Curated by Galerina, ICA hosts a double-bill performance night featuring Lacuna by Teo Ala-Ruona and The Well by Maria Metsalu. Jaakko Pallasvuo has written the text together with Metsalu for The Well. Together the performances look for ways to make sense of the self in a complex world of signifiers.

Lacuna is an autofictional body horror performance, that composes ghostly experiences into a verbal and musical incantation. Lacuna means an opening or a gap. It can be a missing or omitted part. For Ala-Ruona, its meaning is twofold. It’s both a ghost – a parasitic memory of his body before transition, on the other hand it’s a blissful void free of trauma.

Teo Ala-Ruona is a Helsinki-based performance artist, whose work focuses on speculative somatic fiction and body horror in forms of performances and texts. He explores topics of sex, queer ecology, toxicity and gender, and looks for ways to re-define language and narratives telling about pleasure and intimacy on a toxic Earth.

Ala-Ruona’s work has recently been shown in Warehouse9 (Copenhagen), Drifts-festival (Helsinki), Jason Platform (Copenhagen), Takomo-theatre (Helsinki), Baltic Circle -festival (Helsinki), Bangkok Biennial (Bangkok) and NAVEL, Gas-gallery and Human Resources (Los Angeles).

Working group:

Performance: Teo Ala-Ruona
Text: Teo Ala-Ruona and Tuukka Haapakorpi
Sound design and composition: Tuukka Haapakorpi
Dramaturgy: Ami Karvonen
Light and spatial design: Sofia Palillo

Production: Ehkä-production, Mad House Helsinki and Teo Ala-Ruona
Supported by: Arts Promotion Centre Finland
World premiere: 3.12.2021 XS festival / Contemporary art space Kutomo, Turku

Lacuna is being supported by the Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland, The Well by The Estonian Ministry of Culture, The Cultural Endowment of Estonia and The Embassy of Estonia in London.

Lacuna + The Well at ICA (The Mall, St. James’s, London SW1Y 5AH) on 18 February at 8pm. Tickets £19/£15, book here.