The Parts, Chloë Bass, 2021. Brooklyn Public Library, New York. Image: Gregg Richards. — *The Parts*, Chloë Bass, 2021. Brooklyn Public Library, New York. Image: Gregg Richards.

In the fall of 2021, The Finnish Cultural Institute in New York is joining forces with art organizations in Helsinki and New York to organize special and intimate in-person gatherings as part of a program titled Exercises in Togetherness. The concept of our program addresses directly the situation most of us find ourselves in at this moment in time where gatherings with others have become faded nostalgic memories, and our skills in socializing and being with each other may need some polishing off. The program offers time and space for gentle exercises in relearning how to be together.

Together with Frame Contemporary Art Finland, FCINY hosts the event Exercises in Togetherness: Herding in Helsinki Central Park on Friday the 10th of September, as part of Frame’s Rehearsing Hospitalities program. The event takes place at Ruskeasuo stables area in Helsinki, with contributions from artists Chloë Bass, Mari Keski-Korsu and Eero Yli-Vakkuri.

The event takes its form as a sequence of artworks, exercises and encounters considering different forms of togetherness. Chloë Bass, Mari Keski-Korsu and Eero Yli-Vakkuri invite us into encounters with those around us through listening exercises, readings, performative presentations and guided actions. The event brings different artistic practices together to consider various dimensions of security, safety and care within interspecies relations. It is also a place to consider ways of being together and how to care for forms of social interaction and togetherness in times of pandemic.

Drawing on Eero Yli-Vakkuri’s ongoing research with horses, his outdoor session offers an insight into the daily work of the mounted police and the life of the horses which the police employ. The presentation includes a short introduction to the training methods which the mounted forces deploy to be capable of performing crowd control in public space.

Garden of Agency is a project by Mari Keski-Korsu that invites the participants to imagine the relationships between horses and plants. The horses learn about their environment and themselves together with their herd, just like humans could do. In this event Garden of Agency is an audio work which takes the participants into a sandy paddock where not too many plants thrive and challenges them to imagine a herding in a medicinal garden.

Chloë Bass is producing a limited edition personal item printed with text from her ongoing series THE PARTS for this event. THE PARTS consists of notes from the artist’s daily life and reflective personal texts, which reside at the intersection of aphorism, diary entry and prose poetry. Born on Instagram, the series is now being translated into various physical forms, including a current exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library. The project considers the many registers of personal and public experience, as they become living history.

The contributions from Chloë Bass and Mari Keski-Korsu have been commissioned by the FCINY and Frame.

Participation in this event is free of charge, but it requires registration. For full details on the event, how to attend, and to read more about Frame’s Rehearsing Hospitalities program, see here.

Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, publication, and installation. Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy: where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual, has recently concluded a study of pairs, and will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis. She is currently working on Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place (2018 – 2022), an investigation of intimacy at the scale of immediate families. She is based between Brooklyn and St. Louis.

Mari Keski-Korsu is a post-disciplinary artist who explores macro-level manifestations of the eco-side. Her practice is focused on inter-species communication and complexities of care to possibly enable empathy towards whole ecosystems. She is a doctoral candidate to study for a Doctor of Arts degree in the research field of Contemporary Art in Aalto University. Her research focuses on emphatic interspecies rituals in change.

Eero Yli-Vakkuri is a recovering survivalist. In the past he made annoying street interventions which made people uncomfortable. Presently he is advancing sustainable design through campaigns, workshops and artistic presentations. In 2018 Yli-Vakkuri resided as an artist-in-residency in New York with the ISCP and FCINY.