The Wonderer is a piece of site-specific sound art that sends its experiencer on a guided walking tour along the Aurajoki river. This piece draws from the peculiar details of urban environment that tend to go unnoticed and the sensations associated with them, allowing the hearer to experience them on site.
This piece aims to make the chain of associations stemming from memory visible, associations the smallest sensory experience or seemingly inconsequential sight can trigger in the human mind. As it progresses, this piece also leads the hearer to immerse themself in their own mind through prompts and questions.
Mp3-players and maps are handed out in exchange for a deposit at the Kunsthalle, which serves as the base for this piece. For each spot on the map there is a track on the player that should be played at the corresponding site. The hearer may go from site to site in the speed and manner they choose. Despite being numbered, the sites can be experienced in any desired order.
This essayistic piece of urban art is an ode to pausing, to sensitively observing one’s environment, and to cherishing one’s own sensations and memories.
Suvi Nurmi is a Helsinki-based artist whose medium is words. Her pieces are site-specific text installations, text-based sound art, or communal poetry workshops that typically form into a part of public space in the interaction of the space and its users.
Nurmi achieved her Master’s degree in site- and situation-specific arts at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2011. She currently works as an independent artist while finishing up her degree in the Master’s programme in literary studies at the University of Helsinki.
The work is supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
