Perceiving Nature(s): Epistemic, Artistic and Political Practices as Contested Fields
Lecture series 15 May 2025
The second event in the lecture series ‘Perceiving Nature(s): Epistemic, Artistic and Political Practices as Contested Fields’ took place on Thursday, 15 May, featuring lectures by Professor Marko Jouste (University of Oulu) and Dr Pia Palme (Vienna).
Marko Jouste is a university lecturer at the Giellagas Institute, University of Oulu. As a music ethnologist, historian and musician, his extensive research covers the contemporary and historical aspects of ‘Saami culture’, as well as the exploration of ‘Saami’ history through sound recordings and their transcription. Through numerous publications and on the basis of comprehensive analyses of the content, textual meaning and their interrelationship with the oral tradition of historical traditional music – such as that of the Aanaar (Inari) Saami, Marko Jouste contributes to the documentation, historical analysis and archiving of ‘Saami culture’. Three Saami groups in Finland were presented: the Northern Saami, the Aanaar (Inari) Saami and the Skolt Saami. Using a well-defined reference system, intertextuality and various forms of oral expression can be explored. Audio examples, accompanied by vocal and textual explanations, illustrated the diverse layers of meaning, which relate, amongst other things, to fairy tales and legends, as well as to underlying individual messages and events.
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Pia Palme works as a composer, artistic researcher, writer, performer and activist in the field of contemporary and experimental music. Her works range from solo performances, vocal works and ensemble pieces to music theatre; they address the state of the Earth, explore speculative futures and engage with ecology, feminism and posthumanism. As human beings and artists, we do not merely react to the state of the world and significant changes – such as the rise of technologies that are redefining human existence, structural injustices, social unrest and wars, environmental changes and the extinction of species, but are actively involved in them – a fact that also applies to the complex processes of composing music and theatre. In her performance-lecture, Pia Palme used recorded images, video and musical examples to present the creative process to date of her music theatre project, which incorporates the Danube as a collaborator. The speaker, echoing Karen Barad, suggests that our activities should be perceived as ‘part of the becoming of the world’. The individual actions and influences of each person flow into the bigger picture. The well-attended lectures by Marko Jouste and Pia Palme were rounded off by lively discussions.