Artist aasj work with a queer- and eco-critical perspective through video, sound and building projects and focus on making work that acts as open-source conceptual and emotional everyday tools. During their research trip, aasj set out to explore how the cultural heritage of their maternal family could provide a place of critical reflection within contemporary arts practice, which – also a reality largely structured by capitalist norms and pressures that organise relations, bodies, and behaviours within a system of economic value and exploitation.
aasj describes: “I was extremely blessed to meet incredible carriers of Karelian knowledge and practice, such as traditional instrument builder Minna Hokka, who has built over 120 Karelian and Ingrian instruments and embodies the living knowledge of these traditions, as well as Olga Zaitseva, and Pirko from the Juminkeko Institute in Kuhmo, as well as people I met in forests, saunas, and roadside cafés who shared their stories and practices with me. The trip centred on a collective learning space with Minna hosted by Vartiosaari Artists House in Helsinki, where we invited other professional artists with Karelian heritage or interest in the practice to learn the techniques of building tuohitorvi (birch bark trumpets), sound tools deeply rooted in Karelian traditions.
Tuohitorvi once shaped forest communication, carrying herding signals, predator-repelling calls, gathering motifs, and soothing melodies. Their ritual use was tied to seasonal rhythms and spiritual protection, for example when trumpets were sounded before cattle entered pastures each spring. Preserved in Karelia longer than elsewhere in Finland, these instruments embody a living heritage that reaches into pre-Christian traditions, where relations between humans, animals, and the spirit world were organised through sound, ritual, and ecology rather than ownership or commodification.
The sessions combined cultural introduction, instrument crafting, and playing techniques, opening a space to reflect on how embodied knowledge—transmitted through material, gesture, and resonance—can inform contemporary art with care, reciprocity, and ecological attunement.”
Did you get inspired by aasj’s example?
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