Eliel Tammiharju, Anna Maria Häkkinen & Johan Högsten
Sini Pelkki
Bio
Eliel Tammiharju works with sound and performance. His recent works include SONGBIRD with Tiia Kasurinen (Dance Base Yokohama, Inkonst, Kiasma, 2025) and Nights around counting steps with Nele Tiidelepp (Mousonturm & Kanuti Gildi Saal, 2025). Tammiharju explores how sound can extend beyond audibility and reorganize itself as dance. He works with lack as a force of possibility — not as absence, but a composed incompleteness that only choreography makes complete. For over ten years Tammiharju has also performed under the name Keliel, touring museums, festivals and clubs across Europe, Asia and the United States. He graduated with a MA in Sound Design (2024) from the Uniarts Theatre Academy Helsinki.
Anna Maria Häkkinen (she/her, b. 1981) is a choreographer and performer based in Helsinki. Her recent works include Afterglow, low lingering slips of light, a Performa Biennial commission for eleven dancers and a harpist (LMCC, New York 2023 / Kiasma, Helsinki & KAI Art Center, Tallinn 2025), and Phoenix – a deep relaxation serotonin release (UniArts, Helsinki 2023), a commissioned choreography for dance students. Anna Maria is working with collaborative practices through themes such as durational and repetitive movement, dance history, composition and play. She graduated with a MA in choreography (2012) from the UniArts Theatre Academy Helsinki.
Johan Högsten is a Helsinki-raised currently Amsterdam-based artist working with dance, performance, choreography and video. After spending his teenage years focused on streetdance and competitions he received his bachelor’s in contemporary dance from the University of the Arts Helsinki. Currently as a master’s student at ArtEZ HOME of Performance Practices, he studies de-disciplined performance-making developing his practice and research. In addition to performing at venues across Finland his video works have been exhibited among others in Amos Rex and Kiasma. Physical, virtual and digital bodies, movements and their affects and poetics intrigue him. As noticeable in ROCK/STAR Vol.1, a collaborative mixed reality performance that combines motion-capture, choreography, videogame mechanics and deconstructed club music, Högsten’s cross-media practice is heavily informed by theory, perception, internet culture, subcultures and contemporary anxieties.
Lampi 2 is a performance for sound design and two dancers [ING]
Some notes want to be alone, some notes want to be one with the dance.
Lampi 2 (Pond 2), created by Eliel Tammiharju and his working group, is a sound design in which notes hide until revealed by dance. In this work, equations of music are proven by forms of sound, dance and crystals.
Why feel small before the infinite when you can visit a pond? If the surface ripples, it turns to another. Something disappears, peeps out, brightens the surface, flashes into a dew drop. Rises! Sparkles. And yet, it is a finite event.
The work uses Tammiharju’s method of lacking sound. In this method, every disappearance reveals a secret. Rather than absence, lack is a composed incompleteness that only a performance can make complete.
Alongside Tammiharju, the working group includes Anna Maria Häkkinen, Johan Högsten, Helmi Nöjd and elieli (Elisabeth Raymond). The work continues their ongoing collaboration between music and dance, and follows Leipäkivi, presented at Pitted Dates gallery in August 2025.
For a moment, it is possible to imagine the earlier sight. Until she has understood something again, that she belongs elsewhere, belongs to one, belongs to the pond.
Premiering in October 2026 at Zodiak Stage.
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