Up to Nature

Over the past three years, Finnish artist Antti Laitinen has devised performances with subtle humour that are deliberately doomed to fail. A trained photographer, he fastidiously documents this failure of his projects. One of his recurring themes is the relationship between humans and nature. For example, in Bare Necessities (2002) he went out into the Finnish nature and attempted to survive for four days without the assistance of any cultural artefact. In this project’s documentation he can be seen trying in vain to make a blanket from moss, or how he keeps rubbing two sticks together without even the slightest hint that they might soon catch fire. For the festival Up to Nature, Laitinen embarks on another similarly hopeless mission into nature. For Tree he will be felling a deciduous tree in the Vienna Woods and cutting it up into logs in order to ultimately reassemble it as true to the original as possible. As a copy of the original, Tree becomes a sculpture in public space. www.anttilaitinen.com

By and with Antti Laitinen

Up to Nature is a co-production of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival Kuopio, Black Box Teater Oslo, brut Wien, Inbetween Time Bristol, and Maska Ljubljana. In co-operation with the Wiener Festwochen. With the kind support of the European Commission.

Admission free