Nature Untitled | Nimeämätön luonto

Audiovisual installation | Oct 7 – 14th 2025

Performance & talk | October 11th at 16:00

Yö Galleria
Lönnrotinkatu 33
00180 Helsinki

tue–fri 14-19 & sat-sun 12-17

Yö Galleria: Kanssa/With - installation- and performance happening

How do ecological poetics perform between dance, site and image?

Nature Untitled is a triptych dance performance, created in collaboration by choreographer Veli Lehtovaara, visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila and sound designer Jani Hietanen together with an international group of artists. The work is performed by dancers Matilda Aaltonen, Erik Eriksson, Kevin Fay, Elias Girod, Inga Huld Hákonardóttir, Anni Koskinen, Sofia Simola.

In Yö Galleria the work is presented in the form of a 2-channel audiovisual installation, created from the performance documentation, moving images used in scenographic elements and texts produced during the choreographic process. The audience is seated on the wooden sculptures, which expand the registers of experience to touch and scent.

The work was originally performed and experienced in three specific environments. The first movement, inside an empty oil silo, dances out the ghosts of exhaustion and energies consumed. The bodies fold and crackle, the steel structure purrs, the phantasms of the oil era burn only to vanish. In the second movement, we traverse on a field road and in interstellar space. The stage is both enveloping and infinitely extending vacuum, space and ship at the same time, governed by the sound of artificial intuition. Dance wobbles and weaves, recalls and regrets the earth and its beings. The third movement juxtaposes a primeval forest with a shopping mall. The human-made technological environment plunges into the restful depths of the old growth forests. Dancing bodies graph the divergence of forms and minds emerging within this border zone.

The work constitutes the first artistic component of Lehtovaara's doctoral research project Ecological Poetics in Dance and Choreographic Writing. At the same time, the installation form explores the documentation and re-presentation of a live and embodied dance performance in the context of an exhibition.

The triptych was created for and performed in the context of Moving in November and Zodiak - Centre for New Dance in Helsinki between Oct 30 - Nov 13 2022. The audiovisual installation premiered in Claws and Connections – all the world's senses -group exhibition of artistic research at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, 2024.

Live event

Saturday, Oct 11th at 16:00

Performance and Earth Talks- conversation series: Nature Untitled – Dancing in the oil silo, black box and shopping mall

Dancer Sofia Simola will perform fragments from Nature Untitled -triptych adapted into the gallery space. Choreographer Veli Lehtovaara will talk about the creative process as part of his doctoral research at the University of the Arts Helsinki. His research focuses on ecological poetics in dance and choreographic writing.