Trickster Magazine

[ Klara ] It was very special collaborating with Zody, who works with ideas and formats so similar to my own, I felt very understood. We both had completely different ideas for the exhibition when we first started emailing each other, but everything gradually crystallized into a result that I think meets perfectly in the middle of both our similarities and our differences.

[ Zody ] I think one of the most enjoyable elements for me was realizing that Klara and I actually have so much in common, to an almost freakish extent. We were both born in 1991, we’ve both worked in the film & theater industries on the prop and scenery production side of things, and we both have a lifelong interest in archaeology and paleo-anthropology.

We met at an art fair in NYC last year, where Klara was showing work. I was with my friend Michael who works as an art journalist and he started freaking out about Klara’s figure sculptures, saying “Oh my god Zody, you guys are literally dressed exactly alike”. It was true, I was wearing my Sorcerer bag and pants and we were totally twinning. Luckily Klara happened to be there as well, and we immediately started talking about natural history museums, particularly the American Museum of Natural History, which turned out to be a mutual favorite.

[ Zody ] It’s an old cliché but it bears constant revisiting that history is written by the victors; the powers-that-be… or powers-that-were. Maybe some readers can relate to the bizarre and untethering phenomenon of being present in a historically significant event, such as a protest, where the experience of participating in a shared social experience can drastically differ from the way it is later portrayed in the media, and thus how it gets digested and enshrined by the sociopolitical apparatus that arbitrates history. Maybe we should look at canonized historical narratives as something like manufactured consent.

[ Klara ] I think the moment history is retold, it immediately becomes fiction, even if the event happened yesterday and everyone agrees that it really took place. Truth, unlike fact, is something we have collectively decided to accept as real. Thinking about history is also thinking about death. A genre I consider a perfect art form is horror cinema. Ideally, it should contain both surprises and plot twists. Human history is simply a very good horror film.

[ Klara ] I always work with forgery and fantasy as my primary tools. I manipulate materials to look like something else, artificially age them through patination, and build my narratives around invented historical scenarios. It’s fun to deceive people.

[ Zody ] I think the line between reality and forgery is almost negligible in a certain sense, especially when it comes to history. One thing that interested us, as a premise for this exhibition, is how quickly something stops being a copy and starts functioning as reality once it is circulated and believed in. At that point it doesn’t really matter whether something is authentic in a strict sense, it matters what kind of reality it produces. Sometimes there’s a point where an imitation doesn’t sit “outside” the real anymore, but in fact starts producing it. That’s what Jean Baudrillard calls simulacra; when representations no longer refer back to an original, but circulate as reality in their own right.

There’s a piece by Maxim Gorky about Coney Island (America’s first amusement park) that I keep coming back to, where he describes it with a kind of disgusted fascination. He depicts it as artificial and grotesque, but at the same time he’s clearly drawn to it, like a moth towards a fiery death. That leveling of polarized impressions feels crucial… the fake is not simply opposed to the real, it can also intensify it or even replace it through repetition and spectacle.

What interests me is that simulacra often don’t feel like a loss of reality, but an increase in its intensity. The copy becomes more legible and emotionally immediate, more narratively satisfying than whatever vague “original” it supposedly comes from. Maybe forgery isn’t always a deviation from truth, but instead it’s one of the main ways in which “truth” becomes canonized.

[ Zody ] I was a dinosaur kid. I was completely obsessed with the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in NYC growing up. I thought it was just the coolest place on the planet - a flawless repository for all human progress in learning about the history of our world. Imagine that… “progress”, the biggest myth of them all! Around the time when I first started to become aware of some controversies in the museum, regarding the balance between conveying objective facts versus legacies of colonialism and how museums can unwittingly reinforce prejudiced beliefs, was also around the same time where I started to become self-aware as a middle class white person in a liberal city that hadn’t done away with racism quite as much as I’d been raised to believe.

One of my favorite artworks of all time, which really changed the way I think about how museums portray historical narratives, was an intervention piece by Fred Wilson I learned about after moving to Baltimore for college in 2011. Wilson, a Black artist who had previously worked as a museum educator at AMNH, was given free reign of the museum archive of the Maryland Historical Society. He recontextualized artifacts such as the ubiquitous busts of white slave owners, and shone light on the absence of busts of significant Marylanders like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. In the center of the room was a silver globe inscribed with the word Truth. There was also an installation called “Metalwork” that arranged fine silverware alongside slave shackles, implying that one’s existence wasn’t possible without the other. The exhibition was called “Mining the Museum” and I think about it quite often.

[ Klara ] The museum is a place dedicated to time travel and to the impossible desire to bring dead objects back to life, to create order within the chaos of time passing. It’s a deeply human impulse: to collect, categorize, and display objects. The natural history museum is a particularly strange place. Sometimes it feels like visiting a zoo: it’s unnatural, the animals are miserable and hiding, and instead you see children crying, screaming, and banging on the glass. I also experience uncanny feelings when I see reconstructions of extinct human species, I feel alienated and slightly afraid. That’s why I work with these themes. Naturalistic representations of a material reality that no longer exists are already very close to fantasy.

[ Klara ] The collective and time-bound understanding of things is also something very beautiful, it’s the foundation of all human culture. I think a lot about collective human consciousness in relation to quantum physics. At the same time, I think most of what humanity has invented lately is rather embarrassing. And before that, it was probably just as bad, we simply don’t remember everything, so we fantasize about how natural and simple life once was. There are probably many collective secrets and forms of denial that we are afraid of exposing. But I don’t want to claim that I’m trying to diagnose either the present or the past. I’m interested in history because it exists, while at the same time it doesn’t.

[ Zody ] Maybe this is a non sequitur, but I’m constantly thinking about the lifespan of Soviet concrete, and how drastically the face of Tallinn will change once it reaches the end of that cycle. The concrete mixtures developed by the USSR and used all over between the ‘50s and ‘80s were generally projected to last only around 50 years. Of course these buildings won’t simply collapse — many are already beginning to be renovated into a more contemporary aesthetic. During my time in Estonia, I’ve become acutely aware that a Soviet appearance is not considered a desirable quality for a building or neighborhood to have.

I wonder what it will mean for Tallinn’s relationship to history once the visible vestiges of Soviet occupation disappear. Will that period begin to feel more like the era of Danish occupation, i.e. an antiquated chapter in the history of a city so thoroughly transformed that the past becomes difficult to comprehend through the distance of time?

[ Klara ] Where the visible ends, the invisible has to begin. Mythmaking is the most natural way to fill gaps in knowledge or attempt to explain impossibilities. Political and religious mythologies are effective tools for persuading people, making them feel part of something meaningful, and legitimizing power. That’s obviously not always a good thing, but we all love a good story. I also love conspiracy theories. My favorite one is the idea that conspiracy theories themselves are a conspiracy theory.

[ Zody ] That’s funny, I feel like I used to enjoy conspiracy theories a lot more than I do now. Speaking of the search for ‘belonging’, I used to be really into Discordianism, which for those unfamiliar is a chaos-oriented parody religion that started in the 60s. It presented itself as the antithesis of more popular religions’ claims to make sense of the world. One of the tenets of Discordianism is that every man, woman, and child on Earth is a Pope. Another one is that all conspiracy theories are unequivocally true. There’s a really fun Discordian novel written by Robert Anton Wilson called “The Illuminatus Trilogy” which was an absurd attempt at synthesizing most of the famous conspiracy theories of the Western world (up until the time it was written) into a narrative format. I even went through the self-initiation ritual laid out in the Principia Discordia (the Discordian bible equivalent - more like a zine) to deputize myself as a Legionnaire Disciple. It involved drinking lots of wine and breaking into an abandoned Freemason mansion in my old neighborhood to hide secret documents in their toilet.

Nowadays, regarding using mythmaking to legitimize power, and how conspiracy theories play into that… after bearing witness to my home country’s seemingly endless spiral into the darkest and dumbest recesses of political paranoia, I feel like I’ve had enough conspiracies for at least a little while. I think it can be an intoxicating idea that there are nefarious puppet masters working behind the scenes of every earthly injustice, deliberately sowing psyops to disorient the unwashed masses… but currently I'm of the opinion that Arendt got it right; the reality of evil is far more banal.

[ Klara ] I don’t think we are borrowing anything from the future, but we are accelerating humanity’s downfall and I’m very much looking forward to the moment we finally drive ourselves to extinction.

[ Zody ] Coffee. At this rate, there will be a time in our lives where we’ve wrecked the biosphere of the planet to the point where we won’t be able to grow coffee anymore. Or at least it will become prohibitively expensive for plebeians like me. I’m very much not looking forward to that.

I think that there's something kind of technical about the characters, like they are mere figures, skeletal structures that the meat of the text clings to and is organised by.

