HOMO HOMO SAPIENS – AN ARTISTIC LABORATORY

For two and a half years, the Homo Homo Sapiens group (consisting of artist Jaakko Pesonen, philosopher Kai Alhanen, art historian Donna Roberts and actor Aleksi Holkko) has been engaging in dialogue to explore the group’s personal experiences, feeding them into the creation of a work that reflects our time. In the artistic laboratory we will explore the metamorphoses of the human soul under extreme social, technological, and environmental conditions. 

HHS is neither a game nor a provocation, but an inquiry into the limits of human control, into the very character and resilience of the human soul, and the difficult but pressing questions concerning our understanding of ‘the natural’. HHS creates a framework for thinking about key aspects of contemporary life that need to be addressed with accelerating urgency. Adopting the frame of an artistic laboratory, HHS aims to examine our world through methods that are generally excluded from scientific space: dialogue, play, and collectively experiencing art. We are living in a time of unprecedented complexity, and while scientific data is widely available our familiarity with the facts seems of little help in alleviating the current global crises. The HHS laboratory thus aims to explore ways in which we might augment science proper by inviting imagination, critical thinking, and dialogical communication to help us enrich our understanding of the human experience in these severe times. HHS aims to explore the potential of a different model for approaching globally significant problems which have in many ways originated from the rapid development of modes of communication which threaten to delimit our humanity, thereby disabling our ability to respond not only to each other’s needs but also to the needs of nature at large.

The artistic laboratory contains a series of constructed spaces occupied by Decca, a gay man from an alternative reality where the majority of people are homosexual. Together with the audience, we will closely observe Decca going about his everyday chores or in more abstract moments which prompt us to think about humanity from different angles. Within the laboratory, participants are invited to be themselves. There is no script, and the work unfolds as we monitor Decca and discuss our observations. It is our hope that observing this character from an alternative reality will enable us to scrutinize our own world with a more open mind, expanding our limited subjectivities through empathy and imagination.

The work is part of the Helsinki Fest.
HHS has been supported by the Kone Foundation.