Mobility grants are intended to support residencies abroad, performance tours and exhibition projects, as well as travel for international collaborative projects. With a steady increase in the number of applications year on year, it was decided to award significantly more mobility grants this year. Support for international mobility creates possibilities for strengthening networks and offers new opportunities for action.

“This autumn’s round attracted a record number of applicants, and the level of applications was high. This is certainly encouraging, but it made the task of the expert panel particularly challenging. The highest number of applicants came from the fields of visual arts, music and the performing arts,” said Eriika Johansson, the coordinator responsible for the mobility grants.

The majority of the grants awarded ranged from €2 000 to €4 000. The largest, two grants of €10 000, were awarded to working groups. Teo Ala-Ruona, Master of Arts in Theatre, will use the grant to travel to the Performa Biennial in New York with his seven-strong team. Another large grant was awarded to the Musiikkitalon kuoro choir, whose 80 members will take The Dream of Gerontius to Cambridge.

Residence in the Svalbard Mountains

Kaisu Koivisto, a visual artist for 30 years, works multidisciplinarily. Her works include sculptures, installations, photography and video, in which she explores concepts of landscape, environment and nature.

“My most recent project is New Nuuk, in which I explore the expansion of Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, and the traces left by technology and human activity in the northern landscape. This is counterbalanced by a body of work on the major changes in the Sörnäinen, Merihaka and Sompasaari areas, which are significantly transforming urban space,” says Koivisto. In August 2024, the artist will head for Svalbard, where she will participate in The Arctic Circle expedition residency with a mobility grant.

Visual arts in Berlin

Artist Siiri Haarla, who focuses on painting, aims to create a link between painting and natural science. Her work combines many painting techniques, collage and text. Haarla’s previous exhibition Iiris≈siiri at Forum Box was about vision, colour and language. The paintings asked questions about the laws of life: how does a tree become a tree, how does a flower become a flower? How and when did I become me? 

With the mobility grant now awarded, Haarla will travel to the Toolbox Gallery in Berlin in early 2024. “The exhibition will bring together my memories from ten years of dividing my time between Berlin and Helsinki,” says the artist.

Off to Japan to learn from the masters

Object conservator Veli-Matti Mursu conserves and restores art objects and sculpture for individuals, museums and foundations. In addition to conservating methods, he uses the Kintsugi technique, a Japanese tradition dating back more than 500 years. The Kintsugi method highlights the damage to an object rather than trying to cover it up. The seam becomes like a golden stitch, emphasising the individuality of the object.

“Working with ceramics is particularly close to my heart. In addition to conservative measures, I emphasise the aesthetic integrity of the final result. Professional instruction in traditional kintsugi is not available in Finland, so I travel to Japan to learn from local and American masters.”

Taking the recorder to Berlin

Musician Eero Saunamäki has premiered dozens of contemporary music works for recorder. Working with the support of a Taike grant next year, the professional recorder player has performed as a soloist in more than ten Finnish symphony orchestras over the past five years. With the support of a mobility grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation, he will travel to Berlin for the Classical:NEXT music event.

“My goal is to perform my Nokkahuiluguru solo concerto on ten different recorders at the event. The concert will include music from the Middle Ages to the present day, as well as stories behind the works, instruments and the performer.”

All the awarded grants (in Finnish)

The purpose of mobility grants is to cover expenses such as foreign residency costs, performance tours, exhibition projects and travel related to international collaborations.

The opening of international borders with the waning of the Covid pandemic may have contributed to the rise in applications this year, while another factor may have been Arts Promotion Centre Finland’s decision to stop giving out separate mobility grants.

“The Covid pandemic may also have led to our grants having become more widely known in the Finnish cultural arena. It is highly understandable that artists have an even greater desire to work abroad now, after the pandemic, which causes a greater demand for grants,” explains Senior Adviser Veli-Markus Tapio, who is in charge of handling the applications.

Cycling from Germany to Switzerland and performing contemporary circus in Europe

The granted sums ranged between EUR 2,000 and EUR 8,000. Masters of Music Suvi Oskala and Emilia Lajunen received EUR 5,000 for carrying out an album release tour by bicycle from Germany to Switzerland.

“On our bicycle tours, we take a stand through concrete action on the challenges brought to the field of live music by climate change. After the pandemic, festivals are striving to operate as ecologically as possible, and encourage artists to avoid air travel. Travelling by bicycle and ferry is slower than flying but more sustainable in terms of the climate,” Oskala says. The duo Emilia Lajunen & Suvi Oskala plays chamber folk music on five-string violins and has performed internationally in countries as diverse as China, South Korea, India and the Nordics.

