JENNA SUTELA | PROTOPLASMIC FLOW

A performance contained in a box, to be taken home and activated whenever and wherever you want. An objet d'art for you to enjoy an unusual performance experience in touch with your own time and your own space.

Protoplasmic flow is a performance created by Jenna Sutela and delivered to the audience in a box.

One of the artist's regular collaborators, the Physarum polycephalum, is considered a natural computer. This yellow, polycephalous micro-organism of ancient origin processes data without having a nervous system, operating through communities of nuclei that possess advanced spatial intelligence. The project, which Jenna Sutela has devised for and with Samara Editions, offers the audience a chance to enter into contact with this surprising organism.

After purchasing their ticket to Protoplasmic flow, spectators receive a box containing everything required to activate the performance in whatever space they wish.

Protoplasmic flow is the second commission from “Samara Editions - Performances by post”. Samara Editions (www.samaraeditions.com,Telegram @samaraeditions) invites artists to imagine ways in which their practice can be transformed into an object capable of triggering a performative experience.

Jenna Sutela is a Finnish artist who works with words, sounds and other living media such as bacteria and mould, using mechanisms of interspecies communication and symbiosis. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and to react to moments of social and material precariousness, often in relation to technology.

Her work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Serpentine Galleries in London and the Sydney Biennial. She is a visiting artist at The MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Art and Science for the three-year period 2019-21.

At re-creatures a special project produced for the occasion triggers an intimate dialogue with this performative device, questioning whoever wishes to take part as to the very nature of the "spectator"

 

By Jenna Sutela

Physarum polycephalum grown by Ian Hands-Portman

Graphic design Johannes Schnatmann e Pomo

Font Helsinki Type Studio

Thanks to Vanda Skácalová e Leah Whitman-Salkin

Published  by Samara Editions, Milano, 2021

Co-production Azienda Speciale Palaexpo | Mattatoio

Première in the frame of re-creatures, Rome, July 2021

Printed in Italy

Supported by

Kone Foundation e Finnish Cultural Foundation