The Symposium

With Annika Lintervo and Hermanni and Inka Yli-Tepsa

"The Symposium is a multisensory and participatory performance that is built around the participants’ senses of taste, smell, touch and hearing. The starting point of the work is removing the sensory workshop format, which has become common in the workshop activities of art museums in recent years, from its therapeutic or educational context, and turning it into a performance.

The title of the work refers to the Symposium by Plato, in which banquet participants are lifted towards transcendental truth through sensual pleasures. The performance is mainly linked to Plato’s work through participants gathering around a festive table: instead of ideas of transcendence, the work explores and serves sensations and multisensory connections.

In the performance, the participants sit at a long table blindfolded, which makes it harder to anticipate sensory experiences based on vision, thereby highlighting the other senses. The setting up of the work draws on an overview of the history of sensing and multisensory experience, created as part of the project."