Sacr3: Eternal Return

The parts are Sacre (2015), Sacre 2: HEX (2017) and Sacr3: Eternal Return (2019). The video works are following an anonymous protagonist searching for freedom and meaningfulness.

Self-Accusation is partially based on Peter Handke's 1966 play of the same title. Handke's text is dramatized in a video within the video. In the frame narrative, the maker of the video receives a violent critique. The work deals with submission, living by the rules, and dreams of beauty and freedom.

A cyber goth in her thirties makes dance videos at home, seeking freedom and the truth in a society obsessed with productivity and success. Her mode of living is persistently challenged by an older brother, whose caring and love come with a strive to transform her sister. The sibling drama takes a new turn upon the goth's encounter with a dance prodigy whose brilliance seems to leave everyone else in darkness. The film draws from the thoughts of the philosopher and activist Simone Weil (1909-1943), medievalism and cyberculture amongst other influences, viewing work, art and dance as war.

How quickly the footage of the empty art school takes on the eerie quality of ruins. A putty sculpture becomes the chipped-away head of a Greek medusa from a thousand years ago. Now medusa becomes myth. Art education is relegated to the ancient past—and is then juxtaposed with the future, figured in the stark Nordic architecture of a residency program that doubles as a start-up hub.

Pallasvuo claims that "the most beautiful things are torn, revealing something underneath". Bringing together grunge music, Georges Bataille, the story of doubting Thomas and open-pit mining, Pallasvuo allows a glimpse into his obsession with holes. Online-sourced references accelerate in front of our eyes, pulling us deeper into the abyss.

Over a blue screen, a voiceover narrates The Artist’s experience of a sanatorium, where they were supposed to make a piece of art, but did not.

Sacre 2: HEX is the second part of The Sacre Trilogy by Anni Puolakka and Jaakko Pallasvuo. The solemn cybergoth dance enthusiast introduced in the first part of the trilogy (Sacre, 2015) has graduated into a smug Wiccan vlogger. Her formerly know-it-all brother has fallen on hard times and now needs her help. Family relations entangle with work anxiety. Virtual and material survival tactics get tested. Spiritual, financial and social layers mesh in money-burning rituals. A damaged sibling dynamic is further destabilized by a seductive alien.

Looking back at footage of Venice Biennale 2011, The Artist remembers the optimistic feelings felt at the time, the projected careers, the romantic setting and how art meant something. The Finnish pavilion was closed when the footage was shot because of a fallen tree. Was it a sign? The sinking city echoes The Artist's current sense of resignation. The piece shifts from video footage into cartoons with speech bubbles, perhaps in an effort to reclaim the voiceover from a romanticising of ennui that seemed to be setting in. Is this a new beginning? Liberated from its ambitions for an illustrious career, art has now become a more metaphysical means of survival.

Mixing crude animation, 3D modeling, and faux filmic textures in a self-reflexive essay on digitally abetted nostalgia, this playful work of fair use pastiche refracts all manner of postmodern touchstones (David Foster Wallace, Talking Heads, Reality Bites) into an aesthetic interrogation of its own methodology, resulting in, to paraphrase one onscreen subject, a critique of a critique of a critique.

Body  without bone. Sloppy and improper. Body  seepage. Naked sewer rats. Hairless aristocratic cats. Slime. The body of the future, fluid & flexible & folding into itself. Body negotiations. 3D software as a lab for new subjectivities/monstrosities. I dub all the voices. Unfortunately, the mischievous flubber seems to have a mind of its own.

“A documentary about a morgue.” “Medieval sports.” “Chamber plays.” “Something with choirs.” These belong to a long list of projects the artist was going to make but never did.

A communist and a capitalist recall their voyage into a wilderness of leisure time. A domestic cycle of breaking into houses, chasing the ghosts of parties past, and trying to conceive … but what? The waters ice over, ready to incubate. Something new is being born.