Drifts Festival brings Anna Pesonen and Hongxi Li to Helsinki

Drifts Festival (opens a new window) returns for its fifth edition, Unknown Territories: Forests, taking place from August 14th to September 10th in Helsinki, Finland.

Unknown Territories is a three-year artistic initiative that embarks on spiritual and geographical journeys across forests in 2025, seas in 2026, and archipelagos in 2027. It centers on the concept of geographic exploration as a pathway to uncover hidden cultural terrains, from forgotten histories and Indigenous knowledge to practices, rituals, and memories entangled with nature.

In 2025, Unknown Territories: Forests confronts the devastating impacts of extractivism, capitalism, and urban expansion on forests, which are interwoven with cultural myths, Indigenous knowledge and biodiversity. In a time of ecological crisis, it envisions these living landscapes as spaces of resilience and radical imagination, opening pathways toward planetary futures where human and more-than-human coexist.

As part of this year’s programme, Associate Curator Nimco Kulmiye Hussein (opens a new window) has selected two artists, Anna Pesonen (opens a new window) and Hongxi Li (opens a new window), for the thematic strand Unknown Territories: Forests, curated by Soko Hwang. The program features over 30 local and international practitioners presenting audiovisual performances, film screenings, lecture performances, and exhibitions—all free and open to the public.

Participants

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Anton Vidokle, Forensis & Bill Kouligas, Laura Huertas Millán, Satu Herrala, Alma Heikkilä, Sauli Sirviö, Niina Tervo, Nomadic Kiln Group, Ana Vaz, Jas Lin & Fitness, Lotta Petronella, Soko Hwang, Marja Viitahuhta, Leena Lehti, Sara Gebran, Shubhangi Singh, Kristiina Koskentola, Petra Hermanova, Hongxi Li, Heta Bilaletdin, Seung Ae Lee, Katie Paterson, Go-Eun Im, Tuomas Toivonen, Patrik Söderlund, Anna Pesonen, Fanni Niemi-Junkola, Alejandra Alarcón and more.

Featured Artists

Anna Pesonen

Heed the Echoes of the Forgotten is an acoustic sculpture and sound installation that explores Karelia as a contested sonic landscape shaped by war, surveillance and cultural erasure. Drawing on Second World War military technologies, Pesonen reclaims the form of the parabolic acoustic mirror, once a tool of extinction, and transforms it into a space of cultural preservation. The piece features newly commissioned vocals by ethnomusicologist and musician Karoliina Kantelinen, one of the last living practitioners of kelkettely, a near-extinct Karelian singing tradition. Recorded by pioneering Finnish sound engineer Risto Hemmi and presented through Genelec speakers, the piece offers a high-fidelity encounter with a near-extinct tradition. A live performance by Pesonen and Kantelinen will further activate the work, connecting ancestral sound with contemporary practice. The work creates a sensorial space that holds grief, resilience and the embodied memory of displacement.

Hongxi Li

Sandcastle is a 30-minute performance in which Li inhabits Jolene, a fictional persona navigating a child-scaled, moss-covered garden enclosed by wrought iron. Through gestures of play such as building, removing and mimicking, Jolene echoes cycles of ecological erasure and territorial imposition. Drawing from British colonial design and performed on Finnish soil, the work stages an unsettling encounter between intrusion and intimacy, control and care. It asks who land truly belongs to and at what cost.

Together, these works reimagine the forest not as untouched wilderness but as a living archive of displacement, survival and the slow work of remembering.

The featured artists are funded by The Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland.