Roos Hermsen

(free translation of the Finnish word Muijala: woman’s place/ where a woman is)

For me personally, Muijala is about what it means to be a woman. A woman alone. A woman in a strange land, outside society, outside convention. A woman who still sees herself as a girl.

A woman who owns land, who has the chance to work with real space. A woman with very limited resources. A woman with too much responsibilities. A woman with no other choice but to drop, share, question and neglect some responsibilities, or hopefully change and transform them.

What does it mean to share space. How to trust others. How to work with others, live with others, live with myself. How to hold space, what to provide. What to leave open, how to create space and time that is open, generate possibilities, how to allow, encourage and stimulate?

To learn what is work, and what is not. And beneath, behind it all; what is desire, what to desire, where to gently turn my desire towards.

A pull towards escape, a wish to go away, a force and circumstances that holds me here. A frightening sense of belonging. To be bound to a place, to grow roots. Only here I can really be myself. It is beyond scary to identify with a space. I am not this land, I am not from this place. I am one of the very many beings that live here. I don’t believe in ownership and possessions. Instead: affinities, sympathies, aversions. Alignments, diversions.

Will I allow myself to become a person, the gardener-writer I want to be. Will I bury myself with work, will the place swallow me, will the project burst, will the outside world protest, will the system strangle this dream when it becomes reality?

Can I hold time for myself, can I sustain privacy, can I create space for myself in the midst of it all? Can I see it while being in the middle of it, do I need to go away to see clearer, do I need to have the overview or am I allowed to be a part, to just live my share, to be here?

Whose permission am I seeking, whose approval. How much failure to allow? Can I become even poorer then I am, can I live with even less, do I really want to starve, strip, suffer, be stuck, be limited to the bone, can I bear and enjoy it. Will there be enough left to share? When will abundance arrive? Is it already here, within this apparent scarcity, there might be more abundance than I will ever be able to accumulate.

How to define the course, how to live with my aversion for goals, why I don’t want to reach them, my disinterest in success, is it fear, is it incapability, is it laziness, is it a blessing? How to find the balance, is balance bliss, is there ecstasy in it, can I sing, cry, moan, write, live for the everyday?

Do I really want to know the answer, do I even have a question. All I want to do is listen, watch, feel what is already here, and to look forward to what is coming, what is arriving. To discover in a slow pace, to run free when I want to. To be able to daydream, slumber, observe, appreciate, reflect, think, reject and maybe make a wish. A wish for space, a wish for time. Let’s experience it together.







* Muijala Art Space is a rural artist-run residency grounded in ecofeminist practices