While going through the administrative process for international child adoption, the first form that prospective families are required to complete asks the question “Why do you want to have a child?” The candidates for parenthood are given only two lines to answer this life-sized question.
This plain question illuminates the difference between the processes of becoming an adoptive or biological parent – to get a biological child, parents do not need to fill in forms or analyse and justify their reasons. The question, however, is relevant to most people at some point in their lives
In our work “Why do you want to have a child?” we have asked this same question to many different people: those who already have a child, people who wish to have a child, as well as people who have decided they don’t want children. The people interviewed did not know the question in advance, and were therefore unable to prepare an answer beforehand. The work reveals the interviewees’ feelings of surprise, discomfort or hesitation at being suddenly confronted with the unexpected question.
We ourselves have lived with this question for the last few years and this work gave us the opportunity to relate our own feelings about it as well as to share the question with others. We have included our own response to the question by including ourselves amongst the interviewees.
The work is supported by the Arts Council of Finland.
Why do you want to have a child? will premiere at the Aine Art Museum, Tornio, Finland, on November 27th, 2009. The exhibition will run until January 24th, 2010.
Why do you want to have a child?
Directed, filmed and edited by Minna Rainio & Mark Roberts
38 minutes.
Why do you want to have a child?will premiere in the exhibition Tänään Kotona (Home Today) at the Aine Art Musuem, Tornio, Finland, 27.11.2009 – 24.1.2010
Borderlands will be shown at the Festival “Des Frontieres et des Hommes”, Salle Verlaine, place de la Liberté 57, Thionville, France, 4-15th November 2009.
Eight Rooms received its premiere at Korjaamo in Helsinki on 5.11.2008. The new eight-screen video installation focuses on the international trafficking of women for prostitution.
If you could see me nowis a trilogy of multi-screen DVD video installations by Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts.
The series is comprised of the works Rajamailla (Borderlands)(2004), Angles of Incidence (2006) and Eight Rooms (2008). THe three works explore how different groups of people experience their changing social positions and relations, and focus on people who exist at the margins of society – margins which might be either physical (geographical) or social. Each of the works also deals with the transformations experienced when passing from one place, time or set of circumstances to another. Continue Reading »
Eight Rooms is an eight screen video installation that deals with the trafficking of women as part of international sex trade.
International human trafficking is a phenomenon that exists in the shadows of globalisation and in which Finland also participates. This trade in women – mostly from ex-Soviet nations but also further afield – is perpetuated by thousands of ordinary Finnish men, and yet it remains relatively hidden and unspoken in our society.
The installation ‘Eight Rooms’ consists of eight synchronized DVD-video projections that have been filmed in hotel rooms. The screens create a circular space inside which the audience views the work. Each screen depicts a different hotel bedroom into which a cleaning lady enters to perform her work or tidying the beds and smoothing out the sheets. As the cleaning goes on, a narrator – a young Russian woman – describes the dramatised feelings and experiences of trafficked women. These brief, plain monologues, when juxtaposed with the ordinary and familiar hotel rooms, emphasise the everyday nature of this phenomenon. As the stories continue, the cleaner continues her own invisible work, cleaning the same rooms over and over again.
The installation uses images, sound and space to create a claustrophobic and sometimes uncomfortable environment that mirrors the experiences described in the narrative. The viewer becomes a physical participant in the installation, in much the same way that they are a part of a society in which trafficking takes place.
Eight Rooms is the third part of the Rainio & Roberts’s video If you could see me now. The first part of the trilogy – Borderlands (2004) – examined the Finnish-Russian border, while the second part – Angles of Incidence (2006) –dealt with the experiences of refugees in Finland.
Eight Rooms is a part of Rainio’s PhD research at the Elomedia Doctoral School for Audiovisual Media in the University of Art & Design in Helsinki and University of Lapland.
Script & Direction: Minna Rainio & Mark Roberts
Producer: Ville Hyvönen
Cinematography: Tuomas Järvelä
Original Soundtrack: Petri Kuljuntausta
Actress: Riitta Elstelä
Narrator: Nadja Leinonen
Co-produced by: Valotalo Productions / Virta Productions
The work is supported by: The Promotion Centre for Audiovisual Culture AVEK
The Art’s Council of Finland
POEM, The northern film and media foundation
‘Surfaces’ is an edited selection of tracks from the performance ‘Working Space / Surface Time’ by John Court and Mark Roberts.
The sound sources used were generated entirely by the movements of Court’s body as he moved slowly over a raised wooden platform. The sounds of his movements were picked up by four piezo microphones, amplified, and processed live. Each performance lasted exaclty 8 hours, and the material presented on this album was selected from four separate performances made during 2004.
The album contains 11 mp3 tracks edited into a continuous soundscape.
‘The Fact of the Matter’ was a live, four-hour sound performance in the abandoned Lokstall (train depot) of a closed iron-ore mine in Kirkenes, Norway. The sounds used in the performance were sourced from field recordings around the mine and depot. Narration is provided by an ex-worker reading extracts from a 1950s promotional book. The texts boast of the machinery, techniques, and large export product of the mine, which today sits abandoned and desolate. The community of Kirkenes still feels the effects of the closure of the mine.
This mp3 presents an edited re-recording of the performance made in 2005.
Angles of Incidenceis showing as part of the touring exhibition Borderlives
March 15 – June 1, 2008 Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany
June 14 – August 10, 2008, Stadtgalerie Kiel, Kiel, Germany
Veli Granö, Jaakko Heikkilä, Tea Mäkipää, Anu Pennanen, Minna Rainio & Mark Roberts, Vesa Ranta & others
Borderlives – Contemporary Art from Helsinki, St. Petersburg and Tallinn is an up-to-date inquiry into the artistic, social and mental situation of this northernmost region of art in Europe. It concentrates on artists, who independently and accurately reflect the epochal upheavals of recent years. At the center of this artistic discussion are physical and mental border experiences.
Both Angles of Incidence and Rajamailla (Borderlands) will be shown at Rovaniemi Art Museum, Rovaniemi, Finland, from 23.1 – 9.3.2008.
A selection of individual (solo) works will also be exhibited.
Mark Roberts is showing two new video video works Foreign Apples and Terra Incognita from the series “Scenographs”. Each work in the series attempts to condense a theme or issue into a single scene. Foreign Apples looks at the presence of nationalism in the everyday, while Terra Incognita examines the difficulty of making life-changing decisions in a mundane world.
Minna Rainio and Mark Roberts combine media art, conceptual art and documentary to deal with social and political issues, and to investigate the impact of these on people's individual experiences and histories.
