Looking back, moving forward: a conversation with Anni Puuperä

In an ideal world, these conversations with CROWD’s participating artists might not be happening now at all: they would be taking place late in 2024, when the learnings have had a chance to bed in, the ripple effects of the residencies to move through each artist’s practice. That said, there is still much value in inviting their reflections, and beginning to get a sense of what has shifted for them as a result of their research time. In this conversation, Anni Puuperä tells me (Maddy Costa) how her thinking evolved in relation to place, materials and thoughts around care.

Maddy: It can be daunting to have four intensive residency weeks with a person you’ve never met before. How did you find working with Natalia Barua, your CROWD partner?

Anni: It was a really good experience: we have quite a similar mindset for open questions and listening, which made cooperating and collaborating quite easy. And it was inspiring to have somebody to share questions and ideas with. Especially when working with community art, I think it’s important to have at least a partner for this.

Maddy: Care was mentioned by you and Natalia right at the beginning of your first residency, and has been a major topic across CROWD this year as well. How has your residency time supported your explorations?

Anni: I’ve been trying to think about care with my long-term collaborators for many years, and the CROWD residency was a chance to have more time to research it. For me, care work isn’t different from the artwork: they’re combined. How are people taking care of each other, the environment and themselves, is an important question for me. It is also an approach in my artistic practice. In CROWD care felt quite concrete because we had a facilitator – working as a freelance artist, alone, or even in a bigger working group, we don’t usually have money for that. It felt nice, but now the process is over, I wonder: is this possible to have a facilitator in freelance artistic work? 

Maddy: It’s so important to remember how funding/money makes time which makes more possibility. Artists are increasingly being asked to do more with less, so how do you not feel defeated by that? What do you know you can do even if funding is restricted?

Anni: One thing would be to take some time before an artistic process to figure out with the people you are working with what their working methods are, how we can take care in this process, and what kind of aftercare is needed. It’s not only about funding: the people you’re working with might be busy doing other work, having two rehearsals in one day. This is why I think having facilitators in the work might be something important to put in grant applications. Our facilitators [Julian Owusu in Varjakka, and Luke Pell in Glasgow] brought more information, more thoughts, more care, and when the two of us couldn’t make a decision about what we were doing, we could have a conversation with the facilitator. They were both really good at giving space to us and supporting us.

Maddy: We’re having this conversation a week after your residency with The Work Room ended; you also had a four-week gap between leaving Varjakka and arriving in Scotland. What particularly stayed with you in those between times, and since your residencies ended?

Anni: After Varjakka I found myself being not so interested in people but rather the place and the non-human parts of the community. I was thinking a lot about site-specific work and how it is important for community dance, as well as working with materials, sticks and stones and other things we collected, which we did a lot there. I’ve used nonhuman materials quite a lot but not as a central part of community practice. So that has felt like a new direction, which we were able to bring into the Glasgow residency too. Again it’s about care: how you approach the world by taking care of the environment and materials is something I want to give space to. Sharing the space with human and non-human respectfully.