Today Is Our Tomorrow is an annual transdisciplinary public gathering taking place on October 8th, exploring the interaction between people, their acoustic worlds and the sounds of the environment that the listener hears and imagines. This years’ edition gives special attention to the voices of young people, and the politics of listening. The teen advisory boards of Index (Stockholm), and PRAKSIS (Oslo), and PUBLICS Youth have been developing new artworks with co-commissioned artists Harold Offeh, Laia Estruch, Irina Mutt and Sayed Sattar Hasan.

PUBLICS Youth have worked with invited artists Harold Offeh, and Laia Estruch as part of a cooperative learning and curatorial process. The workshop with Estruch grows out of an ongoing conversation between PUBLICS Youth, Irina Mutt, and Laia Estruch as part of Latitudes‘ current Parahosting by PUBLICS. Harold Offeh has been working with PUBLICS Youth on the political and cultural meaning of voice and play, and how those are made public. They have explored how voices appear in popular visual culture, questioning the relation between digital performativity and the politics of voice. Saturday’s presentation reflects on where the link stands between art making, play, and learning. Offeh and PUBLICS Youth consider how to host experiences of playfulness and voicing, specific to different generations and geographical contexts.

The evening program begins at 7pm with Eilien & Lenoczka who will create an audiovisual journey merging Finnish and Ukrainian landscapes. Eilien and Lenoczka work through sharing sounds and videos from their everyday life, and combine this to videos from performance artist Igar Melnik. Together these mesh up in an extraordinary mixture of electronic music, everyday documentary, stop-motion collage, performance video and VJ artwork.

Sound artist KMRU is developing a new soundtrack for an imaginary future festival as part of a longer commissioning process. Already in 2020, The Guardian described KMRU as “one of the leading ambient artists working today”, while Bandcamp called him “one of the most prolific and innovative artists in his field”. On Saturday at 8pm, KMRU presents his new work titled As Nature, which brings foreground field recordings and electromagnetic sounds from Nairobi. Some sonic effects are enacted due to human interaction with objects, while others sounds are consciously reproduced through the acoustic transmission of mutual interaction of magnetic fields. These fields are increasingly present due the constant fluxes of invisible, silent waves of open cables, electronic dump sites, and homes inhabited by people in these places. As Naturesequences and fuses an unseen sonic impression of these sound waves, amplifying them.

For the event PUBLICS is collaborating with We Jazz Record Shop. Neighbouring PUBLICS and being a significant part of Vallila cultural scene, We Jazz Record Shop is a vinyl first store specialising in jazz and other non-mainstream musics. The shop carries both new and second hand releases and it’s run by We Jazz Records, also a label that organises festivals, events and DJ sets. On Saturday between 7–9pm, a limited selection from We Jazz, including Peel (Edition Mego, 2020) by KMRU, will be available at PUBLICS.

Eilien creates music combining text-based coding, field recordings and their own voice. Behind Eilien-project Ellen Virman works as a sound and lighting designer, based in Helsinki. Lenoczka is a key figure in eastern Ukrainian underground scene working as a VJ, DJ, multimedia artist and procuder of festivals and events. Igar Melnik is a performance and video artist living in Kyiv. His work often combines buto and commenting outside world through his body. The three artists met at performance art festival Carbonarium,  Kyiv 2018. In 2019 Eilien and Lenoczka toured together in Kharkiv and Severodonetsk. This is the artist’s first performance together in Finland.

Joseph Kamaru, aka KMRU, is a sound artist and experimental ambient musician, raised in Nairobi, Kenya, and currently based in Berlin where he is a student at Universität der Künste Berlin for sound Studies and Sonic Arts Master’s Program. His works deal with discourses of field recording, improvisation, noise, ambient, machine learning, radio art and expansive hypnotic drones. Kamaru has earned international acclaim from his in far-flung locales as well as his ambient recordings, including the 2020 album Peel released on Editions Mego. He has presented his works in Nyegenyege Festival, Mutek Montreal, unsound, GAMMA, CTM and many more.

Laia Estruch’s practice hinges on the voice as a material reality—an expressive force and a medium that is expelled from the body. Over the last ten years, her work has broached the fields of sculpture and contemporary art, spoken word and experimental theatre, undertaking a kind of no-frills exploration of the voice’s communicative and emotive grammar while probing the conventions of staging it. Her interest focuses on the extremities and porosity of the spoken word in its relationship with song and raw sound. The articulation of noises and meanings often encompasses and exceeds human vocal language: breathing, exclamation, mumbling, ululation, cries and whispers. The voice is recast as an extraordinary, supra-human object. In 2022 she won the 6th Premio Cervezas Alhambra de Arte Emergente (Alhambra Beer Award for Emerging Art) and in 2021 she was awarded the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona (City of Barcelona Prize) in the category of Visual Arts.   

