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FIELDS OF MAY

Image of people discussing during a witness seminar, sitting on wooden installation outside on the island of Seili.
Witness seminar, 2022. Curated by Contemporary Art Archipelago (CAA). Photographs by Taru Elfving and Ilppo Vuorinen. Montage by FRAUD.
Image of a tree stump overlayed with two charts.
Remainder of one of the trees used for the Sigyn’s new masts pictured during the search for the 3 stumps through Fiskars forest, 2019. Photograph by Taru Elfving. Overlayed by graphic showing the disappearance of natural forests in Finland between 1000 and 2010. Keto-Tokoi & Kuuluvainen (2014), and a map of shipbuilding sites and input supply zones c1590.
Image of peopel discussing around a large mast on the ground in a shipyard with an image of the original ship from which the mast came from.
Scouting for wood for the Midsummermast installation, shipwrights and carpenters discussing wood provenance in the Turku shipyard, 2019, photograph by FRAUD. Black and white image show the salvaged masts' location on the original ship, the Sigyn.
Archival image of a maypole in Fiskars c1940 with an overlay of various maypole models from the area.
Maypole in Fiskars. Holmström L (1940) Min-nen och hågkomster. Ekenäs: Ekenäs Tryckeri Ab. Overlay with various maypole models by region in both Sweden and Finland. Fossenius M (1951)
Drone view of the Fields of May installation, blackened wood arranged to accomodate seating and a flag atop.
Fields of May, 2022, collage of drone photography and video. Drone operator: fisheries research, Finnish Environmental Agency.
Woman sitting on the wooden structure.
Katriina Siivonen discussing ‘heritage futures’ as rituals for ecological survival in which art is instrumental. Katriina is sitting on Midsummer Mast, an installation by FRAUD hoisted in Turku, 2021. Commissioned by Contemporary Art Archipelago (CAA). Photograph by Jussi Virkkumaa.
Image of people around a wooden table making deadeyes together.
Making the deadeye together (part of sailing ship rigging). These were used in the making of the Midsummer Mast piece (2020).
Women around a mast, making the pine wreath-like decoration for the structure.
The "woman's work", making the garlands to decorate the Midsummer Mast with offcuts from recently cleared pine forests.
Wooden structure with repurposed ship masts, hoisted and decorated like a maypole and decorated.
Midsummer Mast, 2020, FRAUD. Part of the Meadows exhbition curated by Taru Elfving in Fiskars.
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Fields of May is a commision that is permanently installed in Seili in the Finnish Archipelago as part the Archipelago Research Institute (Turku University). It will act as a location and conduit of Witness Seminars on the subject of the blue economy, the ecology of law, and the climate crisis. It is an architecture of engagement that coalesces a diverse ecology of practices and historical-material specificities with the aim of cultivating the conditions of possibility that might conjure worlds attuned to non-extractive rhythms.

The installation consists of salvaged discarded masts, spars and other maritime wares donated from the museum-ship Sigyn (Turku, FI), a wooden barque built in 1887 that crossed the Atlantic and Indian oceans - as well as the North and Baltic seas - for trade. As Seili is situated next to the old Baltic maritime timber trade route, where passenger ferries pass today, Sigyn routinely sailed past this island. In 2018, the ship needed new masts. Unlike last two centuries, when Finland provided most European Empires with the timber and tar to build their fleets, when scouting for mast timber in 2018, only a handful of trees were found to be of suitable size. The masts which compose the seating area bear witness to the commodification of trees, the transatlantic timber trade as much as to the changing nature of Finnish forests, now largely servicing pulp production or the blue bio-economy at large.

Transcript of the 2022 Witnessing Seminar link here.

Fields of May is commissioned by Contemporary Art Archipelago as part of Spectres in Change, and it is funded by Canada Art Council, Acción Cultural Española, and Kone Foundation.