Satu Herrala

Satu Herrala is a Helsinki-based curator and researcher with a background in dance, choreography and somatic movement practices. She is interested in exploring how attuning to bodily coexistence informs ways of being, knowing and acting, and how collective action emerges from embodiment.

Currently she is working on a doctoral research on embodied curating at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Together with Anna Karhu-Cormier and Maija Mustonen, she founded and co-curated Love Harvest Festival at Frantsila Herb Farm in 2024. Between 2020 and 2024 she co-directed Forest as a Geopolitical Stage, a Finnish-Uruguayan art and research initiative, with Jussi Lehtonen and Tamara Cubas.

She is a performer and a member of the working group for Pauliina Feodoroff’s performance piece Matriarchy commissioned by OCA for The Sámi Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.

Together with Hans Rosenström she co-curated a contemporary art programme A I S T I T / coming to our senses consisting of exhibitions, performances, discursive events and public art in 2021, produced by four Finnish Cultural Institutes.

Between 2015 and 2019 she worked as the artistic director and curator of Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival in Helsinki. She is a regular guest lecturer and mentor at the University of the Arts Helsinki, and a board member of Helsinki International Artist Programme HIAP. She is a Saari residency alumni 2024, and currently working as a mentor for new residents.

Embodied Curating: a relationally attuned, felt-sense, response-able curatorial approach to resonate in complex social and political lifeworlds

What is the importance of a “body” in the curatorial practice and discourse? How to acknowledge bodies as “epistemic agents”* in the process of making art public? Embodied curating situates the curatorial constellation in a relational field of living bodies as epistemic agents. It attends to the dynamics, differences, resonances, tensions, attunements–as well as non-attunements–that arise from the curatorial situation, and it allows the process to be guided by them.

Applying philosophical, somatic and feminist socio-political frameworks in different registers such as Karen Barad’s agential realism, Resmaa Menakem’s Somatic Abolitionism, Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water, and Minna Salami’s Sensuous Knowledge, the presentation reflects the urgency to acknowledge the intra-active, situated nature of bodies becoming public in art and culture in order to make more attuned worlds.

* Janna Parviainen: Bodily knowledge: Revised epistemological reflections on kinaesthesia, movement, and dance. 2022, 192.