The Stroker
2019
Video, 15”20, color, sound
English spoken
Courtesy of Carlos/Ishikawa and Helsinki Contemporary
The Stroker is a single-channel video installation based on Takala’s two-week-long
intervention at Second Home, a trendy East London coworking space for young
entrepreneurs and start-ups. During the intervention, Takala posed as a wellness
consultant named Nina Nieminen, the founder of cutting-edge company Personnel
Touch, who were allegedly employed by Second Home to provide touching services
in the workplace. Nina strolled around Second Home being friendly to everyone,
greeting and lightly touching people as she passed them by. It gets the office talking.
Workers gossip amongst themselves, visibly bonding over their common confusion.
She was nicknamed “The Stroker”.
The responses of the “touches” varied widely. Most were polite, but there were
those whose body language registered a visible discomfort—perhaps simply due to
the cultural context of this invasion of personal space, or perhaps as a result of the
inner conflict that arises when one does not feel able to truthfully or openly react.
When unable to assert oneself, this kind of embodied negotiation may take the place
of words.
The nuances of movement demonstrate how people negotiate the dilemma of being
mediated bodies under social pressure, and how such responses are controlled by
the tacit conventions governing what is deemed to be “acceptable behaviour”. In the
clear-walled, open-thinking space of The Stroker, we witness a physical negotiation
of boundaries where there seemingly are none.
Artist’s Bio:
Pilvi Takala is an artist living and working between Berlin and Helsinki. Her video
works are based on performative interventions in which she researches specific
communities in order to process social structures and question the normative rules
and truths of our behaviour in different contexts. Her works show that it is often
possible to learn about the implicit rules of a social situation only by its disruption.