Harakka Island Radio 3: Island Ecologies

Saturday started with gentle winds and a changeable sky, filled as usual with the screeches of the watchful terns. Two guests were scheduled for today’s program, filmmaker and scholar Minou Norouzi and nature guide and photographer  Erkki Makkonen.

As the theme of the day was ‘Island Ecologies’, Sarah Washington’s “Analogue Birds”, was the first thing to play while preparing a late breakfast with strong coffee.

The day’s playlist contained – not without a reason! – Dinah Bird’s “Different Rains”, Peter Cusack’s Berlin magpie recordings, and Sebastian Pafundo’s wave song piece “Dorothy”.  The Brazilian composer and radio artist Roberto D’Ugo had sent three compositions, all of them exploring analog sound/field recording (and making) and/or the imagery of the sea and liminal loop rituals. We played “M.A.R.” and “Stranger in the Nest”.

Minou Norouzi is a documentary film maker and critic with a focus on documentary art practice, knowledge production, and diasporic cinema language. 
For Harakka Radio she had prepared a text about islands which playfully approached the different connotations of the terms ‘island’, Isola, isolation… – and the sociopolitical parameters attached to them: the use of islands as prisons, or as conveniently isolated spaces for the mentally ill or the dead, for example. The audio file they brought was a piece by artist Moses Sumney, cut together with her most central statements about islands.

We also talked about her involuntarily lengthened stay on the Helsinki island Suomenlinna during her HIAP residency in 2021: The rules of the Covid pandemic required her to extend her stay from 2 months to a much longer term.

Erkki Makkonen, nature guide, photographer, arrived around 3:30 pm. A photo was taken – on physical film material.

Maybe Erkki was the right person to ask why there no magpies could be seen on the ‘Magpie Island’, but hundreds of breeding barnacle geese and terns? Magpies reside here at a different time of the year he says, and explains, that it is only since 1990 that the barnacle goose made Harakka island its breeding place. Our talk meanders from the history of the island and the buildings on it (telegraph communications and chemical laboratory) to the educational work of the nature guides to the climatic changes evolving during the past decades. Having worked as a nature guide on the island for about 25 years already, Erkki drew on a deeper-than-usual sensing of the island’s nature. I wanted to learn more about possibly specific dealings with birds as more-than-human messengers between earth and sky. Owls, he says, would be the kind of bird that he has connected to in the past. Maybe, he says and laughs, he would even turn into one, in another life.

It is only in later research that I found out about the mystery tales about the barnacle goose which was believed to grow either from (equally black-and-white) barnacles clinging to floating timbers or, as this illustration below shows, from barnacle mussels hanging from a tree and then ripening into birds.

After the radio, we all walked over to the auditorium of the academy to witness a live painting video by Liisa Kallio, followed by a lecture about magic by the Karelian artist Joonas Jokiranta. Joonas had already started his performance, covering the blackboard with words and symbols. Luckily most of his words could be recorded as ‘impossible’ radio sorcery for Harakka Radio’s very last island broadcast, the Day of Magic!

Contributing radio artists (in loose order of appearance)

• Sarah Washington: Analogue birds
• Sebastian Pafundo: Dorothy
• y2mate.com-Moses-Sumney-insula (Track by Minou)
• Roberto d’Ugo: M.A.R.
• Dinah Bird: Different Rains
• Joan Schumann: Generative Engine
• Peter Cusack: constant_magpies_distant_sirens_dogs&voices; very_close_magpie_sparrows
• Roberto d’Ugo: Stranger in the Nest

This post is also available in: German