PARIP 2005

International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005

Svinhufvud-Lockett: Lotta | UK/Finland

And I ask the audience to follow me over the threshold, and through to the kitchen. And we gather round the kitchen table and share moments from around this centre of the home: here you learn to eat; here you read Donald Duck every Wednesday after school; here you eat bananas and chocolate milk before bedtime, and Weetabix with milk and jam for breakfast. The kitchen table witnesses good and bad times: under it you kick the dog and apologise to it explaining you thought you’d kicked Dad; on its bench you arrange all the spoons in the house and establish a start for an orderly way of life; on its bench you pile every night the ‘kimpsut and kampsut’ to wear to school the following morning. Luce Giard writes of the home, and within it, the kitchen: “Our successive living spaces never disappear completely; we leave them without leaving them because they live in turn, invisible and present, in our memories and in our dreams. In the centre of these dreams there is often the kitchen, this ‘warm room’ where the family gathers, a theatre of operations for the ‘practical arts’, and for the most necessary among them, the ‘nourishing art’.”

A presentation that explores an individual’s experience of domestic space.

Lotta Svinhufvud-Lockett examines the history and current reality of her family home in eastern Finland. Built in the late nineteenth century, ‘Kotkaniemi’ was purchased by her great-grandfather, the third president of independent Finland, in 1908 and constituted the domestic space of her childhood. Recently, and in difficult circumstances, the house has been transferred to state ownership and converted into a museum dedicated to P.E. Svinhufvud, with her mother as chief guide. The presentation examines the mechanisms and repercussions - personal, familial, regional - of this change in status; the reordering of the house layout - with prohibitions of access and interface; the change in the nature of objects from family heirloom to national treasure; the addition and removal of iconic objects; the erasure of orders of marking caused by recent periods of habitation and memories of geographies of childhood. And it describes a series of performative interventions that provide an alternative interpretation of place.

The presentation examines the complex relationship between ourselves, our bodies and domestic space, our physical and sensual experience of place, and the impact a particular location can have on our lives. It considers performative practice, and the use of performance writing in its body of research, as tools of enquiry into understanding this particular space and the events affecting the space and the people inhabiting it; as well as opening up an analysis of the space through the examination of said performance practice within the fields of everyday practice, geographies of childhood and archaeologies of the contemporary past.

This presentation also discusses the use of mystory – a concept developed by Gregory Ulmer in Teletheory in 1989, a text that integrates academic, popular, disciplinary and autobiographical discourse. The presentation addresses the use and role of mystory as framework/theory for writing in my case of Practice based research. It will also discuss in some detail the positioning of the self at the centre of writing proposed by mystory – to do academic writing, one does not necessarily need to take the position, or the voice, of the objective, anonymous, authoritative writer/reader, but allow for other voices to exist within the text. This may open up unforeseen and unlikely, yet equally as significant, possibilities and understandings.

Lotta Svinhufvud-Lockett is undertaking PhD-research at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. 50% of her PhD consists of three ’Practice as Research’ performances, offering three different performative interpretations, and representations, of Kotkaniemi: a historical, familial, living house.