Ptarmigan is now closed.

Artūrs Punte is our artist in residence from 15th September - 15th November 2010.

Artūrs Punte was born in Riga in 1977. He graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, in Moscow, and currently works in advertising. Punte’s conceptual projects include “Bubbleshow” (www.bubbleshow.com, with Dmitrijs Zagga) and “Как хочешь!” (www.re-lab.net/KX, with Vladimirs Svetlovs); he is also the author of several poetic video projects and was an organizer of the poetic video festival “Word in Motion” in 2001 and 2003. Punte edits the journal “Орбита” and the Web site www.orbita.lv, and compiled the collection “Dengi/Науда” in 2001. He writes poetry in Russian and Latvian and translates poetry from the Latvian.
Punte has published works in the journals “Орбита”, “Даугава”, “Karogs”, “Luna”, “Латвийская литература”, and “Ariel” (Sweden); the collections “Dengi/Науда”, “Dzejas diena”, “Спутник” (Kemerovo, 2001), “Вавилон” (Moscow), “Nell`orbita di Riga” (Italy, 2006), and “Ars poetica” (Bratislava, 2005); and the anthologies “Братская колебель” (Moscow, 2004), “Девять измерений” (Moscow, 2004), “Освобожденный Улисс” (Moscow, 2004), and “Воздушный змей” (Tartu, 2006). Punte’s works have also been published on the Web sites www.satori.lv, www.orbita.lv, and www.textonly.ru.

During his stay, Punte will be creating a sound performance, workshop and screenings.  His project whilst at Ptarmigan is a sound performance  - “Poetry Map of the Town”.   He will be making field recordings in the urban areas of Helsinki – on the streets, in the shops, cafés and other public places.

An essential aspect of the performance will be the usage of hisself-made musical “instrument” that is a special freaky-looking gadget for live sound mix. The “instrument” is made from Yamaha sound mixer connected to four mp3-players and a microphone; the appearance altogether reminds of a retro-futuristic guitar.

The main idea of the project is filling the map of Helsinki and it’s suburbs with visual, audio, textual and poetry tags. He aims to do it with every place he visits – thus step by step (line by line – in case of poetry) building his own big virtual map of the imaginary city. Punte will  choose specific sites within the place to get familiar with, and reinterpret them by the means of poetic texts. Text may be expressed in various forms, such as short poems, letters, SMS and diary or tags and notes on the internet map (GPS based). As the project outcome, the virtual map will provide an experiential tour of the multiple layers of physical, social, historical and fictional qualities that have been identified through the research of cities.

Regarding the project, Punte writes " The lines of my poetry often have concrete geographic connections, including coordinates in the spatial means. On one hand, these ‘coordinates’ lead to a very particular point, like a building or a certain café; on the other hand, maps themselves are very intense and visually rich material, which invites us to ‘read’ them more and more closely, do reveal them layer by layer, and to follow them. Thus, the most appropriate poetry reading could be a common journey of a poet and a reader/listener, using the specially prepared sound-scape or: map. Reader and the author, together look for a route on this map, zooming certain objects closer, illustrating the exact phrases with the sound, recorded there; mixing several sound tracks, using effect to create the most impressive sound picture for the poem. The destination and time for this travel is chosen intuitively; this performance altogether is very improvisational and processual."

This residency has been made possible due to funding from the Nordic Culture point.