Cheap Finnish Labour
CFL – Cheap Finnish Labour – consists of various formations of the active members of Platform, sometimes together with invited artists. CFL can be described as a frame for discussing and developing collaborative projects. CFL is open to external participation and automatically the interaction with the environment becomes part of the work, a kind of social sculpture that explores alternative strategies for producing and showing art.
Land we have
Vasa 2010
To sing in a choir is about accepting that the presentation of the expression of the group has a greater impact for the cultural experience than the individual influence. Through the conventions that choir singing assume as an artistic expression, CFL wants to make universal patterns visible of how human beings express cultural belonging and raise questions and interpretations relating to fellowship, alienation, identity, time and place.
Platform Parasite Art Event
Istanbul – Vasa 2009
The event was part of an ongoing collaborative art project that CFL started as a social intervention in Istanbul and realised in parallel with the inauguration of the 11th Istanbul Biennale. Between the 8th and 15th September 14 artists and cultural workers who run the Platform Contemporary Art Space in Vaasa, attended and explored the centre of Istanbul and the venue of the Istanbul Biennale. Inspired from Bertol Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt, distancing as an artistic and staging effect, the CFL group in Istanbul explored distancing as a source for art practice.
Training Camp Kirkenes 2009
A trip to Kirkenes and Hamningsberg in Norway was undertaken as a training camp or brain camp – to explore and discuss CFL.
Cheap Finnish Labour – Don't complain
Huseyin Alptekin (Turkey) at the Venice Biennale 2007
Huseyin Alptekin (Turkey) and Camila Rocha (Brazil) were artists in Platform's residence during the spring 2007, when Alptekin was planning the work for his participation representing Turkey at the Venice biennial. Since Alptekins work deals with the issues of displacement, records unimportant facts and acts and through this brings attention to things that are out of attention Cheap Finnish Labour offered to help realizing the work.
Cheap Finnish Labour promoting "Welfare – Fare Well"
A performance during the launching party of the new issue of Framework which was promoting the exhibition in the Nordic Pavilion: "Welfare – Fare well". Free issues of the magazine were distributed by CFL, along with a flyer announcing an auction of an art piece namely a a pair of shoes previously worn by CFL member Peter Rosvik. Irish artist Mark Clare was invited to function as the main auctioner.
Cheap Finnish Labour Exploring Alternative Economies
XX1 Gallery, Warsaw 1–15.2.2007
In every culture there are similarities. Is it possible to melt in, to become a temporary part of the different and the unfamiliar? Or is the only possibility to orientate in an unfamiliar environment to do what we would usually do? Or is it possible to to make alternative choices out of this position, to make a difference? What actually happens when you try to melt in, to be part of the other, the unfamiliar? Is it not then that you can alter perspectives and in this way notice and make visible that which is everyday and extraordinary existing right in the core but not seen? Or is it the other way around, we end up at the margins, or even worse, in a void between spaces that is neither familiar nor unfamiliar, or even both? Can one create a turning point in this void and become a hero in someone's world?