Ellie Rae Hunter & Anni Puolakka
PENETRALIA II17 December—27 January 2024
Opening: 16 December, h.18. Curated by Zoë De Luca Legge
The word penetralia typically refers to the most private and embedded architecture of a building or temple. Beyond an initial, immediate association with sex, it is the noun neutral of the Latin adjective penetralis, “interior”. This word reveals an unexpected reality about the verb penetrate and offers us a way to signify the dimension of the intimate, the recondite, and the inaccessible. Without the pretensions of the impenetrable, it spatially traces the mystery of the inside.
Ellie Rae Hunter and Anni Puolakka's dialogic show builds upon the namesake 2018 film, which tells the story of a person whose memory of an early sexual encounter with the bubbling waters of a jacuzzi is triggered when she moves into an apartment above an all-male sauna. Heat, sounds, and condensation from the sauna seep into the flat and the protagonist finds herself impregnated with a swarm of fishing lures. The collaborative project explored entanglements, boundaries, and transformative relations between beings and materials. Five years later, Penetralia II further develops the artists' research into the porosity of architectures and bodies through a series of individual works and a spatial intervention.
To represent a body is not so much to passively witness its existence but rather to actively contribute to its materialization, that is, to its construction as a political subject within society and as an object of knowledge within nature1 . The body explores the fantasies, stories, and imagery we create to come to terms with the realities of interspecies and inter-material coexistence. Its materialization as a sociocultural subject underscores the embodied nature of experiences and how bodies are implicated in, and contribute to broader processes. It highlights the lived experiences of individuals as crucial to understanding and addressing both corporeal and metaphorical issues. In Penetralia II, Hunter and Puolakka’s works merge autobiographical and fictional narratives to delve into the ways these elements interact with our psychological and anatomical selves. The exploration focuses on how unintentional or unexpected encounters with the other can unveil profound insights about our existence and potential beyond, potentially suggesting a paradigm that rejects the notion of the other in favor of an openly intertwined and integrated ethos.
Sydämestä (2021) by Anni Puolakka is a 14-minute video depicting the journey of Toxoplasma gondii inside a human body. The protozoan parasite interacts with their host, becoming excited as the human moves and breathes and describing how the most mundane physiological functions become fascinating when observed from a different point of view. However, the parasitic organism is busy with their own tour of all the murky tunnels and crevices of the human body, a one-parasite show aimed at killing the host’s cells. While on their way to the depths of the heart, the parasite encounters a fetus, entering an even deeper level of intimacy as they witness the human talking and singing to their future baby. The jealous parasite then proceeds to take all of the host’s space and energy for themself, proclaiming their will to become one with the human and never leave their body. This theatrical representation speculates on our conception of intimacy and proximity. While the story focuses on the relationship between humans and all the living entities that make us such, the hypotheses behind the origin of the infection implicate human interaction with nonhuman animal products, suggesting an additional interspecies connection in the process. Once we recognize that our bodies - and therefore identities - are formed by multiple individual entities, otherness ceases to exist. Nothing is alien anymore.
Puolakka’s investigation of the hybrid nature of beings proceeds in Yy, Kaa and Koo (2023), a series of collages developed on found objects. Children’s books torn apart by their reader, a fabric sample hanger, and an art folder host a layering of painted paper, each one depicting an instinctual, fantastical shape of the body. This small collection of environments and characters is a way for the artist to enter new realities by using materials at hand.
The act of creating interiors corresponds to Ellie Rae Hunter’s series Pure Color (2023), consisting of four life-size aqua resin molds of the artist's back. Each of the versions is embedded with aluminum casts of miniature objects: a set of plates, a rug with a cat on it, and a robe on a hook. These framed body portions hold as many dollhouse portions, highlighting the body's containing - and even playful - nature. Portion within portion, cast within cast. This metaphysical remapping reminds us of the psychological architectures that become lodged in our physical forms; That bodies are composed of many elements, and that some of them may be nonhuman animals. Be they intimate but external, familiar but uncomfortable, it is the outside that shapes the inside.
This topic is further developed in Hunter’s video Heavenly (2023), which unfolds from the myth of Uranus and Gaia, the sky and Earth gods who gave birth to the Titans, a powerful group of divine beings. Once Uranus, already worried about the power of his children, became paranoid that they might overthrow him, he imprisoned them in the Earth, by pushing them back into Gaia's womb. The goddess, now in great pain and distress, plotted revenge with her son Cronus, who ultimately succeeded in castrating Uranus, freeing his siblings, and taking control of the cosmos. The mythical space of Gaia's uterus thus becomes a representation of imaginary anatomy. An allegorical space where the internalization of beliefs about the body transcends organic nature, mirroring the societal constructs ingrained in the myth rather than functioning solely as a physiological entity. Gaia's womb becomes both the surface entity and the projection surface, one that embodies both the invasion and replication themes. This duality of selfhood transforms the womb into a symbol of pure permeability, unveiling how the very fabric of existence is shaped by cultural influences.
Welcome to Me (2023) is a site-specific installation that blends all the abovementioned speculations in one, human-scale yet inaccessible environment. In a sense, a penetralia takes shape within the gallery walls. A diamond-shaped nest of painted fabric catalyzes all open questions, highlighting the need to assume a humorous and light-hearted mindset to answer them. The metaphor of the body temple shifts to a less sacred, more playful one. To address serious topics with a different take on what normal expectations are embedded in us; To remind us that humor opens new and less rigid ways of thinking about the body, sexuality, and pleasure2.
1. Laura Tripaldi, Gender Tech: Come la tecnologia controlla il corpo delle donne, Editori Laterza, 2023
2. Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover, Minnesota Press, 2021
The project is supported by Frame Contemporary Art Finland
Almanac Inn is supported by Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, Fondazione CRT and Regione Piemonte.