&Neighbourhood day

On Saturday 11 of April, we celebrated our &Neighbourhood project at the theatre and with an opening tour of the story monuments in Tapiola.

People taking part in the project coming from all kinds of backgrounds created their own stories in whatever way felt right to them: as recordings, images, texts, or videos. Everyone also picked a meaningful spot in Tapiola for their own monument. You can check them out on your own too, scroll down to see the map.

One key part of &Naapurusto has been Dash Che’s project My Story (Also) Lives Here — a series of creative and playful workshops exploring memory, traces, and the feeling of belonging. The workshops combined storytelling, movement, photography, sound recording, and map-making, resulting in Story Monuments: public traces of memories and fragments of personal stories. Some of the monuments would require interaction through scanning the QR code and using headphones.

Another key part of the project has been Homa Shokri’s workshop series Neither Here Nor There, which explores through the body how belonging, movement, and transformation are experienced in the city. Throughout the workshops, participants worked with a series of scores, collecting fragments from their daily lives in the form of images, texts, and observations. These materials were later brought together into collage works. Some sessions were documented with participants’ consent, and an artistic documentary video emerging from this process premiered at the &Naapurusto Day alongside the collage works.