Circus artists Stina Kopra and Lotta Paavilainen with their team received EUR 6,000 for carrying out a residency, performance and networking trip around Europe for their contemporary circus performance 20 Years Later, Still Here!

“The performance is a peek into two woman circus artists’ joint twenty-year journey through the circus, art and friendship. In it, we counteract stereotypical prejudices and encourage everyone to be true to themselves,” Kopra says. The artists, whose shows combine balancing acrobatics, physical comedy and stand up, have been performing together since 2001, representing top-level Finnish circus artistry in locations around Europe, as well as in Israel, Japan and the Philippines.

Sini Tuominen, in turn, is a dancer, dance teacher and cultural producer from the field of street and club dance. She received EUR 7,000 to take part in the Urban Artistry project in Washington, D.C. and to conduct a study trip to New York and Los Angeles.

Mobility grants open doors for international activity

Musician Samuli Majamäki intended to record a second album with Tanzanian singer-songwriter Andrew Ashimba already before the pandemic.

“Covid put the project on hold, but now we are ready to produce the record, which combines music and nature sounds in a unique way. Our objective is to produce an intimate listening experience and a journey into soul-soothing melodies, rhythms and African natural soundscapes,” says Majamäki, who received EUR 3,500 for conducting his performing and recording trip to Tanzania. Majamäki is no stranger to the country, having lived there between 2003 and 2005.

Visual artist and researcher Kari Yli-Annala creates works whose central themes are time, intensity and change. He received a grant sum of EUR 4,000 to cover the costs of carrying out artistic work and research in Copenhagen and Berlin, as well as a photography expedition to Palestine.

“I am recording changes to the surroundings of the al-Arroub refugee camp in Hebron. The focus is on a nearby hill, which is important for the camp’s residents,” Yli-Annala explains.

According to traditional musician Issiaka Dembele, music belongs to its roots, where its ancestors and spirits can be found.

“I am going to travel to see my uncle and father, who are masters of traditional instruments (balafon, kora) and melodies. Some of the music is holy and spiritual and should not be played in any which way. I want to make this valuable tradition known in the West using modern platforms such as Spotify,” Dembele says. He was granted EUR 2,500 to carry out a composition, research and recording trip to West Africa in relation to Manding and African blues music.

Applications for the Cultural Foundation’s mobility grants are accepted twice a year, in March and August.

Acceptable uses of mobility grants include foreign residency costs, performance tours, exhibition projects and travel related to international collaborations.

This round’s largest grant, totalling EUR 10,000, went to the Finnish Artistic Dance Association, which intends to present director Carl Knif’s contemporary dance work “Sessions” for the first time in Hong Kong. The work’s themes are encounters and misses, and their impacts, and it considers whether a performance could be as confidential as the relationship between a patient and doctor.

Support for everything from lacemaking to metalwork

Visual artist Tarmo Thorström, who incorporates lacemaking into his works, will use the mobility grant to take part in a lace festival in Girona, Spain. A local association organising the festival has commissioned a work from Thorström that will be created by the association’s lacemakers. It will then be left on permanent display in the lobby of the city’s main cinema.

– My works draw inspiration from the cultural heritage of Rauma (Finland), conducting a dialogue with its long history. Despite its handcrafted form, lacemaking was so significant in Rauma that it was classed as an industry as early as the eighteenth century. In today’s technology-oriented, hectic society, lacemaking can be seen as a counterpoint to continuous economic growth and excessive, boastful consumption, Thorström says. 

Blacksmith and metal artist Arttu Halkosaari will use the grant to travel to countries including Scotland, Ireland and France to work as an apprentice blacksmith.

– I want to gain experiences that I can use to teach future generations about the opportunities of this craft. Travelling from smithy to smithy as an apprentice is an old custom I want to uphold, Halkosaari explains. His eighteen-month journey will include forging, work experience and artistic work, and he will carry it out in a van-cum-mobile-home.

Mobility grant facilitates presentation of works abroad

Scriptwriter/producer Essi Aittamaa’s work “Sauna”, which concerns human vulnerability and the courage to lay oneself bare before others, will be performed in Denmark. The play has an unusual setting: a gay sauna.

– I felt that this was an excellent setting for the work, because laying oneself bare is at the heart of its message. If it can feel difficult for us to approach others and reveal ourselves even in our daily lives, within the safety of clothes and other protective layers, how might it feel in a sauna?

