FrenchMottershead (UK): Five shops

FrenchMottershead present three interactive experiences, created in collaboration with local experts, who lead participants to actively explore their connection to the forest. From a choice of three: Fishing, Orienteering and Weaving, each experience offers participants an opportunity to play with the order of things in the forest on Karhonsaari. Each of the workshops is organized three times, and 15 people can attend at a time. Sign up beforehand or on the day, if spaces are left.

Understory 10: Fishing
Come fishing with the City of Kuopio’s Master Fisherman Esko Pekkarinen. Collect the materials to make your own tools and fish from the shore by day and spear fish from a boat by night (Tuulastus), before cooking up the catch to share around.

Understory 11: Orienteering
Be trained by orienteering expert Markku Ruotsalainen to understand what’s important and what to look out for. With a variety of tasks and actions to perform across Karhonsaari, you’ll experience the landscape in a playful, new way.

Understory 12: Weaving
Beginning with a forage around the island, locating and collecting raw materials, Anelma Savolainen will lead participants through weaving their own objects and weaving stories together in the creation of a new shared experience.

Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead are London-based artists whose work looks at the conventions of social exchange and its relationship to the public and private realms in which they are played out. Their work sets out to reveal often-ignored acts or communities and to subvert people’s expectations and the unwritten rules at play, mainly through tactical interventions that invite people to take part in a creative act. Their working process comes with a lot of communication and negotiation, and the outcome is often unpredictable, yet engaging and accessible. Their work has been said to achieve the popular ideal of raising people’s awareness of everyday life.

Esko Pekkarinen is a long-term fishmaster for City of Kuopio. His work includes promoting fishery, organizing fishing, planting fish, reconditioning water systems and organizing events.

Anelma Savolainen is an expert, artist and teacher in weaving. She enjoys using the traditional weaving materials like reeds, willow, birchbark, roots and straws, but in new ways. She integrates in her works techniques from other areas of handicrafts.

Markku Ruotsalainen works at the Arts Council of North Savo as a regional artist, and in this workshop is able to use his long-term hobby as a source of knowlegde.