Tea Mäkipää‘s works depict a tough and cruel world. Though devoid of exaggerated gestures or outbreaks, they are versions of reality that bite, burn, and scream, likely to throw you off balance – the very balance all of us are striving so hard to maintain. After prompting you to turn your eyes away, their striking beauty will lure you into having a closer look. Despair and loneliness lurk beneath their surface, poking at our deep embarrassment for failing to take action against the sad and tragic state of affairs. Yet they transcend our self-pitying misery by opening up to interaction and proposing an intimidating challenge we cannot simply turn away from.

The common defining feature in Mäkipää‘s works is a laconic notion of the physical order of reality, referring to the structural elements that shape our lives. They deal with the infrastructure we take for granted, the fabric that makes the world go around – trivia such as buses creeping from one stop to the next, mechanical water closets propelling your faeces to places unknown, trucks delivering your favourite buns to the bakery around the corner … Tea Mäkipää is no doubt fascinated by, if not obsessed with, these all-pervading yet strangely invisible structures of everyday life – structures we fail to notice until they become dysfunctional. Structures such as the place where you wake up, eat dinner, make love, and try to get some sleep while counting the pills you swallowed. Structures made of pipes, panels, and metal sheeting. Structures that cater to our needs. Structures made visible, for instance, in Mäkipää‘s 1:1, an installation that does what it promises – bring to our attention the scaffolding of our living spaces.

With Mäkipää, what we see is what we get. In 1:1, we thus see the infrastructure of an archetypical house in Helsinki, which Tea Mäkipää used as a construction model for an 11 x 5 x 5.5 metres large installation. This work, which includes a recording of a soundscape, deals with the type of physical reality that we usually ignore, a reality camouflaged by various layers of paint, cement, and wallpaper. Perhaps even more significantly, our ignorance of these factual realities is the result of a mental process by which we have come to define and describe life. It would seem that we are conditioned to avoid paying attention to where the water comes from, what is needed to purify it, where it goes after we have used it, and so on. Most of us are reluctant to follow such complex trains of thoughts and look for answers – Mäkipää literally forces us to do so.

But does it actually matter? Does it make a difference to know where our bodily fluids are heading to after the toilet was flushed? And if so – do we really have the courage, let alone the patience, to admit that we might not want an answer? After all, don‘t we know enough already? About environmental pollution, unrestrained consumerism, political shortcomings, and all things threatening the world? Isn‘t it rather time to realise that we need to do something? To let deeds follow our thoughts? Clearly, what we need are strategies for survival – not so much an all-encompassing scenario to save the planet than actions that tackle the issues right on the spot. Actions that reinstate an individual level of responsibility and freedom, since they are a matter of small but effective gestures. Of things that make a difference to you. And me.

One of Tea Mäkipää‘s strategies for survival consists in upholding a certain level of naïvety in the way she perceives herself and her surroundings. This is by no means an illusory authentic naïvety, but rather a learned ability to cope with the complex demands of everyday life. It is an attitude that has presumably to do with growing up in the provinces, or more prosaically, the strange and remote forests of a strange and remote nation state called Finland. Mäkipää‘s upbringing maybe did not provide her with the refined tools needed to foray into the complexities of the contemporary world, but it argu-ably left her with the sort of hardheadedness that will keep one advancing under all circumstances. Boxing rather than ballet, that is – fighting personal and collective demons head on.

Mäkipää has thus safeguarded her faculty to question how things function – how the food gets to the supermarket, how we treat the animals we are eating, and where all the waste ends up. She still wonders at the magic workings of a sewer. And from this amazement at the simplicity of a structure grows an awareness of the vulnerability of our existence, an existence we seem reluctant to take for what it is worth and incapable of protecting, as if deliberately ignoring the consequences of our actions and indecisions. Our carelessness is directed to ourselves and to our environment alike, as denounced by Mäkipää with sheer anger and melancholy in Domesticated Dreams, a collaboration with Pasi Mann, shown in 1999 at Helsinki‘s Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. Entering the exhibition space, the viewer was overwhelmed by a multitude of smells and visual impacts. In the middle of the room sat a lavishly dressed table with a wide range of fruits and vegetables to be eaten up by an army of snails. On a nearby stage stood two screens, one of them showing video footage of miserable battery hens, the other depicting the happy existence of free-range chickens. The video projections were juxtaposed illustrations of a natural habitat and a man-made, ratio-nalised, profit-driven infrastructure, building a stark contrast between the life of healthy animals and the ordeal of physically and mentally depraved creatures.

