Varsinaissuomalainen koira (A dog from Southwest Finland) is a portrait of Nousiainen from the point of view of a teenage kid. It’s an ambisonic four-channel experimental musique concrète composition and video installation that lasts one hour. The work plays on a loop in the gallery. The loop starts on the hour and you can experience it from any point in part or in full preferably in full. The work contains loud sounds. There is a sofa you can sit on while experiencing the work. Three people can sit on the sofa at once but it is also possible to experience the work standing up or sitting on the floor. The best spot for experiencing the spatial sound is in the center of the speaker setup.

a field behind which there seems to be a forest that’s just a row of trees grown for pulp behind which there is a field behind which there seems to be a forest. nousiainen or nouste as we call her. 1997. i piss on my passed out friend. a stark light on colourless dullness. does pee freeze no it doesn’t or i mean what the fuck of course it does. raw sounds nothing muffles them. the roaring scream of a tuned exhaust pipe gets louder as a moped approaches and as it passes by fades out into the distance. i’m 13 or 14 and i would do anything to get attention and acceptance. the horizon draws a horizontal limit behind which you can’t see you can hide behind it. later i will narrate a victim narrative about how i was bullied because i was bullied but i was also an asshole i had to be. in nousiainen it’s never far it’s cut off by the line of trees at the edge of the field. once a friend of mine says in a group of boys that she wants to be a woman when she grows up. veins of asphalt cut across the fields gravel capillaries branch off of them. everyone’s confused i guess or think it’s a weird joke no-one says anything. the locals move across the transversing distances where are they going the highway 8 cuts everything in half. it has two lanes you can run across now it has four lanes no dice crossing its hum is always in the background at 120km/h. violence is so commonplace no-one considers it violence. people passing through don’t even notice what they’re passing through. turku is somewhere else turku is far away turku is another world 22km away. femininity and being a girl are punishable offenses the punishment and the decision to punish are carried out by other children. there’s only lemu only askainen there’s masku and maybe there is raisio and there is naantali. a landscape appears as a landscape to a person in the landscape. a person appears in the landscape but not for themself. for a moment the landscape forms an entire world from which the person experiencing it is absent there is only the locus of the experience. i have discovered punk i have been able to afford to buy one cd that i listen to that i listen to that i listen to. places seep into other places past and future they are porous they are vague. i’m sitting with my cousin on a sofa under a tarp covering a boat rack i’m drinking beer for the first time. due to existing in a body we are forced to be in only one place at one time. we’re still best friends. there’s no internet. there’s petrol in the tank of my moped i feel free

Text: Camille Auer

Camille Auer (b.1984) is an artist, writer and cultural critic from nousiainen, living in helsinki for now. she loves mudflats, arctic wading birds and the murkiness of hard facts. currently she wants to premeditate on what it would look like to let things unfold in an unpremeditated way. she has had a bunch of exhibitions and performed her work at international theatre festivals. she has played noise and punk shows around the world. auer’s essays, poetry and art writing have been published in loads of different publications and she’s kind of underground famous for her girldick zine series. her first monograph ruff knowledge should be coming out soon. varsinaissuomalainen koira is her eighth solo exhibition.

Pro Artibus has received support for the exhibition
The Finnish Heritage Agency, Stiftelsen Tre Smeder, Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland

The artist has been supported by
Kone Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland’s Arts Council of Varsinais-Suomi