The realest parts of the text are the site of the amusement park (which I imagined to resemble the very real Helsinki amusement park of Linnanmäki) and the anthropological observation that in certain cultures hierarchical roles dissolve and are reformed based on the seasonal cycle (which came up in the exchange we had in preparation for this exhibition).

To me the premise of this show also carried some kind of intertextual echo of the Stanley Kubrick / Steven Spielberg film A.I (2001). The celestial beings that conclude my story could be seen as a nod in the direction of the film.

The question of what the text is based on or where things come from is difficult to answer because the relationship between language and what language claims to represent is muddy and/or evanescent.

Despite completing a degree in writing I feel like I have significant difficulties understanding different species of texts and the various ways texts claim an adherence to the truth. In this case the text emerged from a relation; from this invitation to write in parallel to specific sculptural material. The realness of the text might be in the invitation itself.

My sculptures describe how very small details and nuances can dramatically shift perception and our sense of time. The reason they concern both the future and prehistory is that I constantly want to work with the idea of progress and regression as one and the same concept.

I’m interested in the idea of what is considered “human enough,” and why we as a species are obsessed with ranking everything, including ourselves, according to capacity and function. The drive to place oneself above others is, as we know, also a byproduct of the Enlightenment, which is where many of our ideas about humanity’s origins still come from. At the same time, we look backward in order to understand the present, or to find explanations for our innermost nature. In the end, it becomes circular reasoning. There are scientific misunderstandings, factual inaccuracies, and political and social implications in how we describe and want to describe human nature, and what is supposedly best or most natural for us as a species.

“The Enclosure of the Commons” refers to the socioeconomic transformation in Britain in which commonly shared agricultural lands were privatized and consolidated into the hands of a wealthy elite, stripping ordinary people of access to communal resources. This was the beginning of capitalism; rights were eradicated, millions were displaced, and the Industrial Revolution was catalyzed by forcing a newly landless class into wage labor. Similar forms of enclosure were replicated throughout the Western world.

As Jaakko mentioned, one of our conversations leading up to the exhibition centered on the idea that throughout history, some societies dissolved and reformed hierarchical structures according to seasonal cycles. This comes from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, which has been influential for all three of us. The fact that a police force or a governing body can appear and disappear between seasons, and that this existed as a legitimate social model in the historical record, has very exciting implications for me.

I feel like I’m constantly seeking out historical examples challenging the assumption that our current systems are inevitable. It’s easy to think that capitalism, state violence, or social inequality persist because they’re unsolvable constants of human society. But anthropology shows us that human organization has always been far more fluid and experimental than we tend to imagine. Our current model is only one arrangement among many that have existed across history.

“Farmer in the City” in this context could represent the feeling of being a foreigner in a strange land (something I relate to) where commonly accepted local laws and beliefs seem absurd and strange. I think that sensation comes through in the sculpture’s clownish appearance; the Pinocchio nose is a motif I’ve been revisiting in my work as a semiotic device that frames the figure as a fool, or an unreliable narrator.

“Farmer in the City” is also the title of one of my favorite songs, a soul-crushing ballad by Scott Walker about the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini. The sculpture is covered in ceramic reliefs that work as narrative vignettes; one of which depicts Pasolini’s murder scene based on a newspaper photograph. Another recreates a drawing by Teodors Ūders I encountered in the Latvian National Museum in Riga called “Murderer” where a crazed-looking man stands over a lifeless pair of feet with an axe, while a woman tries to intervene. I guess I’ve been reflecting on conflicts across scales, from petty peasant squabbles to political assassinations, and the limited methods we seem to have at our disposal to address them, at least for now.

Klara Zetterholm (b. 1991, Stockholm) lives and works in Stockholm. A graduate of the Royal Institute of Art (2022), she makes sculpture and bas-reliefs that draw on scenography and prop-making to construct fictional narratives echoing archaeological and natural history displays.

Zody Burke (b. 1991, New York) is an American multimedia artist and musician based in Tallinn, with a BFA from MICA and an MA from the Estonian Academy of Arts (2024). Working across sculpture, ceramics, and sound, she builds cyphers that map American identity, inherited mythologies, and geological time.

Jaakko Pallasvuo  (b. 1333, Finland) is an artist and writer living in Helsinki. Working across writing, drawing and performance collaborations Pallasvuo's practice is an open question about power and the nonsensical.

Credits:

Interviewed by Diandra & Paula
Graphics by Zody Burke
Photography by Stanislav Stepashko

When Spring comes I am the police. I have a mantle of rough hide. I have a baton. I walk around. I patrol. I tell people to move. If they don’t follow my orders I hit their calves with the baton.

It’s a season of uncertainty. Bad omens, rapid movement in the sky. The birds don’t fly across it as expected. There are warning signals in the air itself. I must ensure compliance. We move through the Spring as one.

Summer comes around and people stop taking orders from me. I no longer have a superior. I am not part of a chain of command. The need for order is no longer felt. The absence of order produces a more complex order. I throw my baton into the river. It floats. It is carried away. It was really just a large stick. I drop my mantle. It is saved for later.

I’m unwrapping my feet. Then the soles of my bare feet touch the ground. The whole tonus of my body can change. I walk in a different manner. My summer gait is a prance and a strut. I remember that I am able to dance. I dance with the others. They do as they wish. We are kissing each other.

In the Autumn things get serious again. I am sent out into unknown territory. In the Autumn I am a seeker. I am a pair of eyes and ears. I am the tip of the tongue that tastes the new. I feel free in my mission, but it is a negative freedom. I move through the boundless landscape alone.

At night I am cold. I am very nervous. I try to impress on my mind what I have been able to observe. I am already rehearsing a story to myself: the true story that I must tell to the others upon my return.

I am fishing. I am hunting flightless birds and high-strung rodents. But I am also prey here. In the night a big cat approaches silently. I am half-asleep. The big cat attacks.

As the big cat claws at me, I know the fear of the smaller animal. I am the small animal that knows fear. I escape by crawling into a narrow crevice between two boulders. The big cat cannot follow me there. I am bleeding and the big cat can smell it. I hide for what feels like an eternity. Finally, the big cat gives up on the notion of having me.

I return home, wounded. The reunion is bittersweet. Autumn is turning to Winter. Key parts of me are infected. I won’t live to see another Spring. The mantle will be worn by another. They’ll be the police. I’ll become the river. Before that I will tell them a story of what is also out there.

The one who can see far brings a secret object to my deathbed: the remains of the brain of a forefather, transformed into black glass during a volcanic event. It’s not only the sky that is shifting. The ground we act on is in motion. The ground scrapes against another ground and smoke might rise; lava is known to have spilled out from the depths.

I am lying on my deathbed, holding a fragment of glassy, gloss-black brain against my skin. I am kissing the vitrified mind. The brain smells burnt. I am tasting the word vi-tri-fy. For a moment I can see the way the future will unfold.

She is wearing a black polo neck sweater. She’s at a debate. She is twenty years old. She has begun her studies at the university. She is at the political science department with other people who were contentious, serious, and mostly tolerated in high school.

Her analytical mind is separating the gestalt into distinct parts. Her mouth forms sentences that cascade into paragraphs, chapters. Her mind will never be as sharp as it is now. She and her university friends sit in their critical circle in the university café. If they smile, the smiles are narrow.

At home she looks for clean clothes in a large, dim heap of textiles scattered on the floor. She has a hard time finding what she is looking for because all her clothes are black. She has read some research on how wearing black is associated with authority, professionalism and emotional control. She wants to be perceived as an authority on something. The black clothes are also part of a kind of mourning she is in. She’s mourning her life. Adulthood has been a real disappointment so far.

She has moved in with her partner. They are fixing up the kitchen in their just OK rental flat. They’re dropping things, making a lot of mistakes with the work. On the first of May they go to a demonstration. She’s holding hands with her partner as they, obliviously, walk into a cloud of still-lingering tear gas. Then there’s coughing, tears and muci flow, and her face is a red balloon, suspended above her black polo neck sweater.

Masses gather in front of the parliament building. Others are chanting slogans, cheering at the turnout. She stands there silently and tries to stare through the granite exterior of the parliament. She wishes to see further, past this temporary projection of power.

Later, she and her partner have a fight. She hones her intelligence on their weak feelings for each other. She dismantles their whole thing. Her partner is awestruck and kind of disgusted by her. She packs a couple of things. She is not in tears. She has to look for some place to stay. But first she goes online and shops for a bright orange bomber jacket.

The Spring term is coming to an end. She doesn’t text her university friends back. The summer break is long and she finds a job. This summer she is working as a ride operator at the amusement park. There are broad vertical stripes in mint and violet on her work uniform. In the changing room mirror she observes her uniform and her newly tanned face. She no longer looks like she’s deep in thought.

She’s operating a wooden rollercoaster that smells like pine tar. The rollercoaster is on a hill overlooking the rest of the amusement park. She can actually see the whole city from the summit of the ride.