This installation occupies a central role in Tea Mäkipää‘s body of work. It is the culmination of a long process that gave her the opportunity to work with plants and animals, analysing the behaviour of snails, researching how chickens are bred, and learning how to grow mushrooms. While doing so, Mäkipää was again highlighting things that generally go unnoticed. She succeeded in combining the conceptual complexity of the contradictory fate of domesticated animals with the overall visual richness of the installation. Domesticated Dreams addressed issues it seemed to care for sincerely, but did so in a way that managed to draw viewers into the organic processes and the metamorphosis of the living plants and animals it was showing. By luring viewers into its thought-provoking logic, by showing what happens to a living creature when it is reduced to a link in the food chain, it was a profoundly disturbing experience. Viewers could not help but reflect on the instrumental rationalisation of existences they are taking part in. Therefore the most frightening aspect they came to realise was their own silent acceptance of such conditions, violently reminding them of how ruthless they – we – have become. The caged hens were a symbol of our reality, a reality guided by the sole principle of economic efficiency, a reality where nothing else matters.

In fact, this sort of logic applies not merely to animals and our environment, but equally affects us, treating us as indistinct consumers rather than personalities. We have ourselves become objects to be traded, played with, borrowed, and disposed of. The individual is little more than just another consumer, grateful if allowed to consume just a little bit more – a notion more telling than is apparent, for it is at the core of the crisis of the capitalist society, a model that is fast becoming so effective that it no longer requires human work force. All it needs are natural resources: matter, food, and live stock.

Despite this clear-cut critique, we should pay attention to nuances. Mäkipää may be consciously naïve, but not when it comes to environmental issues. In fact, she does not project Paradise Island. Rather, the setting of her intervention is the very mess in which we have become entangled. Though conscious to be part of the game, and thus part of the problem, she is not a passive bystander, or a silent partner in crime. She does what she does simply because she cannot let go. But instead of playing the part of the martyr or the prophet of doom, she is sharpening our awareness for where we stand and how we behave, especially with regard to others. Our existence is riddled with the refusal to grow up, marked by the disgusting habit of letting things go awry for the sake of keeping busy by concentrating on seemingly important matters such as pondering over tonight‘s TV programme. And though we acknowledge our pathetic passivity, we choose to sustain it, all too aware of the petty comfort it provides.

For all their criticism, Mäkipää‘s reflections bear traces of hope, as may be seen in her most recent installation called Catwalk, a large-scale video work conceived for permanent display on the facade of Digitalo, the new headquarter building of VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland near Helsinki. Once again, Mäkipää delivers what she has promised. The animation shows a range of living creatures in motion, set in a catwalk environment. Eighteen metres wide, sixty minutes long, set alive by five synchronised projectors, Catwalk reduces all species – humans, flies, horses, cats, you name it – and objects – either walking by or flying past – to the same size. So while the tempo of the “models” striding over the catwalk changes, the general mood radiating from this work remains the same. It communicates a distinctly upbeat feeling that emphasises the glorious diversity of creatures and objects, and as such, is a both clever and humorous celebration of plurality. In Catwalk, size matters, cueing the nature of the perception it encourages: a viewing process that seems to work both ways, as you realise while watching, making you conscious of your status as a viewer.

This awareness in turn generates a possibility to consider things under a different light. Instead of showing civilisation in a cul-de-sac, Mäkipää manages to set free enough energy to re-activate a set of alternatives. These are neither turned to an innocent past nor a speculative salutary future, but intend to materialise right here, right now. They are concerned not solely with fighting consumer culture but mainly with creating pockets of resistance. A sort of resistance that trusts the power of na•vety to ask difficult and troubling questions, thus participating in the processes of defining and redefining our daily concepts and symbols. A sort of resistance that returns to the scene of the crime with a vengeance. Mäkipää‘s work learns that resistance is more than just being against something. It is about addressing the fear that you might one day lose the ability to feel.

Mika Hannula, a curator and art critic, is a Professor for Art in Public Spaces at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki.