Skills of Economy Event
Skills of Economy was an event gathering contemporary artistic and activistic reactions to economy. The seminar took place at Ravitolalaiva Wäiski on 3.10.2013, accompanied by screenings at the Finnish Academy from 2.10.-6.10.2013.
Event
The Skills of Economy Event collected artistic and activistic responses to economic conditions, pairing a seminar with a programme of screenings. The programme ran across the first week of October 2013, closing with the seminar at Ravitolalaiva Wäiski on 3.10.2013.
| Screenings | Finnish Academy, 2.10.-6.10.2013 |
|---|---|
| Seminar | Ravitolalaiva Wäiski, 3.10.2013 |
The Skills of Economy series continued into further editions, including Post Models: Ore.e Refineries To Use As a Capital For Your Health Only! and Work It Out, all listed among the curatorial projects.
Jussi Koitela is a visual artist and curator whose practice moves between exhibitions, curatorial projects and writing, exploring how economic structures shape artistic labour and everyday life. His work is characterised by an interest in institutions, public space and the social roles artists occupy, a line of inquiry that connects studio practice with the wider cultural field. Alongside his own projects, he has organised seminars and events that gather artists, activists and audiences around shared questions, treating discussion as an artistic medium in its own right.
The Skills of Economy event was one such curatorial project, gathering contemporary artistic and activistic reactions to economy rather than describing it from a distance. Rather than a purely theoretical gathering, the programme combined a public seminar with screenings, placing conversation and moving image side by side. The structure reflects Koitela's broader approach: research, discussion and exhibition interwoven, so that economic conditions are approached through the voices and practices of those living with them, and through shared moments of attention.
The seminar took place at Ravitolalaiva Wäiski in October 2013, with screenings running at the Finnish Academy over the preceding days of that first week of October. Spreading the programme across several days allowed the material to breathe, giving works time to be encountered repeatedly and permitting informal discussion in between the more formal sessions. The choice of venues — an independent cultural space and an institutional setting — mirrors the artist's interest in how public and institutional frameworks frame artistic production, and in how the boundaries between them can be examined.
Koitela's practice often works through dissolution and rearrangement, using models, maps and spatial arrangements to reveal systems that normally appear fixed. Economy here is treated as terrain: something that can be walked through, questioned and redrawn. Related projects engage with themes of ore, refineries, capital, health and the institutional demands placed on working artists, asking what changes when the conditions of production are made visible. The tone is reflective rather than polemical, closer to a melancholy study than to a manifesto, and the writing accompanying the work extends that mood into essays and texts.
The resulting body of work — projects, exhibitions, writings and events — reads like an archive assembled from fragments: floating arrangements, ghost images, portable museum ideas and featherweight forms. Koitela's own writing appears alongside the visual material, treating commentary and documentation as part of the artwork itself. Based in Tampere, with ties to cities such as Tallinn, Copenhagen and Kärsämäki, his trajectory moves between local practice and international circuits, maintaining a consistent concern with the economies, institutions and everyday norms that quietly organise creative life.