She cannot know that nine hundred years earlier my remains were buried on the hill where the rollercoaster now runs. I did not become the river. I remain under the ground. Anyways, she’s not thinking back that far. The rollercoaster itself, fifty years old, looks ancient to her in this accelerated world. The wooden rollercoaster is creaky and slow next to the airbrushed, seamless, flashing amusements of the contemporary moment.

She reads up on how the amusement park came to be. The amusement park is in a neighbourhood where factory workers lived in some of the first modern apartment buildings in the city. Most of the workers ended up in the war. The ones who stayed in the city lived through repeated bombings.

The amusement park could be understood as a gift: peacetime fun in a city that survived, a city that still had its industries and its workers. The city was growing rapidly. The supply chains were not global yet. Trade wasn’t free, exactly. Many useful things were being produced or assembled nearby.

The amusement park rides are industrial machines, she thinks. They were built to move the bodies of the workers and their children, to make heads dizzier. There are games where you can’t win, games that are just supposed to disorient you. The sense of disorientation is called ”fun”. It’s the situation at hand.

There is something touching about these older rides to her. She perceives them as the eccentric siblings of the rational tools and vessels of modernity. The madness of the rides is not as disguised. The rides are an open-faced excess. They are stars.

The madness of fuel was the madness of the assembly line was the madness of the radio broadcast was the madness of the battlefield was the madness of these amusements – enough to make one's head spin.

Working at the amusement park does make the magic dispel a little. The ride operator of the old rollercoaster must remain standing in the last car of their train and guide the rollercoaster through its predictably amusing journey over and over and over and over again. By the end of the summer she has back pain resulting from hundreds of repetitions of the same bumpy ride.

Day in, day out she observes the same delight, the same recklessness, the same fear and the same nausea on the faces of her passengers. It’s like she works at a factory that produces affects.

She works long hours for a low wage. She works so parents and children can partake in managed feelings of danger. She works for the unsupervised teenagers moving through the amusement park with shoplifted bottles of Malibu liqueur poorly hidden in their oversized clothes, waiting to be thrilled.

Autumn comes, as does the end of her time at the amusement park. She is happy to put her black polo neck sweater back on. Back at the university her intellect is more cutting than ever. She makes her hapless professors cry. She doubts she will ever love again. She slams a large, dusty, leather-bound book shut.

She is smoking a cigarette by the imperial, symmetrical entrance of the university. The wind keeps changing its direction. Dead leaves are dancing on the street. A wet leaf lands on her left cheek in the late afternoon darkness. She feels experienced and wise. She’s seen it all by now.

They enter the site in Winter. They uncover these things. They find the skull of the big cat. They find the mantle of the ur-police. They find her bones and some of her later jewelry. I’ve been dead nine hundred years longer than her, but she’s been dead for thousands too. Her black clothes have been consumed by the earth.

They find my remains and pieces of the ceramic vessels that were buried with me. They find nine long nails that did their part in keeping the rollercoaster together. They find the brain vitrified into glass.

An animal is a living being that feeds on organic matter. An animal must eat others that have lived. We are some interesting animals to them. We have much in common with the other animals, and less in common with them. Maybe we could relate to their curiosity: the eager and intrusive way they study the remainders.

They are from the sky. They are celestial bodies. They don’t know any ground. They will not return to a ground. They are drawn to these grounds like we were drawn to the stars that glimmered out of reach.

We never got to walk on the surface of a sun, but it is possible for them to descend to us, excavate us, tunnel through the ice, the dirt, any layer of rock. And they can easily reach the molten core we never touched – us dwellers of the surface of the crust of this planet.

They hold fragments of our bodies and the objects we’ve left behind. They notice the skulls of the beasts. They are not holding these things up to a light source. Their hands are the lights. They touch our remnants with their light-filled extremities. This light is a medium that both emits and absorbs information.

They want to know what it was like to be born from the earth and to drink and to eat and to seek on the earth – to think in a grounded way, to begin operations, to unearth the fuels and burn them up. They want to know more about the way we were amused.

They want to know about the flood, and about this permanent Winter, how there is now one season instead of four. It’s cool to them: how we became food and fuel, how we got ourselves compressed back into the demure ground now shrouded by ice.

They hold flower seeds in their light-filled hands and the seeds sprout in their light and grow into flowers and then the flowers wilt and then there are no flowers again. They wonder where the flowers came from, and where they went.

by Jaakko Pallasvuo