be a dialogue with our own memory, with our own assumptions, with our own future and with the basic conditions of our existence, but referring to them through the ants.
Concept, direction, space, performance: Sanna Kekäläinen
Text: Kari Hukkila
Sound: Anonymous recording in Africa processed for the work by Sanna Kekäläinen and Heli Keskikallio
Performances in K&C Space:
1.11.2025 at 19, premiere
8.11. at 18:30
9.11. at 16
12.11. at 19
14.11. at 19
18.11. at 19
21.11. at 19
28.11. at 19
30.11. at 16
5.12. at 19
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