Last Friday, I attended a performance the artists themselves describe as a “multidisciplinary work for human voices, French horn, video and binoculars.” Watching Celestial Navigators, I found my thoughts returning again and again to an earlier art experience. Almost imperceptibly, the exhibition Chorus sinensis, which I had seen a few years ago at the Pori Art Museum, came to mind as if the performance’s engagement with navigation and getting lost were continuing a conversation that had already begun back then. The connection is not straightforward, but it reveals something essential about how we perceive nature and our place within it.

But let us begin with last Friday. The three performers of Celestial Navigators — Tytti Arola, Annika Fuhrmann and Elena Kakaliagou — enter the stage accompanied by a narrator’s voice. The way the narrator frames them evokes a nature documentary. Although the voice describes what I assume to be the performers’ own experiences, they are referred to impersonally as female 1, female 2 and female 3. These experiences revolve around getting lost and uncertainty, manifesting on both small and large scales: from losing one’s way in a literal sense to doubts about career choices and feelings akin to impostor syndrome.

Against this human uncertainty, the work sets the instinctive certainty of migratory birds. Their V formations appear efficient and purposeful — almost enviable.

The piece ultimately unfolds as a network of associations around navigation, operating simultaneously on visual and auditory levels and creating unexpected connections. In one sequence playing with light and shadow, the sextant handled by Tytti Arola recalls, both in surface and silhouette, the French horn played by Elena Kakaliagou. Modern navigation also enters the frame: in one extended passage, the performers form a human flock that blindly follows the voice of a navigation system. The scene inevitably brings to mind the recurring news stories of drivers who end up stranded on ski tracks after trusting GPS instructions over their own senses.

The work’s focus on uncertainty and lack of direction stands in striking contrast to the sense of control on stage. The performers’ effortless virtuosity — shaped by years of practice — alongside the focused, meticulous work required by the piece, for instance in its use of live electronics, makes it clear that each member of the ensemble has a precise understanding of both the work and their role within it.

The relationship between music and natural imagery is equally compelling. While the music incorporates numerous references to nature, the work seems at times to ironise a romanticised view of it. This is suggested, for example, in a passage where the narrator explains how the French horn produces wind-like sounds. I understood Annika Fuhrmann’s various bird-like vocal techniques in a similar way.

Celestial Navigators quickly brought to mind Chorus sinensis, a video work, accompanying essay and photographic exhibition that focused on the cormorant — one of the most disliked birds in Finland. Its colony life is often perceived as destructive: its droppings kill the greenery that people find aesthetically pleasing.

Cormorants were hunted to extinction in Finland by the early 20th century but have since returned under protection. During their absence, Finnish nature was represented in art in many ways, yet the cormorant had no place in that narrative. The exhibition asked whether alternative stories about the bird might be possible. Is this a bird worthy of song? Could there be poetry about a bird that neversang, one whose very presence disturbs?

The exhibition revealed something fundamental about our relationship to nature. The images of the colonies were visually striking, yet they disrupted the traditional idyll of landscape imagery. How should we respond to a nature that does not conform to human narratives? We perceive the cormorant’s traces as destroying a nature we value — but we might do well to remember that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Although Celestial Navigators and Chorus sinensis address very different subjects, they share a kind of posthumanist perspective on nature that feels refreshing, particularly in a Finnish context that often emphasises a harmonious connection to it. Both works foreground a sense of separation — highlighted in Celestial Navigators by the use of binoculars, positioning the human as observer — and, through this, expose the problematic nature of our relationship to the natural world. The problem may lie in the very idea that we should have a 'relationship' to nature at all, rather than understanding ourselves as part of it.

The V formation traced across the sky in Celestial Navigators and the stark colonies of Chorus sinensis thus come to stand side by side: one representing an order we admire, the other a trace we would rather not see. Together, they sketch an image of nature that does not ask what it should look like.

‍

Featured photo: Roman Odjinud.

‍

Works

Celestial Navigators in Toinen kerros, Helsinki (March 2026)

Tytti Arola, Annika Fuhrmann, Elena Kakaliagou

Chorus sinensis in Pori Art Museum (from June to September 2022)

Curating and production: Ulla Taipale
Cinematography, sound recording and video editing: Jan Eerala
Composition and sound recording: Laura Naukkarinen
Essay and research on bird literature: Karoliina Lummaa
Costume design: Merja Markkula

‍