Conversations with Ants evening is a part of collaborative project led by choreographer Sanna Kekäläinen. The first stage of the project was realized in Portugal in September 2025. The concept of the work centers on the idea of visiting. Local performers will visit the work and continue the performance event with their own presentations. The evening in Helsinki begins with Conversations with Ants by Sanna Kekäläinen and continues to Ordinary Matters by the local project guest, choreographer Heli Keskikallio. Kekäläinen is working with author Kari Hukkila with the aim of linking the principles of ants’ activity to the theme of the Anthropocene.

Conversations with Ants is a long-term collaborative project with Kekäläinen&Company, Teatro Mosca and Lerena Teatro (Portugal) and Colectivo Glovo (Spain). With the underlying theme of ants, the project will be carried out in Portugal, Finland, and Spain. Kekäläinen works in each place with local invited guest artists who bring their own input to the project. In Helsinki the local guest invited is the Kekäläinen&Company residency artist Heli Keskikallio.

Sanna Kekäläinen: Conversations with Ants

Ants are a kind of biological and global double for humans: only ants and humans have spread all over the globe except for the Antarctic.

Speculative estimations have been presented that the common weight of all ants would be roughly equal to the common weight of all humans.

But there is also a difference of crucial importance: if all humans were to disappear from the earth, it would take a long time for the biosphere to recover from the damage humans have caused. If ants were to disappear from the biosphere, in a very short span of time, the whole biosphere would become uninhabitable.

The work consists of two parts:

  1. Encyclopedia of movement:

The starting point for working has been scientific knowledge about ants intertwined with our own images and memories of ants. The working method has been to transform the concepts of poetry and private memory into physical concepts. The work has also been furthered by some formal devices of art, such as the sestina developed in the 13th century poetry, in which the poetic movement (from line to line, from stanza to stanza) can be expressed in numbers continuing infinitely, and in this way suggests a comparison to the paths and movements of ants.

In conceptualization and physicalization, movement has been a crucial element alongside material elements, as well as factors creating meanings, such as a concentrated weight, steps, paths, locus, centripetal striving and decisions. The structure of the whole work consists of rules but requires new local decisions all the time.

  1. My dream is made of facts:

The aim for the text is to try to attain a “dialogue” with something that won’t hear us or respond to us, but which nonetheless is present and even necessary for our existence. Humans know next to nothing about ants. A common estimation is that about half of the ant species are still unfound, and of the taxonomized roughly 16 000 species of ants only some 50 are more or less researched.

However, the little we know about ants tells us things that go beyond our imagination — from cattle farming and fungi cultivation to remarkable architecture and the organization of work to mention a few.

Thus, the dialogue, as necessary as it is impossible, will rather be a dialogue with our own memory, with our own assumptions, with our own future and with the basic conditions of our existence, but referring to them through the ants.

Heli Keskikallio: Ordinary Matters

Choreographer Heli Keskikallio draws on everyday materialities in the performance Ordinary Matters on which she is working in the Kekäläinen&Company residency. The performance builds through a long process as a series of performance versions that will be presented in different places and occasions during 2025 and 2026. In her work Keskikallio approaches everyday experiences as some kinds of sensory and imaginary openings, perceiving the complex and often invisible relations that exist between us and our surroundings. As performers Keskikallio is joined by everyday objects she has brought from home and that she has a personal relationship to. Ordinary Matters brings about everyday poetics and the familiarity and estrangement inherent to everyday experiences. The performance asks: how do we become shaped through the constant interactions with the things and objects surrounding us?

This evening is a part of the Focus on the Local Landscape within the frame of Moving in November.

Choreographer Sanna Kekäläinen places the tension, the difference between the bodily and the abstract, on the gaze. This difference has echoed in her work by other, analogous differences: between public and private, spectacle and intimacy. In her work, she has also addressed the problem of the stage: in awareness of its paradoxical nature, she has formulated the methods ’Private stage’ and ’Open score’. Sanna Kekäläinen breaks viewing habits with her radical performances and passionately brings into focus our crucial existential questions. From the starting points of her thinking like feminist philosophy, gender politics and psychoanalysis to texts and writing with the body with highly original movement, Kekäläinen has created ways to intertwine the private experiences of the body with wider social connections.
Kekäläinen is known for her works which pointedly comment on current topics and have strong and solid content. The themes of her works have travelled through gender diversity, shame, global inequality, the community’s attitude to mental health problems and madness, she has delved into researching the alarming state of the earth and the undeniable main role of humans in driving the eco-catastrophe. The works have been characterized as bold, thought-provoking and uncompromisingly high quality, both in Finland and abroad.
“Kekäläinen’s stage is loaded with wounding intellectual dynamite. Its power of explosion is directed towards the cruelty of capitalism, the perversions of the society of spectacle, towards gender as a disciplinary action or relations to otherness and the other – particularly when that ‘other’ is oneself. Kekäläinen is guilty of cutting the mainstream’s spectacular images into pieces, of exploding them, so that the silent and innocent knowledge residing under the image – in the body itself – can be revealed.” Riikka Laakso: The Naked Stage of Sanna Kekäläinen

Heli Keskikallio is a Finnish choreographer, dancer and pedagogue based in Helsinki. She works with performance, dance and multimaterial bodily thinking making performances and performative events, facilitating artistic meeting places, curating and organising artistic happenings, teaching and writing texts on the body, dance and the artistic working structures in different contexts.
In her choreographic works Keskikallio is interested in the processes and different registers of bodily thinking. Making art is her way of practicing ecological sensitivity and speculative somatics that she approaches through sensuousness, flesh, and the extra linguistic expressivity and sensibility of bodily beings. She wants to cultivate sensuous ways of knowing and embodied thinking into this world that she feels is pierced through reason, making sense, and algorithms.

Kari Hukkila is a prolific dramatist, essayist and novelist. In his work personal history and the collective memory of Europe intertwine in a way that is exceptional in its erudition, accessible in its deep emotion. He began writing drama texts in the context of postdramatic theatre of the 1980s and has since written several dozen drama texts. His essays cover a wide spectrum of topics from different art forms to personal experiences, many of the latter are characterized by the connection of literary and philosophical themes to Algerian immigrants in France. His first novel One Thousand an One was published in 2016 by Teos. English translation came out in New York by Contra Mundum in 2023 and a German translation is forthcoming by Droschl in 2026. The novel is the first literary work impregnated by his long-term work with ants, in which he has tried to find literary and formal appropriations for his writing from the work of ants, from the path formation, the organization of the ant colony, communication, decision-making in task allocation and building activity. He has presented his ant poetics in Paris (La Maison de la Poésie) and New York (Contra Mundum). Currently he is working on a novel that will be published by Teos in 2026.