The Squirrel's Nest (Oravan Pesä)
The Squirrel’s Nest (Oravan Pesä in Finnish) is a podcast I developed for the Arts & Creative Practices initiative at Aalto University, harvesting critical perspectives from within the university by developing conversations around contemporary life and the ways knowledge and practice are built today and for the future. Disseminating the work of researchers, artists, and educators based at Aalto, these conversations bring about strong human concerns and reflections in connection to art, science, design, technology, and the main forces governing our contemporary reality. Following through with the core question animating the project — “Why do we do the things we do?” — the podcast proposes a channel for self-reflexivity of Finnish academia within a larger context of debate, tapping into stories and projects happening in Otaniemi, the potential unraveled by academic work, and the puzzling dilemmas that come with it.
The dialogues were held inside the Conversation Room, a sound sculpture and architecture for encounter developed by artist Ariel Bustamante during his Artist-in-Residence stay at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University (2015–2016). Inspired by primitive refuges and vernacular architecture, the sculpture was built almost entirely from recycled and upcycled eco-friendly materials in collaboration with builders and craftsmen from Helsinki and Estonia. It encloses a floating interior room whose acoustic quality was designed by ear rather than technical specification, using custom panels made from reed and recycled paper to shape the quality of voice inside. As an architecture for encounter specifically conceived for one-on-one conversation, it acoustically isolates itself from the surrounding environment to provide a protective and undisturbed space shaped by stillness and slowness. Over the course of two years, Bustamante and his team practiced conversation as a method for interpersonal self-exploration, developing techniques to subvert the norms and habits that operate when we think with others. The sculpture has been installed in varied locations across Helsinki and Espoo, and — depending on the circumstance and with the consent of all participants — has the ability to record conversations and play them back to the surrounding environment afterwards.
The Conversation Room renders a quality of encounter and depth of conversation that is simply not available anywhere else. It was precisely that quality that motivated me to develop a project carrying the same principle and spirit into another public sphere. The podcast was a way of extending the reach of those conversations to the internet, bringing the ethos of the Conversation Room to audiences who would never have the chance to step inside it. The sculpture continued to serve as the site of critical dialogue beyond the podcast itself: the interview with UWAS director Juuso Tervo that grounds my 2022 essay on transdisciplinarity in higher education was also held inside the Conversation Room, tracing in practice the very argument the piece makes about the kind of encounter the space enables. A second season of the podcast was developed in 2022 in connection with UWAS (University-Wide Art Studies) at Aalto, where MA students from across the university acted as hosts and producers of the episodes, with myself as curator and editor alongside sound engineer Camilo Sanchez at Aalto Studios.
The Conversation Room project is documented in Why Do We Do the Things We Do? Conversation Room, published by Aalto ARTS Books in 2017 (Aalto University publication series Art+Design+Architecture 1/2017), with texts by Henna Harri, Nora Sternfeld, Hanna Ohtonen, and Taru Elfving.
Read the related essay: Transdisciplinarity in Higher Education ↗
Credits
Curator & Editor — María Villa
The Conversation Room — Sound sculpture by Ariel Bustamante
Season 2 Sound Engineer — Camilo Sanchez, Aalto Studios
Initiatives — Arts & Creative Practices, UWAS