Originally organised in connection with the Venice Biennial, the fifth Uniarts Helsinki Research Pavilion hosted a series of artist and artist-researcher residencies during spring 2023 and culminated in an on-location exhibition and event on 5th to 21st June 2023 in HIAP, Helsinki. The residencies in April and May were organised in cooperation with Uniarts Helsinki, Helsinki International Artist Programme (HIAP) and the Saari Residence maintained by the Kone Foundation.
Coutts participated as part of the artist's collective The Fiction Group on a project titled 'Weather Stop Fiction Stop'. The Fiction Group is formed of – Adam Kaasa, Nicky Coutts and Jessica Wiesner (also Shehnaz Sutterwalla and Holly Graham). The aim of the group is to experiment with fictioning as a critical form, one that acknowledges queer, black and brown voices and interspecies imaginaries, exploring under-represented voices and positionalities.
'Weather Stop Fiction Stop'. was a durational fictioning that took place during a research week at the Kallio-Kuninkala Residency in Finland. Two devices were used to navigate the week as generative research in progress: the impulses of punctuation and of weather. Both devices opened up means of crossing, connecting, extending, eliding, containing, and spilling out and in through the multiples of the seemingly disparate and individuated fictionings. Fiction in this context is a foggy technology of scale, transgressing relations of size, distance, volume, or comparison through the climatic conditions of punctuation.
The Fiction Group writes to prompts as its art fiction method. The question of the ‘prompt’ acts as a metaphor for both being ‘puzzled together’, and the act of puzzling. Each member suggests a text, image, sound, place (the prompts are always evolving) and the group participants respond individually in writing. The texts are then collectively discussed. They approach this as a radical archival gesture for thinking about how knowledge exists, is presented, animated, reconfigured, and how we might expand the process through altering the conventions of knowledge. Language and its deployment are key, and the group use the language of fiction to write syntactically to the possibilities of ‘found’ objects and beginnings. They aim to expand the language of fiction from text to new experiments in voice and gesture.
The residency ended in an exhibition at HIAP Helsinki.The Fiction Group physically made, performed and photographed the weather tools they had described in their fictions out of materials lying around to form works for the show.