Photographer Heli Sorjonen, in turn, will travel to Denmark, Germany and Turkey to document the work of female imams. She will work there in late 2021 to gather a large amount of photographic and video material for the Danish-Turkish sound artist/director Nevin Tuna Erönde’s international collaborative work “Female Prayers”. The work will premiere in Malmö in May 2022.

Applications for the Cultural Foundation’s mobility grants are accepted twice a year, in March and August. All the mobility grants awarded in 2021 are found (in Finnish) here.

In the photo, Sunny Odom, a Vihti-based undertaker, is floating in the water with his eyes closed. The middle of the photo shows his face as well as a faint outline of his body just under the surface of the water. Otherwise there is nothing in the photo but the surface of the river and its ripples.

– The photograph could be of any place…, says photographer Uwa Iduozee.

– Like Vantaanjoki, for example, chimes in writer Maryan Abdulkarim.

– … but it is of the Niger River, continues Iduozee.

The photograph was on display at the Festival of Political Photography at the Finnish Museum of Photography, but it is more closely connected with Iduozee and Abdulkarim’s book project, in which they, in words and through pictures, tell the stories of eight first-generation black immigrants who came to Finland.

These immigrants came to Finland between 1950s-90s from the United States, England, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Nigeria, and represent the same generation as Iduozee and Abdulkarim’s, now in their thirties, parents. The original working title of the book was This is not how I imagined my life.

– Many immigrant tales here often begin by someone arriving in Finland. We wanted to do things differently. We picked, on purpose, people who didn’t move here until they were already adults. In their case, they had time to have lots of different dreams before coming to Finland, to where they had to come, for example, to escape civil war, for love, work, study, or for other reasons, explains Abdulkarim.

In her book project, supported by the Kone Foundation, Abdulkarim asked immigrants about their lives prior to moving to Finland and Iduozee photographed them in Finnish surroundings. The authors, however, begun to feel that it was strange to document people’s stories only in Finland.

What’s more, not everyone’s connection to their past life was neatly cut off at the Finnish border. Many regularly still visit their native countries and, in Odum’s case, he runs a hotel back in his hometown.

Therefore, in March 2018, Abdulkarim and Iduozee travelled, with the aid of a 5000-euro mobility grant awarded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, to Nigeria. They documented Odum’s life on the shores of the Niger River in Asaba City, located quite close to a delta, and the life of retired Ike Chime in Enugu, located about a hundred and some miles East of Asaba.

– People are more naked in an environment charged with history and things that may be difficult for them to deal with. You could sense a certain reticence in them at first, when we got to see this side of their life and for example family members who are not always in positions that would evoke pride. It did, however, bring us closer to the subjects of our documentary, says Iduozee.

At one point, Iduozee and Abdulkarim were walking with a group of men, looking at places and houses from their past. These landscapes started to evoke memories in them, something that would probably not have happened in Finland.

Iduozee made it his goal not to have the new environment lure him into becoming side-tracked with documenting landscapes exotic to him.

– I wanted to simplify the visual aspect, just like I would in Finland. The picture of Odum keeping afloat on the Niger River is just like that. It does not depend on its environment but a feeling, Iduozee states. 

Iduozee managed to get a similar picture of Chime in Enugu, as he was smelling flowers in the yard of his old home, becoming swept away by his own nostalgia for a moment.

The largest part of the 5000-euro travel grant was spent on flights to and from Finland to Nigeria. The authors were taken aback that travelling in Nigeria was slower and more expensive than they had thought.

In the cities, motorcycle taxies would take you from one place to another for a few euros, but local flights would set you back by a few hundred euros. Long-distance busses were inexpensive, although, at one time, the travellers had to sit on the bus for two hours just to wait for it to get full. Only then did it set out.

A foreigner may not rent a car by themselves in Nigeria, but they must also hire a local driver along with it.

The travellers noticed that there were plenty of police around who regularly pulled cars over to ask for papers. Earlier, there had been a lot of hold-ups on the roads of Nigeria, but the increased visibility of the police has cut them back.

– I was not worried for my safety at any point of the journey. I can pass for a local quite well as long as I don’t open my mouth, says Abdulkarim.

Uwa Iduozee’s photographs from a book project were on display at the Festival of Political Photography at the Finnish Museum of Photography in Cable Factory (Kaapelitehdas Helsinki) 8 Mar – 26 May 2019.

More information on Mobility Grants

Text: Antti Kivimäki