A Minore Amore
Jaakko Myyri (FI)
In the work A Minore Amore, conceived for the artist-in-residency programme FM[Ai]R, Jaakko Myyri deals in a multi-layered way with the preservation of queer stories around the quest for love. In collaboration with the Homosexuelle Initiative Linz (HOSI Linz), he built a digital archive that was filled with content in participatory workshop settings. The starting point was the artist’s reflections on the extent to which heteronormative environments influence the emergence and transmission of erotic terminology and intimate, everyday expressions.
The hay bale sculptures in the installation create a relaxed and rural-looking physical space. Visitors are invited to sit on them and watch the clouds. By scanning the QR-coded stones from the Danube, one gains access to a virtual place where digital clouds can be observed, the animated part of which is generated from the archive of queer stories and desires and contains text fragments that have been written and collected together by the contributors of the queer community in Linz. Like passing clouds or the clearing sky after a thunderstorm, they unfold metaphorical interpretations and invite visitors to reflect on the transience of conceptual connotations.
Jaakko Myyri (* 1991) is an Finnish artist based in Amsterdam. He has graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academie and since then his work paid close attention to the materiality and the knowledgeability of the processes carried into language, gender-roles acquisition and identity performance. His performative collaborations include the new media film “Offspring on springs” 2018, in which multiple scripts are played in parallel by people of all ages that affect the protagonist Skiver and the socially contextualized conformation to gender binaries – shown at a solo exhibition at NEVERNEVERLAND (Amsterdam).