Tanja Tiekso
Tanja Tiekso (PhD) is a researcher, art theorist, essayist and experimental musician. Her research focuses on the concepts of avantgarde and experimentalism, poststructural feminism, posthuman theories, sound art and new and experimental music. Her Doctoral thesis (2013) in musicology concerned experimental music.
In her current artistic research project at Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki, Tiekso explores listening and experimental composition. Tiekso has published several articles, essays and art criticism in international and national professional journals and magazines, and has published a book on experimental music. Tiekso is also a translator of The Art of Noises [Hälyjen taide] by Luigi Russolo in Finnish. She has performed as a solo improviser and as a member of improvisation collectives, and as a singer-songwriter. Tiekso works as a part-time lecturer at Uniarts Helsinki.
At the UNM festival, Tiekso instructs a workshop on listening meditation. The exercises are partly based on the method of Deep Listening created by composer Pauline Oliveros (1936–2016). The theme of the workshop is plant breathing. The supplementary material consists of Emanuele Coccia’s book The Life of Plants: a Metaphysics of Mixture (orig. in French La Vie des plantes. Une métaphysique du mélange, Payot et Rivages, Paris, 2016). In the workshop, participants practice listening, breathing and examine the boundaries between the body, the environment and the soundscape, and improvise.