What happens if we become animals in openness? The exhibition explores the concept of a rabbit’s burrow as a bizarre, confusing or nonsensical situation or environment. Through an obscure garden path-like search the project approaches the uncanniness of our being in everyday life, and the strange time spent alone in our homes during the pandemic and lockdowns. The exhibition explores the thought of home as a nest, the weird and eerie in our everyday environment where we are when left alone, and perhaps becoming an animal or being like one.

The idea of a rabbit hole is the loop we ended up following like Alice going after the white rabbit towards a wonderland, Frank the rabbit attempting to guide Donnie Darko, and everything we find in-between these while we fall and wait to be woken up.

As part of the project How to Life

How to Life – Lowering your expectations below average is a project combining art and artistic research by Anna Jensen and Andrea Coyotzi Borja. The project is an ongoing site-specific practice in a constant state of becoming. The project places an opportunity to be present, and be involved with practices, research, and experiences taking diverse forms and mediums within a context focusing on the process, the in-between, and not in an end product. It is an approach to embrace the unknown without immediately reducing it to what we already know. How To Life is about engaging, even before knowing, or defining, what you are engaged to. It is a space allowing thinking without the expectation of a result, without the confinement of the framework which some platforms seem to set upon the practice. How to Life is about walking, smoke bombs, T-shirts, avocados, and writing and thinking together in different spatial conditions.

About the artists

Anna Jensen and Andrea Coyotzi Borja are both doing their Doctoral studies at Aalto University about the uncanny and infraordinary everyday. They have graduated from Aalto university’s Visual Culture MA program, worked in Pori Live project together and done multiple exhibitions in collaboration. How to Life project started 2017 and since then it has been presented in Mustekala, in Manifesti club in Turku, in Space Invaders VII – The Gift in Cholula, Mexico, in a rural residency in Corris, Wales, 2018, and in Titanik Gallery in 2019.