Everyday Priorities –
Art, Technology and Accommodations
On November 26th, Everyday Priorities – Art, Technology and Accommodations, returns with an evening of two new performative works by artists Flis Holland and Joy Mariama Smith that stretch the limits of communication, access, and perception. Together, the performances invite questions of connection, collectivity, and liberation – whether through an interstellar signal or the refusal of dominant sensory hierarchies. After the performances, there will be a discussion facilitated by curator, moderator, and educator Tracian Meikle.
Join us in Helsinki at Kanneltalo, for the next iteration of our ongoing collaboration with M-Cult (Helsinki).
Everyday Priorities–Art, Technology and Accommodations is a series of gatherings and new artistic commissions that explore, experiment with, and put into action alternative ways of commissioning, producing, and presenting artistic work, media art as well as dialogic and performative practices. As a collective (un)learning process, the project enhances the critical and speculative use of new technologies, different forms of hospitality, and access toolkits.
Flis Holland (UK/FI) tracks the collisions of neurodivergent, trans and celestial bodies. Using video, apps, and audio tours they try to resist visual capture and categorisation, to loosen the link between seeing a body and knowing it. Holland’s solo show “Off-Colour” was at Helsinki Art Museum in 2023. Recent group shows incl. Oulun Taidemuseo, Pori Biennial, Pitted Dates and Bemis Center, plus screenings at Rakkautta & Anarkiaa, Uppsala, Kasseler Dokfest and BAFICI. In 2025 they are supported by a grant from Taiteen edistämiskeskus.
Unansible
The Ansible network (1) offers instantaneous interstellar communication. No delays. No static. Seamless exchanges, said to dissolve the distances between us and foster understanding. Yet the signal, for all its perfection, feels alien.
In this small group audio performance, we will push the Ansible beyond its intended limits in an attempt to undo the network’s polished fluency. Alt texts for astronomical images from the James Webb Space Telescope are seeds for a dialogue that slows, thickens, and splinters, opening up space for more voices.
- Ansible (derived from ‘answerable’) coined by Ursula K. Le Guin, a concept developed in “The Dispossessed: an ambiguous utopia”, 1974.
Credits for all the alt texts used in the work: Alt text by STScI Space Telescope Science Institute, adapted.
Title source: alt text for James Webb Space Telescope images by STScI Space Telescope Science Institute. Image credit: Flis Holland
Joy Mariama Smith is a native Philadelphian currently based in Amsterdam, NL. Their work primarily addresses the conundrum of projected identities in various contexts. A sub-theme, or ongoing question in their work is: What is the interplay between the body and it’s physical environment?
Rooted in socially engaged art practice, they are a performance/installation/movement artist, activist, facilitator, curator, researcher, dramaturg and architectural designer. They have a strong improvisational practice spanning over 20 years. When they choose to teach, they actively try to uphold inclusive spaces.
Untitled [
Multi-lingual
Untitled [Scents Sense] is a performative intervention that uses access intimacy and seemingly supportive technologies to consider the implications of Anosmia (aka ‘smell blindness’) in relation to colonial histories, diasporic identities and the hierarchy of the senses. In this intervention, assistive technologies in conjunction with audio and video, accompany selected smells in which the viewer is invited to consider, borders, boundaries, access, power, policing, stigmatization as well as collectivity, liberation, intimacy, care, migration, and resistance through the lens of the olfactory.
Tracian Meikle (she/her) is a Jamaican-born curator, moderator, and educator based in Amsterdam. Her practice explores Black liberatory practices, ancestral connection and the power of imaginative worldbuilding. She has curated encounters, exhibitions and residencies across Europe and Africa, where freedom, disorder, embodiment and time function as both themes and curatorial methods.
Commissions are produced within Everyday Priorities – Art, Technology and Accommodations, a project by M-Cult (Helsinki) and Metro54 (Amsterdam) in collaboration with the Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux. The premieres at international theatre festival Baltic Circle are the result of a partnership between M-Cult, Baltic Circle and Kanneltalo.
Supported by the Ministry of Education and Culture, Finland and the Mondriaan Fonds, Netherlands.
Date: Nov 26, 2025
Time: 6pm (Local Time)
Location: Klaneettitie 5, 00420 Helsinki
RSVP Here
Accessibility
That gathering space at Metro54 is located on the ground floor.
The doorway is 100 cm wide.