"It is more important to struggle for your dreams than succeed in them." -
Antti Laitinen.
For A Foundation and The Liverpool Biennial, Antti Laitinen presented a survey of key works from the last decade of his performances, including the It’s My Island trilogy, Bare Necessities, Untitled and Walk the Line, among others.
Curated by A Foundation's director, Mark Waugh, who commissioned a new performance for Touched., an ambitious project to build a vessel out of bark in the gallery at Greenland Street and sail an inaugural voyage.
Antti Laitinen takes us beyond the normal realms of the world into a new reality encapsulating an artistic vision at once both innocent and yet haunted by the knowledge of our contemporary ecological crisis.
"Antti Laitinen had set sail at 7.30am from New Brighton and was drawn across to the east bank down to the Pier Head by 9.30am before successfully negotiating the shipping lane to reach Cammell Lairds in tact, but numb with cold. He had made the raft from nothing other than curls of bark, not of Cork Oak bark as you may have expected but of Scots Pine. It was no bigger than a hearth rug !
This was a brilliantly executed ‘happening’ in an age when ‘risk assessment’ and insurance rates have killed off too many bold adventures. However, it was no Arthur Ransom lark. Antii had already navigated a similar raft across the equally busy Baltic channel between his home town Helsinki and the Hanseatic port of Tallin. On this occasion he sought expert advice from our renowned RNLI pilots and was escorted at a distance by a support vessel with a film crew on board." - The Artful Dodger