Future Past in Linnaniemi (2023)
Future Past in Linnaniemi (2023) was a site-specific live performance and installation by Suvi Tuominen, created for the New Performance Turku Biennale 2023 to respond directly to the rapid urban transformation of the Linnaniemi port area and the development of the upcoming Museum of History and the Future in Turku, Finland. Engaging deeply with the maritime landscape and historical port district surrounding Turku Castle, the work questions the linear posture of thinking that assumes the past smoothly transforms into the future.
By employing radically ultra-slow movements, Tuominen actively disrupts digital pacing and resists contemporary "presentism"—the constant state of urgency and instantaneity imposed by technological advancement—as well as "chronowashing," a deceptive practice where institutions use superficial long-term planning and monumental museum horizons, or temporal marketing to obscure immediate socio-political inequities. Through this physical disruption, the performance successfully punctures these sanitized institutional timelines, ultimately proposing non-linear, extended forms of experiencing time and space.
‘’..the performance seems to play on that difficulty, bending the logic of temporal dependencies. It
seems to question whether we can imagine the future based on the past and understand the past
based on the present. In the transparent tunnel, the performance makes time move back and forth
as the performer moves back and forth in repetition in a slightly different version of now. In this way
the future is stopped, postponed, too easily present, already over, and the past is too contemporary,
too much bound to the future… Tik Tok videos, on the backdrop of the visualisation of the future
Turku harbour, where the castle always takes the main spot and looks very, very clean and tidy and
exactly the same as right now, future Suvi asks visitors of the museum, which is their favourite toilet
around here.’’ -Karoliina Kucia in Kritiikin Uutiset 18.7.2024
‘’The boundaries of the performance stretches when Tuominen is interviewing the future museum
visitors. Are we seeing into the future or just imagining it? Are we moving in dystopia or utopia or in
some place else where these intersect. Same interviews can be experienced in @linnaniemifuture
TikTok channel’'. -Frida Maria Pessi in Turun Sanomat 9.9.2023
photos: Jesper Dolgov