Tuija Kokkonen
is a director, writer and researcher based in Helsinki, Finland. Since 1996 she has worked on a series of site-specific ‘memo performances’, as the director and the artistic director of Maus&Orlovski, an ever-changing performance collective of artists from various fields. The memos are explorations on relationships between performance, nature and time. They chart terrains between genres of art, between species; terrains where aesthetics, ethics and politics are inseparable. Since 1999 the memos have been performed in the program of Kiasma Theatre/ Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki.
Her current (since 2006) doctoral research project at the Theatre Academy Helsinki is titled "The Potential Nature of Performance. The Relationship to the Non-Human in the Performance Event from the Perspective of Duration and Potentiality”. The work incorporates a new series of performances called Memos of Time — performances with and for non-humans.
Memo performances
Memos of Time (2006 — )
Chronopolitics — III Memo of Time
An endless performance began 1.3.2010. Chronopolitics branches into a performance by non-humans in northern Helsinki and a web performance, which both continue all the time, and into a nomadic live performance, which first appearance was in March 2010. The starting points of the performance are a vision of a world without animals, but filled with representations of animals; our difficulties to perceive duration, and the question, does performance have an exterior anymore. The performers consist of people of different ages, robodogs and other machines, and beings and processes of nature. 
A Performance with an Ocean View (and a Dog/for a Dog) — II Memo of Time
The two interlinked performances focus on weather, time, potentiality and non-human co-performers. (and a Dog) was performed on an ancient shore of a post Ice Age Yoldia Sea in a suburb of Helsinki and (for a Dog) on a potential future seashore on the roof of a city centre department store.
Mr Nilsson — I Memo of Time
The performance addresses humans’ relations to other animals and death through the imagination, the new knowledge of evolutionary ecology, and the everyday links between humans and machines. Mr Nilsson asks what is a human, at the age of global performance - and ends up to be an attempt to recall animals.
Catchment Area — Memos of Freedom (1999—2003)
2001
1999
Catchment Area — III Memo of Freedom
Catchment Area — II Memo of Freedom
Catchment Area — I Memo of Freedom
The five-year project consisted of three performances, an installation, and series of discussions in Kiasma Theatre/Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki. The basis of the presentation was a geographical catchment area, weak action, and questioning the anthropocentrism of the theatre and performance.
Maus and Orlovski — Memos of Love in the City (1997)
The three performances of the first memo series were performed around Helsinki during spring 1997 and the radio play broadcasted 1998. They explored boundaries of performance, and relations between event and ecology as relationships to the self, to the others, and to the environment/nature.