TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

2022, Installation; sound piece and whistles (wood, plastic, metal, ceramics, paper and reed)

The work Decoy is part of Leena Saarinen’s ongoing research on languages ​​of humans and other species and their connections, as well as interspecies communication and mimicry. Saarinen has studied decoy whistles used for hunting. She has built whistles that mimic the vocalizations of other animals, especially birds, from different materials and learned how to play them. Making instruments and learning to play them helps her to better study and understand sound as a phenomenon. She also explores the connection between mimicry and empathy, as well as the dark side of empathy; reading someone’s mind with the objective to harm them. In her own work Saarinen tries to find the potential connection between species through empathy and mimicry.