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25 August 2004, Helsinki, KIASMA Anna Kharkina interviews Marikki Hakola    We began our conversation with the discussion of Marikki Hakola's new TV film "The Bewitched Child", premiered on the 21st of August, 2004 in BioREX cinema (Helsinki).    MH: My new film is based on the opera composed by Maurice Ravel. The opera was — originally — composed for adults and not for children. It had its premiere in 1925. The text is very hard. It is like a trial for a little child. I treat this child in a more friendly way than they did 80 years ago. The piece had been totally different at that time from what we did today. Nowadays, I think, the text and music are both very suitable for the young audience. AK: Did you want to do this work for children? MH: Yes, sure. This is a film for a whole family, of course. It is also for people who are interested in electronic images, dance or classical music. But yes, we did it really for children of over 7, 8 years old. I think the most ideal audience will be around 10 years. AK: This work reminds me of pieces made for children on Leningrad Television that I saw when I was a child. But did you have in mind other children programs when you made it — performances or fairytales? MH: Yes, of course. And this opera is originally a part of the long history of legends that made audio-visual works. And at that time, in 1925, when this piece was composed, there was a boom of this kind of fairytales, fairytales telling about the relationship between Nature and the human mind. Prokofiev made this kind of work… AK: Yes, «Peter and Wolf»… MH: And some others, for example, the Czech composer Leos Janacek also made a piece like this called The Cunning Little Vixen. So if you know the history of opera, it is very clear where this kind of tradition comes from. AK: I wanted to ask you about the beginning of your carrier. One article which I have read says that you were the first Finnish video artist. MH: Yes. That is true. AK: Could you tell us a little bit more about that time? MH: I started to make videos when I was a student. I was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1980s — from 1980 to 1984. It was the time when there was no such thing as video art in the Scandinavian art field at all. My fellow students and I were in the first place interested in making performance and land art, environmental art. And our first resort to video equipment was because we wanted to make documentaries of some of the processes we did in the middle of woods with no audience. So we needed some kind of a documentary tool. And photography was not good enough because we needed the aspect of duration for our documentation; we needed a tool to record dramaturgical processes in time. And that is how I used video equipment for the first time. I think it was in 1981. We had a group called TURPPI. The name does not mean anything. It sounds like a bad word in Finnish but it is not actually. We were more interested in environmental questions and land art — primitivism, so to say. And together, we did two video pieces, «Earth Contacts» and «Deadline». And after a while it was obvious that I was hooked on the moving image editing process. I really wanted to learn more about that. When at the Academy, I also went to work as a trainee to a local Finnish video company. There I had the possibility to learn more about how to use the equipment. There was not video education in Finland at that time. The education in the field of video and electronic moving image was started by me in 1985 in the Academy of Fine Arts. After finishing my own studies, I immediately started giving the first courses at the same institution. Of course, there was the traditional film education in Finland, but its techniques and methods were very different. And definitely the context and conceptual thinking were different. Film makers in Finland just hated us to various degrees. They did not understand what we were doing. Visual artists had more understanding. In 1983, when we had a huge art exhibition in Finland called ARS'83, the first international video art pieces were shown to the Finnish audience. Maybe after that it became easier. Two works of our young student group were shown in Long Beach Art Museums only a couple of months after we had finished them. So actually my international carrier began immediately after we had made those early video pieces. Probably it was because that kind of stuff was not often seen. It also probably looked exotic because we were totally «in the middle of woods» and asked questions about Nature and human beings, and things like that. This was not so popular or in the main stream, not even in visual arts field, at that time. AK: How did you manage to persuade the authorities from the Academy of Fine Art to introduce this new educational program? MK: It was very difficult. When I finished my studies, there were big changes in that institution at that time. The status of the Academy of Fine Arts changed from private school to government-run art university. The administration was transferred from the Atheneum Museum and the school had a new head master, new teachers. A lot of other changes happened too. The Finnish field of art lagged far behind the European one. And the wind of change was strong enough at that time. Even this kind of new electronic art movement could be part of education — but at the beginning it was taught only few weeks a year, not all the time. And after 9 years, when I stopped teaching at the Academy of Fine Art, it was already the time when we got a good broadcast quality Betacam SP editing studios, etc. And there was even the new Department of Time and Space Based Arts established. And that all happened when I was teaching, it was a really big change. But I have not been now teaching since 1993, so a lot of has happened since that time too, during this ten years. AK: I also read that you are one of the founders of KROMA. MH: Yes. I am a founder and owner of KROMA. I do not know how many media art products we have produced, maybe 60 or 70. Also documentaries, lot of animations, short fiction, and installations. One of the biggest installation projects was by Pekka Niskanen. And