I am Associate Professor in both Folklore and Scandinavian Languages at the University of Helsinki and Associate Professor in History of Religions at Stockholm University. My time at HCAS was a marvellous period of intensive research amid rich and vibrant multidisciplinary conversations. The Collegium is an oasis in the current academic milieu where academic freedom is increasingly curtailed and closeted. The freedom to think it offers nurtured new ideas that led to breakthroughs in my research and enabled me to build strong foundations for future international collaborative projects, as well as what I expect to be enduring friendships.
My research at HCAS focused on materialities of oral and oral-derived texts – i.e. things that were spoken and heard and that in many cases are preserved because they got written down or recorded. I am working to liberate the concept of materiality from the tyranny of science-based epistemologies in order to examine materialities as they are encountered and perceived by people. Such materialities are most visible in non-modernized environments, where things made of language are not imagined through ideas of “texts” rooted in modernity’s consumer print culture. At issue is the role of human imagination in the sense-making of the ambiguous existence of things we call “texts”. Although it is easy to exoticize the otherness of non-modernized traditions, this is a general phenomenon – it is simply invisible to us within our own cultural logics.
The Collegium’s energized and stimulating environment fostered the pioneering extension of my research into the sphere of digital objects, where human imagination constructs our ephemeral encounters with emails, pdfs, webpages, and so on as representing enduring “things” in digital spaces, rather than as code that cannot exist independent of a material bearer somewhere in the physical world.
The considerable new insights and understandings that I developed and shared during my time at HCAS were fostered by the collaborative organization of an international multidisciplinary symposium
I work in logic, set theory, and the foundations of mathematics at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Helsinki (emer.). When I think back on my time at HCAS I remember my beautiful office, which gave me the solitude to get work done; but I also remember the new friends I made, some of whom I am still in touch with.
HCAS also gave me the opportunity to continue my curatorial practice, with the exhibition The Wor(l)d, featuring artists María Clara Cortés and Taina Riikonen, curated by myself and Merja Polvinen.
The exhibition accompanied a beautiful symposium in May 2015 called “Getting there and falling back,” which investigated linguistic grasp: the way language hooks onto the world – or fails to. As we wrote:
“With The Wor(l)d we think about the complex and difficult harmonisation of language and world, and how this harmonisation can rupture and fall into dissonance. We follow dissociativity, holding the slippage between sign and its likeness in view as these emerge and make themselves known to us – in the mist. Foucault’s prelapsarianism, namely the idea that the natural and lawlike correspondence of the written word and the world of things was the fundamental episteme of the 16th century – until, as Foucault has it, ‘Don Quixote wanders off on his own’ – sparks our setting out.
The image that functions as a conduit, that fundamental episteme, the idea of a ‘total system of correspondence’, makes possible the very investigation of the world. ‘The world shows up for us’ – the world is right there – and everything in it has a sign, is labeled.
With Foucault we look away from such lost harmonies. We want the chasm; the open sea that lies between word and world, and it’s filling by newly configured narrative and rationalistic modes of coping.”
The conference was extremely interesting, and I am still thinking about the ideas that emerged in the symposium. It was all such a beautiful gift – thank you HCAS!