Thanks to Artists International Development Funding from The Arts Council and British Council, Lou Gilbert Scott and I will be returning to Northern Finland. Working with Arts producer Kaisa Kerätär and the Finnish Institute in London we will be travelling the length of Finland up to Tromso in Norway, researching the literal and metaphorical notion of borders.
“Already, in the womb, our brains are laying down neural pathways that will determine how we perceive the world and our place in it. Cognitive mapping is the way we mobilise a definition of who we are, and borders are the way we protect this definition. All borders – the lines and symbols on a map, the fretwork of walls and fences on the ground, and the often complex enmeshments by which we organise our lives – are explanations of identity. We construct borders, literally and figuratively, to fortify our sense of who we are; and we cross them in search of who we might become. They are philosophies of space, credibility contests, latitudes of neurosis, signatures to the social contract, soothing containments, scars”