I began this process as an autobiographical exploration, as much of the performance art landscape is. However, it is important to acknowledge the ‘why’ of autobiographical work - Heddon (2008) argues that the goal of working with personal material is to use it to “illuminate or explore something more universal” (p.5), which is what I strive to do in KODISTA (Of Home, Homing). In order to be completely transparent about my position, I want to talk about my roots in order to see how they affect my artistry and this piece.

I was born in Porvoo, Finland in 1999, and lived in Tuusula, Southern Finland until I was 19 years old; I am a Finnish citizen. When I graduated from high school I moved to Scotland to work and study, where I spent the next five years of my life, before moving to London in 2023. I have moved around and lived in different countries, leaving places and people behind in order to have new experiences, which has partially contributed to my feeling of home as a collection of moments in time rather than a physical place.

My grandparents grew up in the 1940s and -50s in Eastern Finland. They moved to Southern Finland for their adult lives, but they had a summer cottage in Kesälahti, Eastern Finland, by the lake Pyhäjärvi where they spent six to seven months every year, from February to September. My sister and I would also spend 10 weeks of our summer holiday there every year, from a young age until I was 16 years old. This cottage and spending our childhood summers there was a formative experience for me, and has had an indelible impact on my relationship to nature and how instinctually I grew up in contact with it and learned to utilise all of its elements.

This was the starting point of my research and the answer to one of the key questions in the final manifestation of the performance – Where do you travel in your mind when you think about home?

Growing up in Finland I spoke Finnish as my first language, my mother tongue. Now living, working, and studying in an English speaking country I find dissonance in my emotional response to the English language, and often find myself in situations where I fail to translate a Finnish word into English for its absence in the vocabulary. This became one of the central thoughts when working on KODISTA (Of Home, Homing), as the idea of home is strongly tied to language, both impact how we think and express ourselves.

I want to mention that I am white European and come form a middle-class background, I have not suffered forced immigration or displacement – and therefore I come from a position of privilege. I am a voluntary immigrant and have been fortunate enough to be able to move abroad to seek education. This is something I have thought about in lengths throughout working on this project, and I questioned whether I am the right person to pose these questions. But by sharing my experiences of home through this piece, I hope to lead by example in creating a space where everyone can reflect on these questions by themselves, and with other people.

Having thought through my positionality and what home means to me right now – I have discovered how that definition evolves constantly – this idea of home being immaterial, temporal and tied to memory, people and moments in time has grown to be at the core of that definition for me.