a lot of other experimental and internet projects. It is our goal to make something on the edge, you could say. The media art product that needs a production company. There is no need for all pieces of art to produce it by using a production company. If a piece of art is so small in its production scale, there is no use for a production company. An artist can produce the piece her/himself. But with large scale productions it is easier — and definitely the only clever way to work — to get funding, to organize distribution. AK: How did you find the financial support to establish such a company? MH: Each work has been funded separately from the zero point. There is not funding for the company itself. This means that we are always in want of money, always in big troubles because the more experimental work you do the more difficult it is to get funding for the work. And it is more difficult to distribute it. You cannot count on the revenue from distribution. AK: Is situation the same now? MH: Mostly yes. Because there is no funding which would allow us to exist as a production company. The only funding we get comes to individual productions. And each production has to meet the criteria set by different funding sources. As was the case with my last film, for example. It took us 4 years to produce it, because it was so difficult to get the funding. It took not so long time to make it. We started shootings nearly exactly one year ago and now we have already finished the work. So most of the time we tried to get the funding. But it is the biggest production we have ever produced. So it is understandable. And the biggest production I have ever been directing. We had a problem how to explain what this new virtual set design was. Nobody knew anything about it, and we did not have all the equipment to make demos when I wrote the script and so on. But we knew that there would be this kind of equipment. So there were a lot of rocky stone walls between the first idea and the finished work. And it is always the same with new ideas or new makers. Of course, some filmmakers have already the reputation and references to show, but I have been producing very many works that were the first works of some people. Our aim as a production company was to bring young, new talents to this field, to try to make television people understand what the works of new makers were. It was very difficult but it was some kind of mission that we had. AK: Do you have connection with Television to show the works of your production company? MH: Yes, sure, because in Finland if you do anything with a bigger budget, it is really impossible to produce it if you do not have some kind of distribution deal with some of Finnish broadcasters. The money they give does not have to be big, but the other funding sources such as Finnish Film Foundation or AVEK, the Supporting Centre for Audio-Visual Culture, they have rules that you have to get this distribution deal before you get the professional funding. And also they insist that you should have a production company. So large scale funding is not possible to get, if you do not have a production company. You cannot get it as an individual person, because it would be legally very difficult situation if something goes wrong and so on. AK: So KROMA helps artists also with this. MH: Yes, KROMA has been working really a lot to make these television people and also film people in those funding organizations understand the field of new kind of experimental moving image. AK: And you were in the initiative group which established MUU gallery. MH: Yes. MUU as an association. And after few years AV-Arkki. I was one of the first heads of the board in MUU and I was 5 years the head of the board in AV-Arkki. Also we founded MUU media art festival. AK: Which still exists now. MH: Yes, but actually it has changed now. Its name and profile changed. I think it is very good that this has happened. Now it is called AVANTO. In this field things change so fast that you cannot use the same concept as did 10 or 15 years ago. But when we founded MUU it was in 1987… I had just produced and directed a lot audio-visual performances, and after that I had terrible depths and there were so many other people too, who had been working with this new performance, new audio-visual arts, electronic arts that totally felt themselves to be dropped out in the society in Finland. Even at that time we had a good support for traditional arts from the government but these new fields of art were totally dropped out. They did not match to any category. If government gave funding for example for classical music it did not mean that the same money could have been given to audio sculpture makers. And MUU was founded at the moment when there were people enough to shout together that this is now wrong. The name «MUU» comes from that when you apply for getting the funding from the government or different organizations, you have to put a cross whether it is a dance, theatre, film, music and so on, and then there is this «the others» — «muu». So this «The Others», this «Muu» came to be a name for the association. And in few months we already had over 300 members. All — professional artists and not only visual artists but composers, some experimental filmmakers, performance artists, dancers, architects, even some writers who worked with soft wares for first non linear writings. Very strange guys in 1987. AK: Did you have the support from the state for MUU? MH: Yes, after shouting for a year very loudly and making a lot of public collective performances and shows, yes, we got funding for this organization and we insisted that members of MUU must be representatives in the committees that make decisions on how the governmental funding is split between different fields of art. But actually only at the beginning of this year — 2004 — we have now for the first time funding for media organizations and associations of artists. It is for the first time that it is written in law now. Before it had been considered every year — the minister chose what to give to this or that organization. But now it is in the law that this field must get certain amount of money. It is really the big work done by a lot of artists