Premiere on Fri 4.10. at 18
Second performance Sat 5.10. at 15
MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre, Tallberginkatu 1 C
00180 Helsinki
Duration approx. 1h 15min, after the performance a short discussion with the artistic group.
Tickets starting from 8 €
Service fee is +1,25 € per ticket 
You may buy tickets only from HS Menokone -websales.
Buy tickets here: https://www.hs.fi/menokone/events/137135
The Other Spaces Live Art group has become renowned for its performative enactments, where it embodies more-than-human phenomena and states. This time, the transformative exercises the group has developed study the most heightened form of human experience, the enlightenment.

Traditionally, that state of spiritual perfection has been described by words like awakening, happiness, freedom, joy, freedom, serenity, compassion, equality, emptiness, and wholeness, and it has been searched for within different traditions of meditation. All meditation is based on certain body techniques, which often are strictly codified and hard to learn and practice. At the same time, everyone has every now and then insightful moment, which, like enlightenment, may have a deep impact on a person´s life. Those ”little enlightenments” may occur for instance in nature, in art, while making love, giving birth, being drunk, or in other exceptional or extreme states.

Enlightenment Machine focuses on those momentary experiences, trying to find simple technical means for producing them alone or together, and over again. Could the spiritual quest become a matter of a new kind of imagination, experimentation, play and common invention? How to make it accessible and practicable for all?

Enlightenment Machine calls for the update of the modes of spiritual ascesis without banalizing them. At the same time, it challenges us to ponder our relation to the contemporary enlightenment industry, which works in conformity with the self-centered performance economy.

Artistic planning and execution:
Esa Kirkkopelto
Ilmari Kortelainen 
Minja Mertanen
Paula Tella

The pioneering Finnish Live Arts Collective Other Spaces is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Over the years, Other Spaces has developed into one of the most significant and international performing arts groups in Finland, with its own unique aesthetics and artistic practice.
Over the years, Other Spaces has developed more than 200 physical and collective exercises. A common theme of the exercises is transformation and familiarization with forms of being and experiencing that are foreign to humans. The group has presented and taught these exercises at various events and workshops.

Working group

Esa Kirkkopelto is philosopher, artist-researcher and performance artist. His research focuses on the deconstruction of the performing body both in theory and in practice. He is interested in the compositionial aspects of reality in a posthumanist perspective. Kirkkopelto is the founding member of the Other Spaces live art group (2004–). 

Ilmari Kortelainen (PhD) is a teacher of body consciousness and body philosopher, who teaches at the University of the Arts Theatre Academy. Kortelainen’s research focuses on different forms of meditation, social somatics and extended embodiments, on which topics he has lectured at universities around the world. As a performer, Kortelainen has explored body-conscious experience in Katariina Vähäkallio’s choreography Tauluja ja embollisia luentoja 2020 (Paintings and Bodily Lectures 2020).

Minja Mertanen is a dance and performance artist from Helsinki. She has graduated as a dance teacher, dance and movement therapist and yoga instructor and is currently studying somatic movement therapy. Mertanen has worked actively at the Reality Research Center, Bluckhouse and the Other Spaces collective. Mertanen has specialized in butoh, which she teaches and with which she performs in Finland and abroad, especially in Spain and France in recent years.

Paula Tella is a Helsinki-based visual artist, performance artist and yoga teacher. Tella works on the fringes of performance art, and extensively in the visual arts field using a variety of media. She is interested in the meaning of repetition in the process, different interstitial spaces and how the body’s internal essence or experience is manifested externally. Tella has been actively involved in the Other Spaces group, especially between 2009 and 2017.