Gas | Teo Ala-Ruona TWAH (=These Worlds Are Here)

Helsinki-based performance and visual artist Teo Ala-Ruona will be in residence in Los Angeles for the month of July, producing a writing workshop, an exhibition and a performance. They are interested in generating new forms of collectivity, interdependence and futurities in artistic practice, while creating space for silenced, unheard or non-normative, queer and trans narratives and experiences. Drawing from techniques found in the fields of feminist pedagogy, contemporary performance and theater, activism, and literature, they create collaborative strategies for feminist speculative fiction in lived practice. Creating a context for collective sensitivities, affects and formations to perform, their work takes the form of speech performances, performative installations, workshops, a free school and various types of open events, often produced in partnership with fellow artists and working groups.

As part of their residency, Ala-Ruona will run a writing workshop titled TWAH (=These Worlds Are Here) for trans, nonbinary, queer people and women that will culminate in an intimate audio installation within Gas. Developed at NAVEL, Ala-Ruona’s workshop allows participants to LARP (live action role play) queer worlds as they write, asking them to experience and embody these imagined worlds at the moment of writing. Ala-Ruona says, “Writing is a political tool for naming, re-naming, making visible, audible and felt the dreams that we care for. Writing is also a vehicle—it moves, touches, orientates and re-orients us.” A chorus of words, both written and spoken, by workshop attendees will be the basis of the exhibition in Gas’s truck gallery.

Ala-Ruona will close their residency with the piece Toxinosexofuturecummings, staged at Human Resources. The work will be performed in collaboration with LA based trans- futurist and sound manipulator Scallion Chloe. The work is a futurist and pornographic solo speech-performance dealing with topics of sex, toxicity, hormones and gender. In the performance, sex is seen as an evolutionary and developmental process. It opens up a world in which materials and multispecies bodies infiltrate each other, giving and receiving pleasure. The world is thoroughly polluted, but possible, queer and trans: full of new pleasures and sexualities.

A zine publication featuring an interview with Teo Ala-Ruona and contributions by TWAH workshop participants will be available on-site and online. The print version will be produced as a limited edition fundraiser, and it will be available for purchase for $10.

This project is supported by Frame Contemporary Art Finland, the Finnish Cultural Foundation and Poets & Writers.

TWAH(=These Worlds Are Here) is a limited edition fundraiser publication, featuring an interview with Teo Ala-Ruona, contributions by TWAH workshop participants Angi Brzycki, Jessica Fee, Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai, R. Kauff, Arin Krausz, Julia Mande, Renée Reizman, Bridgid Ryan, Daviel Shy, Soffia Stiassni, Kristof Trakal, Annabel Turrado, Udita Upadhyaya and a custom risograph cover designed by Anni Puolakka.

Teo Ala-Ruona is a Helsinki-based performance and visual artist. His work focuses on queer speculative fictioning mainly in forms of performances and writing. Ala-Ruona discusses techno-trans-masculinity, sex, queer ecology and toxicity through re-defining language and narratives telling about pleasure and intimacy on a toxic Earth. teoalaruona.net

Teo Ala-Ruona