and a lot of cultural and political people that the situation had changed. AK: Back to your earlier works. Have you experienced the influence of Nam June Paik? Visually they look in a way similar. MH: Maybe there are similarities in my early works and Paik„s in some very early works like «TV Garden». I saw Nam June Paik works for the first time when I was probably 21 years old. Actually, the very first video sculpture I had ever seen was made by Shigeko Kubota. She was actually Nam June Paik„s wife. I saw Shigeko Kubota„s works in the exhibition in Berlin in D.A.A.D. gallery. It really heated my head. Before I started to study visual arts I had made more music than visual painting. So I had this music background. When I realized that it was really possible to combine visual things with the time aspect I really felt that this was something that I now wanted to do. Being a very big fan of new contemporary music, I always looked for that rhythm and dramaturgic point of view which time aspect brings. When I started to do videos I enjoyed mostly editing. To do editing was the deepest thing in my emotional world when doing video works. AK: Have you made video installations as well? MH: Yes. I have made a lot of installations. Multi-TVset synchronized. In 1884 I made the first large-scale installation. It was in the gallery of the Old University House- it was an experimental gallery at that time. I made 10 monitors, 6 videotapes synchronized with the sound track, a 20 minutes“ installation. Compared with my early works like this first big installation PRE, maybe there was some kind of baroque in it, similar to Nam June Paik„s later works. AK: I saw your later dance piece «TransVersum» and it has the visual effects that Nam June has. MH: This is probably because of the technical luminance key effect used in it, it may be a technical question. Nam June Paik„s works are totally full of all kind of effects, details, so that he is totally losing the question of duration. There is no duration, they just go on… And in my work one of the most important things is duration. How things are developing in time and how things are developing in the dramaturgical way. But there is no dramaturgical line in Nam June Paik„s works at all. His works are just like fragmental patterns, the same as when you look at the fragments of a baroque building or you listen to phrases of baroque music. If you think about the real construction of Paik„s works — how it is done — there is not duration at all. So I cannot see so many conceptual similarities in my works and his. Maybe some visual technical similarities. I love colours. Nam June Paik loves colours too. AK: Do you know any recent Finnish artists who work in the same kind of visuality as you? MH: No, actually, I think that the contemporary field is very different now from what it was when I made my early works. I think that a very strong realistic boom is now on. Sort of psyche-realism you could call it. And the concept of many young makers is totally different from that in my early works. AK: Could you tell us more about your work in the 1990s? MH: During the 1990s I was mostly working with dance pieces. But also I was producing over 20 works of other media artists. So my 1990s is practically mostly producer„s work. AK: With what artists did you work at that time? Can you name some of them? MH: Pekka Niskanen, Teemu Maki, Minna Tarkka, who is the head of M-cult, we made a big drama documentary in Japan with her, Milla Moilanen, Raimo Uunila, video artist, Antti Hytti, documentary director, a lot of smaller scale dance and music videos. AK: Have you worked with international artists in KROMA or is it only for Finnish production? MH: Not so much with international artists, only in case if it is a collaborative production with some producers from Europe. It is absolutely impossible to get any funding for international artists in Finland. The most part of the funding must come from the country where the artists come from. Even the EU funding system works like that. You can be one of the collaborative producers group, and each can get a smaller amount from their own country. So yes, we produced documentaries with that method, but not media art. But the documentaries we have been producing are also about media culture or some point of view on art or the cultural changes; so even if it is documentary, the theme is often art and culture related. AK: Does KROMA distribute works? MH: Yes, from the very beginning we have been distributing our own works because there was not a good distribution system in the early times. But now we collaborate both with AV-Arkki and the Finnish Film Foundation. So it depends on what kind of film it is — if it is fiction, documentary or media art. It really depends on the genre and the target audience. AK: Is this film distribution system sponsored by the state? MH: Yes, partly, but again we have to apply for distribution funding to make international copies and to send those copies and do language translations and so on. So there is no direct system that works well for an independent producer. Yes, AV-Arkki gets money directly from the government, so if we collaborate with this kind of institution that does distribution you can say that the funding system functions already from the beginning of the distribution process. AK: On what project are you working now? MH: I am working on a big dance film project. It is a collaborative project of China, New Zealand, and Finland, and I am the executive producer and director. So we„ve been once to New Zealand and 3 times to Shanghai, China, to make shootings. I am bringing two dancers from China to Finland at the beginning of this December to finish the shootings in the studio. AK: Will it be a public performance that you are shooting? AK: No. I never do performance recordings. I„m only interested in choreography made directly for the camera. The world is full of professionals who can make that kind of performance recordings. It is not my job. Pictures: 1. «The Bewitched Child», dur. 47', 2004 2. «Continuum«Dur. 23'30" , 1999  3. «Triad», telepresence performance in Internet between Helsinki, Tokyo and New York

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