Irina Mutt is an in(ter)dependent writer and curator from Barcelona currently based in Helsinki. She has been part of the public program commission at Hangar BCN and for the Catalan Critic Association. Some of her exhibitions have been “Undoing text” for Ineditos Casa Encendida in Madrid or “A break can be what we are aiming for” with Barcelona Producció. Since living in Helsinki, she has collaborated with Frame, the gallery Myymälä2, Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, and is a current board member of Pixelache. Her research goes from video games to post-porn, experimental publishing and temporalities outside the hegemonic sense of productivity or linearity. Always doing and thinking from intersectional feminism. 

Harold Offeh (b. 1977, Ghana) lives and works in Cambridge and London. Offeh is an artist working across performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. He is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of histories. He employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture. Offeh has exhibited widely including at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, South London Gallery, Wysing Art Centre, Studio Museum Harlem, USA, MAC VAL, France, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark, Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco and Art Tower Mito, Japan. Offeh is a Tutor in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art. In 2019, he was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists, the largest award of its kind in the UK. 

Sayed Sattar Hasan is a British born artist based in Oslo, Norway. His practice is process-based and freely uses different mediums to suit his ideas. His current artistic approach could be described as ‘post-pop, conceptual crafts’, and he is increasingly drawn to storytelling. Hasan’s work explores the myth of self and collective identities, heritage and belonging, the fault lines between tradition and change, and the need for reinvention. The narratives Hasan develops are often interwoven with his own biography and told with a degree of humour. Hasan is interested in creating spaces to discuss artistic practice and is co-founder and group convener of the PRAKSIS Development Forum.

Timo Vaittinen (b. 1976) lives and works in Helsinki. He gained his MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2007. Vaittinen works in numerous different techniques and materials. His art is tinged with a mystery that is firmly anchored in psychedelia and in underground cultures, and ranges from a documentary level rooted in reality to dissolution into an imaginative, fictional narrative. He is a founder member of the artist-run gallery SIC in Helsinki, and artist-run publishing initiative Rooftop Press. Subwindows 1 & 2 (2022) by Vaittinen were commissioned for the windows of PUBLICS.

Index has multiple public roles as an art institution. We are a platform for artists and for audiences. We understand that the role of an art institution like Index does not begin and end with an exhibition – instead there is an ongoingness to the activities, research processes, learning programs and relationships between Index, artists and audiences. Index works with an artistic conceptual approach that aims to carve out space and time for criticality, dialogue, curiosity and building discursive situations that develop the role of art today.

The Index Teen Advisory Board is an integral part of Index offering paid positions for eight young people from across Stockholm and Uppsala. ITAB actively supports decision-making, evaluation and programming. The aim is to bring together a group of young people with differing cultural backgrounds, languages and life experiences and reflect together on the role and potential of art and culture today. ITAB: Alcina Munene Persson, Simon Sjöberg, Josh Sackett, Leo, Felix Krausz Sjögren, and Vigo Roth Linde.

PRAKSIS is a non-profit arts catalyst that develops interest, knowledge, confidence and careers. It fosters creative practice and knowledge production through collective activity and the exchange of ideas, skills and information. PRAKSIS seeks to establish dialogue between artists, thinkers and organisations locally and internationally, at all career stages, and across diverse cultures and disciplines. 

Open to young creative people and organisers between 16-21 years from Oslo, PRAKSIS Teen Advisory Board (PTAB) offers the opportunity to develop experiences, establish knowledge and networks within the cultural industry. Participants contribute to long-term value creation within Oslo city’s cultural field by providing constructive feedback to institutions they come into contact with. The program looks to inspire, strengthen and engage its participants to create their own space within the field. PTAB: Ilwaad Hassan Mahamed, Dugagjin Osmanaj, Mey-Thip Mortensen, Fariha Fatima Malik, Emil Temim, Sujani Sutharsan, Gard Møller-Johansen, and Ari Sigurdarson.

PUBLICS is a curatorial and commissioning agency with a dedicated research library and event space in Helsinki, Finland, PUBLICS explores a “work together” institutional model with multiple overlapping objectives, thematic strands and collaborations. The first edition of Today Is Our Tomorrow took place in 2019 and was co-organised in collaboration with 10 different institutions and included over 50 artists and collectives.

PUBLICS Youth was recruited for the first time this year, welcoming six young people between 18-22 years old in PUBLICS team. The members participate to the organisation’s programme, gaining experience in curating and co-commissioning, while developing connections with local and international artists and curators. PUBLICS Youth Advisory Board: Asja Lapteva, Erika Ryppieva, Manda Loipponen, Róza Turunen, Valeriia Masliukova-Malova, and Vanessa Uhlbäck.