2024

KOKIMO-Collective / Design Museum Helsinki

Working group: Raisa Kilpeläinen, Pauli Kotilainen, Viljami Lehtonen, Veera-Maija Murtola, Anna Pöllänen

KOKIMO is an artist collective founded in 2010 that explores the constantly evolving relationship between humans and their environment, and the perceptions that emerge from this relationship. The group creates works using spatial, experiential, and performative approaches, emphasizing multisensory engagement and experience rather than traditional spectatorship. Their practice is informed by posthuman, new materialist, pluriversal, and planetary perspectives, and is rooted in site- and context-sensitive working methods.

Gardening Gourmet (2024) is a performance installation staged around a shared dinner table and within the exhibition spaces of the Museum of Finnish Architecture and the Design Museum. The work builds a relationship with the seasons, the concept of the garden, and the surrounding museum context, connecting to the exhibition Garden Futures: Designing with Nature and its featured works.

Through the garden and seasonal cycles, the performance explores audiovisual, spatial, and gastronomic perspectives, tuning participants to a multisensory experience. Gathering around a common table, audiences engage with what the garden offers through taste, sound, space, and time.

I composed the music for the piece and performed the music and sound design live during the dining section of the work—in other words, there were two chefs: one cooking the food and the other cooking the sound. The technical setup included wireless headphones, as well as exciter elements attached to the table, allowing the table itself to function as a vibrating surface that added a physical dimension to the sound. A binaural dummy-head microphone was also placed on the table to capture the sounds of dining, enabling the audience to actively contribute to the soundscape. My live instruments included a modular synthesizer, and, in keeping with the garden theme, a pipephone instrument I built from aluminum electrical conduit, producing wind-chime-like tones.

Full soundtrack can be found here.

More about KOKIMO: www.kokimo.fi