Vappu Jalonen

Good Life

Sound and speech performance, part of the exhibition SamArtBete / CollArtBoration, curated by Galleri Syster, GlogauAIR, Berlin, 2018

 

It is 2015, it is summer, I am doing a five month artist residency in Brandenburg. Right before it, things were not going well. I was sitting on the bed watching TV series with a tight almost ache in my chest and head, taking liquid valerian, and thinking I need to stop doing all these things without pay or for a very small pay. I need to stop paying rent for gallery spaces. I need to stop stressing out all the time. I need to stop competing against my friends.

In the residency it gets better. I have the biggest studio I have ever had, someone cleans my room which feels weird but I get used to it, there is food prepared for me, I have a grant. The place is surrounded by a park and a production forest and roller skating paths and the house, the castle, is full of instruments I otherwise never get to play. Sometimes it feels like a sanatorium.

I start doing two things: playing instruments I have never played before and doing endurance sports.
The instruments: a grand piano, a harpsichord, an electric guitar I brought with me, singing when I am alone in the studio building, sometimes getting the key to the church to play the pipe organ.
The endurance sports: running, roller skating and biking.

I pretend though that I do something else, something I am at least somehow professional at, and that can be called a practice, not a hobby.