Borderlands - a discussion on experiments in working
by Anni Puolakka and Jenna Sutela / OK Do
08.11.2010 13:27
Home-work-home
Jenna: Our creative practice is as mobile as it can get. Having homes around the world, we sleep and work at each other's places and on the way. When we get together, we usually work intensively, turning our homes into camps, talking, writing and putting on events. And we always cook. Living and working like this, it's easy to relate to Merce Cunningham when he talked about his friend and collaborator Robert Rauschenberg: "When I met Bob, I felt less and less need for conversation. I felt what he felt."
Anni: OK Do and life also mix in the sense that we collaborate mostly with friends - or that most of the collaborators eventually become our friends. And then we cook for them too. Perhaps we unconsciously try to persuade people to work with OK Do through good food... Harriet Beecher Stowe said that "home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve". I think working on OK Do makes us happy because it allows us to be who we are and team up with people we admire and like.
Jenna: We usually take on slightly unrealistic cooking projects for our events, too - such as baking cakes in the middle of the night, in between a hundred other things. Learning from that, for the OK Talk brunch events in Helsinki and London, we asked the guests to bring over a breakfast ingredient each so that we can cook together with them in the morning and sleep more during the night.
Crossing disciplines
Anni: We've talked a lot about the concept of OK Do with each other and with others. And although we're designers by background, we really don't want to get stuck in that world. The most important thing is to explore and learn about new topics and territories that fascinate us, like art, science and music, engage in dialogues as well as express ourselves - perhaps using some designer methods on the way.
Jenna: Having published our first book, Science Poems, in Paris in the summer, we recently also learned about the practicalities of independent publishing by running around the city, then Eurostar, and later the London underground with boxes of books. Not just writing, curating and cooking for the book party, we also took the role of a distributor in the project.
Anni: One day we struggled with a text that looked at the poetics of quantum physics and the next we wondered how to get down the stairs in the metro with ninety books and a second-rate trolley. We're planning to issue a list of things that a small publisher needs to take into account when making a book. It was fun.
Jenna: And we met many interesting people - as well as some gentlemen who helped us to carry the boxes in the Paris metro.
Made in places
Anni: We're interested in placemaking as well as how places shape us and OK Do. Travelling and seeing different things finally helps us see familiar things, like Finland, in a different way. While setting up an office in one place one day sounds attractive, it seems that, for now, we just need to keep moving.
Jenna: Sometimes, especially when travelling, it's hard to distinguish between work and holiday. After Science Poems was published, I travelled on the Italian coast only to cook and swim for a week, and Anni took to Lapland. Living on an island with no internet, again, it was easy to turn food making into a project. This made me think about how not only cooking, but various kinds of mundane activities like changing or decorating one's environment, or leaving it as it is, affect living and thus also working. While in Italy, I read a story in a magazine about the American artist Cy Twombly who made no distinction between interior decoration and art, but decorated with his paintings, just as he did with antiques. To him, a doorknob would present itself something as admirable as a painting - just as the contexts of Helsinki, Paris and London, an Italian summer house or camping in Lapland, play a significant role in whatever we do.
Anni: It was weird to have a phone discussion with Jenna about the name of the publication on young Finnish and Chinese architecture that was in process at the time, just after I had woken up from a night slept on the driver's seat of the car. It had been too cold and windy to put up the tent in Norkapp, the most Northern point of the continental Europe you can reach along a road. Deciding on the name, that ended up being ‘Double Happy - (8+8=19) Views on Architecture in Finland and China', required a certain type of thinking for which I felt too far out in the periphery. I guess I had travelled there exactly for that.
Jenna: Another thing I learned about Twombly was that living and working in Italy for a long time, he used white paint, his "marble", to coat the sculptures or assemblages he made, as if to neutralise the heterogeneous effects of the diverse shapes and colours of objects they contained - making them Twombly. And I guess this is what we do, too, in our own way. Collect bits and pieces from our environment and tie them together into an entity that is us.
Anni: And then we take that entity into different places again. It will never be finished.